Earth Then and Now: Amazing images of Our Changing World - Softcover

Pearce, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554077710 ISBN 13: 9781554077717

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2010

Synopsis

300 stunning before-and-after photographs that show the staggering transformation of our world.

Earth Then and Now records the dramatic way our planet has changed over the past century. On one page is a specific part of the world as it was 10, 50 or even 100 years ago. On the facing page is the same place as it looks today. Each stark visual comparison tells a compelling story -- a melting glacier, an expanding desert, an encroaching cityscape, a natural disaster.

Additions to the second edition include these important scenes:

• Before and after the January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
  
• The movement of land masses due to the February 2010 Chilean earthquake
  
• Before and after the fires in South Australia in 2009
  
• Development in New Orleans since the hurricane
  
• The destruction of the Amazon rain forest for farming

Concise captions explain the facts and then allow the reader to draw personal conclusions. Anyone concerned about the environment will enjoy and appreciate Earth Then and Now.

About this title

About the Author

Fred Pearce has reported on scientific, environmental and developmental issues from 64 countries. He is environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the London Independent. He is the author of The Last Generation.

Zac Goldsmith is the editor and director of The Ecologist, a leading environmental issues magazine.

Reviews

We can shrug off environmental reports, theories, and narratives, but photographs do not hedge or obfuscate. In this compact and engrossing book, 250 photographs in before-and-after pairings document the environmental consequences of the last 150 years of human construction and destruction, ingenuity and folly. Of particular drama are images of disappearing sea ice and glaciers and the demise of Central Asia’s once enormous Aral Sea. Urbanization also makes for arresting images, including two photographs taken by the same photographer of the same spot in Katmandu, one in 1970, one in the present when the city is hugely built up and smothered in smog. Versatile environmental writer Pearce provides pinpoint commentary for this visual tour, which includes photographs of nature’s own havoc delivered by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and hurricanes. The continual and unnecessary devastation we cause by industry, war, and waste is most aggrieving and alarming, yet one can’t help but marvel at the complex structures we build. Surely we, the species who dams rivers, moves mountains, erects skyscrapers, and heats the planet, can learn from our mistakes. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554077710
• ISBN 13: 9781554077717
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 288