God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future - Hardcover

Ayres, Ed

3.86

7 ratings by Goodreads

9781568581255: God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568581254 ISBN 13: 9781568581255

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

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Monumental changes are occurring on the planet, yet most people are unaware of them. In God's Last Offer, environmentalist Ed Ayres paints a vivid "big picture" of where the world is headed. He identifies a lethal combination of events -- radical climate changes, increasing species extinction, unsustainable consumption, and exploding human populations -- and presents a blueprint for a radical shift of policies and priorities to avoid a cataclysm.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Carefully researched science journalism and alarmist polemic mingle in an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it treatise. Ayres, editorial director of the Worldwatch Institute, uses a wealth of statistics and published reports to trace what he calls ``a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.'' This blitz, he goes on to say, comes to us in the form of four ``spikes'': a surge in the presence of carbon gases in the atmosphere, causing the by now well-reported increase in global warming; a marked rise in the rate of extinction of plant and animal species; an increase in the human consumption of natural resources; and a potentially cataclysmic rise in human population. These spikes, Ayres says, cannot be understood in isolation; they all feed into one another, with the mere presence of more people requiring the use of more wood, water, plants, and animals. Ayres's use of science in making this foundational argument is solid and seemingly inarguable. He takes a more emotional tone with the second part of his book, which is directed toward policy issues. Why, he asks, does it seem as if no one cares that the world is in grave danger? He argues that the media, operating under the guise of objectivity, do little to convey the urgency of the bad environmental news he reports. ``When the media,'' he writes, ``dwell on crimes, crashes, and scandals, they provide a rich diet of distractions from news of the spikes that are killing us. For those who have interests in keeping the public thus distracted, no conspiracy is necessary; all that's needed is to let the media do what they already have a strong financial incentive to do''namely, to let the corporations whose advertising sustains them run rampant. Ayres's apocalyptic tone is at odds with his earlier cool scientific rationality, and it may cause some readers to dismiss his well-made glimpse into a difficult future as simply more doomsday-speak. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

"The window of opportunity is closing fast," cautions World Watch editor Ayres, who urges us to seize "God's last offer" of precious time and to reverse the global trends that threaten ecological catastrophe and societal collapse. His levelheaded, closely argued manifesto identifies "four spikes" of revolutionary change that endanger planetary survival: first, global warming caused by a rise in carbon dioxide emissions due to overreliance on fossil fuels; second, loss of biodiversity through mass extinctions of plant and animal species; third, a surge of unsustainable, resource-depleting consumption as global media and advertising goad the rest of the world to ape the West's consumerist binge; finally, exploding population growth, which exacerbates all the other trends. Ayres's painstaking analysis of these problems, and of how they feed into one another, presents a forceful challenge to those who deny that a crisis exists or minimize its seriousness. Sifting through the ecopolitical debates of the last quarter century, Ayres dismantles the perceptual obstructions that block our awareness of a crisis: truncated news, propaganda by vested interests, diversionary disputes, apathy, fragmentation of knowledge. While his reflective essay comes up short in offering specific solutions, its primary aim is to reorient thinking, and in that it succeeds, making it a vital companion to the Worldwatch Institute's popular annual report, State of the World.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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