How We Fucked Our Planet
The latest books I’ve fed my brain. For some reason I am on this earth-centric kick with my reading. I highly recommend both of these volumes.
The first, Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” is an interesting study on what would happen to the world if we suddenly disappeared tomorrow. I’m not gonna lie, this is a hard read to wade through. There is a lot of fact talk, and commentary from different experts but Weisman brings everything together in a easy to consume kind of way. He’ll go into certain areas of the world like New York City for instance and disect how long it would take for certain man made structures to fall apart, and what the city as a whole would look like (spoiler alert: it would turn into a jungle supposedly). Other interesting tid-bits (like how cockroaches would be one of the first species to perish with us because we are their number one source of food) are sprinkled throughout the book. But for the most part, the information that Wiesman has collected points to how we as a race have thoroughly screwed our planet and ourselves. it’s quite dismal.
Cradle to Cradle is more of an engaging read, and the book itself is interesting. It’s completely water proof. This book is more about finding the solution to our problems. There is still a lot of “how we are screwing our planet” content, but they give ideas on how to turn our problems around. How to design sustainable systems that make for a cleaner earth. In some cases, it even nourishes the environment. This is a major paradigm shift that the human race must embrace sooner or later unless we don’t plan on calling earth our home in the future.