Waterstones Adventures in the Anthropocene
204 ratings
TO EXPLORE MORE
Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: ** Winner of Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015 ** We live in epoch-making times. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.6 billion-year history. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing into the Anthropocene - the Age of Humans. Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age to see what life is really like for the people on the frontline of the planet we've made. From artificial glaciers in the Himalayas to painted mountains in Peru, electrified reefs in the Maldives to garbage islands in the Caribbean, Gaia found people doing the most extraordinary things to solve the problems that we ourselves have created. These stories show what the Anthropocene means for all of us - and they illuminate how we might engineer Earth for our future. Waterstones Adventures in the Anthropocene - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9780099572497
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9780099572497
My website utilises affiliate links when you click my 'Get the best deal now' buttons. If you buy something through one of these links, I may earn a little commission, at no extra cost to you.
I have relationships with many of the top online retailers (purchasing, shipping and returns will be handled directly by them) which enables me to offer the best deal online for the Waterstones Adventures in the Anthropocene and many other similar products - which will appear below, to enhance your online shopping experience.
For even more great deals on Waterstones Books, click the link.
Author: P J
Rating: 5
Review: It takes a rare talent to so successfully summarize the totality of the effects humanity is having on the entire surface and structure of the planet and yet still manage to discover some hope and optimism against the huge problems and challenges that we face as a consumerist species if we are to continue living habitably well here in the near future. Yet Gaia Vince is such a writer. Against overwhelming environmental odds it is often the small victories that she finds in the more remote corners of the globe that I found the most enlightening and encouraging. Those ordinary people faced by daunting problems who ,with patient observation and inventive cleverness, were able provide such practical solutions to the benefit of not only themselves ,but the entirety of their community and often how that message managed to spread much further. And its those tiny individual arguments set against the vast potentially disastrous consequences of our current behaviours that actually reaffirms our greatest strength as a species. That once we recognise the threats and dangers , we can, eventually and with enough pushing, actually find beneficially practical answers and solutions to those problems. For nothing else will ever damn us more deeply than the overwhelmingly destructive apathy brought on despondency and despair against seemingly overwhelming odds. An unexpectedly welcome glimpse of sunshine in an often darkly described environmental future by a talented and thoughtful writer. A hugely recommended read.
Author: William Geddes
Rating: 3
Review: I suspect it is the "Hubriscene". Is Man really so important? Man is a geological agent, but in the fullness of geological time (more than 4500 million years so far) just how important is he? Is the term "anthropocene" simply an exaggeration and an over-reaction to the (often imaginary) problems that mankind faces today? . Man, who appeared "less than two seconds before midnight", is still at the mercy of the powers of nature - the same powers that, contrary to what Gaia implies,drive climate change - and he would do well to remember this. Man is not God. He is powerless to affect the earth's orbit and tilt for example, and how will he adapt to the next inevitable ice age, or asteroid strike, or supervirus strike, or supervolcano eruption? Maybe he will, but there are surely limits to his abilities and inventiveness. We didn't "make" this planet as Gaia claims. Rather, the planet made us. What would bacteria and viruses or even rats or ants " think" if they " knew" that we had declared the inception of the "Anthropocene"? As mentioned above we've only been here for " less than two seconds", and we may not be here for very much longer owing to circumstances which may be beyond our control. Who knows? These natural powers could snuff us out in less than a second. In the long term, is man really that powerful? One of the prime causes of the extinction of species is over-specialisation, and it remains to be seen whether Man's specialised brain will eventually lead to his downfall, which is one of the outcomes that Gaia actually implies --- but in every case, all that would be left geologically to record our brief presence on the planet are, in places, a few metres of sediment. But the earth would recover and life of some sort would go on. That is how unimportant we and the anthropocene would be over the vast length of geological time. But we think we are important. However, it's good to be optimistic whichever way the dice falls. Vince is certainly that. She writes well ( if often on somewhat eccentric themes). For example, her discussion of whether man is part of nature in Chapter 7 is very relevant, and throughout the book she reports some well-researched and interesting facts and figures. I particularly enjoyed reading Chapter 10 "Cities", which contains many interesting ideas. In fact this book is a very interesting and stimulating read, and a first-class travelogue to some less well-trodden parts of the world. Gaia Vince (like Stoemer and Crutzen who introduced the term "anthropocene") is not a geologist but she tries to write about things geological. And actually, this book is hardly about geology or what some geologists want to call the "anthropocene" at all. Having read the book from start to finish I sometimes find myself at a loss to determining what her overall message is. But a constant theme in every chapter is our urgent need to reduce "carbon emissions". The book is largely about, and underpinned by, the politics of anthropogenic climate change and global warming, but it is disguised as a popular science book. Her "anthropocene" is more of a sociological construct than a geological epoch, and it is a confusing mistake to call it the latter. This is a book about sociology and economics rather than science. At bottom, this is just another outburst from the "Warmists" and anti-capitalists. Vince has climbed aboard the Warming Industry's gravy-train and toured the world, gathering bleeding heart and bad luck stories about individuals and groups who have suffered at the hands of the greedy capitalists -- and one has to wonder at the motives of The Royal Society in the awarding of their Winton Prize to Vince for this as the best science book in 2015. Perhaps a more suitable title for the book might have been " Where mankind might, or maybe should be going in the 21st century in the light of the alleged anthropogenic climare change (which has still yet to be demonstrated)". The point is, if it is not demonstrated then much of what she says is irrelevant. A lot of reputable scientists might say that Vince has exaggerated or distorted many of the alleged human-induced problems which she writes about. For instance, in her "Oceans" chapter she says that, as an example of what warming does, the El Nino event of 1998 killed 98% of the reef around Vabbinfaru (page 166) and "Since then, there have been at least six major bleaching events, and scientists estimate that at least 20% of Australia's Great Barrier Reef- the world's largest- has been destroyed, and up to 90% of coral has been lost in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean" (page 169). So let's keep things in perspective - unlike Gaia's scifi-style Epilogue, which peddles the usual scare stories of the Warmists. William Geddes.FGS.
