One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future

One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future

Book Detail

Paperback: 480 pages

Publisher: Island Press; 4 edition (August 25, 2005)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1597260312

ISBN-13: 978-1597260312

File Size : 2.4 Mb | File Format : PDF

Book Description

Named a Notable Book for 2005 by the American Library Association, One with Nineveh is a fresh synthesis of the major issues of our time, now brought up to date with an afterword for the paperback edition. Through lucid explanations, telling anecdotes, and incisive analysis, the book spotlights the three elephants in our global living room-rising consumption, still-growing world population, and unchecked political and economic inequity-that together are increasingly shaping today's politics and humankind's future. One with Nineveh brilliantly puts today's political and environmental debates in a larger context and offers some bold proposals for improving our future prospect.

Review From Booklist

It's a simple enough equation: an escalating human population places ultimately unsustainable demands on the natural resources necessary for survival. Take the people of Nineveh, the capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire, for example, as the Ehrlichs suggest, a culture that seems to have eradicated itself through conspicuous consumption and raging hubris, dangerous habits we now practice globally. For years the Ehrlichs, equally respected and reviled, have been writing carefully documented and strikingly commonsensical books about potentially catastrophic environmental changes and the complex social, political, and economic circumstances that mask their full significance. Here they discuss the grave consequences of our precipitous spending of "natural capital" (farmlands, freshwater, forests) and instigation of "resource wars" (their coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is most clarifying), the disproportionate power of corporations, the immense divide between "superconsumers" and the impoverished, and the urgent need for new systems of energy production. It's all nearly overwhelming, but the Ehrlichs manage to be both meticulous and witty as they suggest reforms and remind us that ours is an astoundingly adaptive species capable of making radical change once we're motivated. So they're doing their best to bestir us. Donna Seaman

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One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future