Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity

As a university researcher who has spent the last 15 years researching and drafting my own book on the same topic, I wanted to like this book much more than I did. The book has an impressive list of authors and contains many useful recommendations for nudging humanity and the planet in more just and less eco-destructive directions (ideas for promoting greater gender equality and economic equality are quite good).However, the book doesn't address the true scope and scale of the global polycrisis we face, nor the deep incompatibilities between modern industrialized civilization versus what is required to create a just and sustainable civilization. As a result, their "solutions" are fatally undersized and even if we implemented them all, we would still be headed toward ecological and societal collapse--albeit with greater gender equity and substantially higher salaries than now in the global south.Two key issues may help illustrate the problems:1) The book never really addresses sustainable collective and per person ecological footprints, even though these are the budget that humanity must stick to. Humanity's collective ecological footprint currently overshoots Earth's sustainable carrying capacity by roughly 70% per year, and that is why we have seen such massive destruction of ecosystems and massive die-offs of wildlife species since 1970.Humanity's collective ecological footprint must shrink by about 50% to avoid worsening ecological and societal breakdown and allow ecosystems to heal despite some population growth (170/2=85% of Earth’s carrying capacity). Until we shrink our collective footprints to within Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity, ecosystem health will continue to unravel and that will in turn trigger worsening societal breakdown due to worsening crop failures, climate crises, etc.However, because most resource depletion and ecological harms come from the 20% richest people on Earth, to shrinking our collective footprint by 50% footprints, the ecological footprints of people in wealthy industrialized nations must shrink by 60-99+%. For reference, the only countries with sustainable average ecological footprints (~4 acres or less per person) are “developing countries.” However, if salaries and consumption rise in those countries as the authors suggest, then even those countries won’t have sustainable average per person footprints. Not only does the book implicitly recommend that countries with sustainable footprints make them overshoot sustainable per person levels, it never gets anywhere close to discussing the shrinkage of western economies and lifestyles that are the only way to meet the needs of eight billion people while allowing ecosystems to heal and climate to stabilize.(For background, there is an almost perfect correlation between global GDP on the one hand and both energy use and material throughput on the other hand, and more energy and material use always means being more eco-destructive than does less or no increases in energy use, material throughput, or GDP. So, for any society already in overshoot, you must DECREASE GDP, DECREASE energy use, and DECREASE the material throughput of the economy, but the book’s vision for the future would increase all three. Hmm.)Perhaps a source of the book’s unscientifically optimistic vision of a ”green growth” future lies in the lack of expertise among the authors on how things are actually made ANDhow the laws of thermodynamics mean that a growing and increasingly industrialized economy is inherently increasingly eco-destructive (modern civilization INCREASES entropy on Earth, triggering worsening breakdown). To be sure, the de-carbonization of the economy they recommend would decrease the large carbon portion of our ecological footprint, but it would increase the ecological harms from mining, transmission lines, batteries, etc. For reference, extracting a ton of usable nickel for use in batteries creates about 250 tons of mining rubble—which we are going to put where? Well, we will often create massive ponds of mining tailings in places like the Amazon, and the dams holding them back routinely fail. And as we use up the more concentrated deposits of metals and minerals needed to electrify everything, the amount of rubble we create for every ton of usable material goes up and up—as does the energy use to extract that ton.These hard scientific facts about get hidden behind the books’ use of oxymoronic terms such as “clean green energy” and “sustainable growth.” What’s so discouraging to me is that one of the book’s co-authors is a co-president of the Club of Rome, but the “Limits to Growth” simply are not taken seriously (or even clearly spelled out) in the book.2) They never address the fundamental incompatibilities between the values and systems of modern civilization and what we must do to heal ecosystems and societies. Modern industrialized civilization was built around the story of separation (Descartes), anthropocentrism, false hierarchies of worth among humans, egocentric hedonism, competition, short-term thinking, the belief in no limits, and the ideologies of consumerism, nationalism, and neoliberal industrialized capitalism. All of those values ultimately lead us to unhealthy, unjust, and unsustainable societies, as reflected in the fact that sustainable indigenous cultures were built around roughly the opposite set of values. Thus, the authors engage in lots of wishful thinking that we can and will implement policies that make things fair and sustainable in a society whose values lead it to exploitation of the Earth and each other. Can’t be done, which is why one of the recommendations for the book in the first few pages gently points out that it would have been nice to see the book argue for a transformation in societal values.The book’s computer models are interesting but I’m skeptical about their accuracy given that they don’t seem to have overshoot or ecological tipping points built in. Instructively, global warming, global ice melt, sea level rise, and ecological breakdown are all happening now faster than experts predicted just a few decades ago.

A very readable and easily digestible set of solutions for where we are today and what we need to do about it if we want to survive as a species into the future. If only every politician in the world would read this book, say 'Yes' and then get on and implement the suggestions.A minor niggle would be that the figures in the book are quite basic and don't read that well in black and white - I assume the originals are in colour? Also some of the 'sidebars' could be better formatted for the page length in the book. Both these niggles, while minor, make the book less clean and tidy. I'm sure both are very minor things to be fixed too so not sure why it wasn't done. Anyway, that doesn't detract from the content which is thoughtful and desperately needed.

Book is contemporary reading for all human beings... intellectually engaged or not.

Earth4All

I’m researching regenerative capitalism and this book is full of great research into climate change that makes it easy for non scientists like me to understand what’s going on. It also provides insight into how we can all contribute. I recommend it.