The End
Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
What is the fate of the world as we know it?
Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, pandemics, cosmic radiation, gamma bursts from space, colliding comets, and asteroids—these things used to worry us from time to time, but now they have become the background noise of our culture. Are natural calamities indeed more probable, and more frequent, than they were? Are things getting worse? Are the boundaries between natural and human-caused calamities blurring? Are we part of the problem? If so, what can we do about it?
In The End, award-winning writer Marq de Villiers examines these questions at a time when there is an urgent need to understand the perils that confront us, to act in such a way as best we can for the inevitable disasters when they come.
We can do nothing about some natural calamities, but about others we can do a great deal. De Villiers helps us understand which is which, and lays out some provocative ideas for mitigating the damage all such calamities can inflict on us and our world.
The End is a brilliant and challenging look at what lies ahead, and at what we can do to influence our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Without discounting the very real impact of climate change, de Villiers (Windswept) steps back from global warming brinkmanship to suggest that, in fact, "we've been living in a little bubble of stability in a great sea of chaotic change" and that cataclysm is the universe's normal condition. He casts back billions of years to report that mass extinctions have at times wiped out 96% of all species living in the seas, the world has cycled through several monumental ice ages, collisions with comets and asteroids have altered life on Earth (in 1996 a three-quarter-mile-long asteroid passed within four hours of our planet) and land-shattering earthquakes have a transformed continents. More recently in known history, massive volcanic explosions have dramatically influenced global temperatures and human life half a dozen times, most recently Krakatoa in 1883 and Pinatobu in 1991, and notes that noxious gases, mammoth tsunamis, great floods, "vile winds, tropical cyclones and tornadoes," plagues and pandemics continue to threaten human survival. De Villiers's conclusion, contrarian and more controversial than calming, is that despite the fight against global warming, "the planet is always changing, and so must we."
