Considering the Crisis

The Long Emergency
A critic of urban sprawl charges that America is "sleepwalking into the future" as we face the end of cheap fossil fuel and global warming, which will shut down the global economy and reduce living standards. (2005)

One with Nineveh
Two Stanford environmental scientists describe today's hubris as rivaling Nineveh's ancient kings. But unlike the regional ecological collapse of Mesopotamia, "this time the collapse could be global," due to increasing population and runaway consumption. (2004)

The Limits of Growth
In the updated edition of their 1972 book, the authors maintain that humanity has squandered the past 30 years, and the world will experience overshoot and collapse due to global resource use and emissions. "We are much more pessimistic about the global future than we were in 1972." (2004)

Dark Ages America
The U.S. is in a state of "advanced cultural disintegration." Parallels between America and late-empire Rome, and the subsequent slide into the Dark Ages, are increasingly suggestive. The author critiques "liquid modernity," the market-driven public media, Pax Americana, alienation, and civic ignorance. (2006)

Plan B 2.0
Our global economy is outgrowing earth's capacity, moving civilization "closer to decline and possible collapse." The response must involve stabilizing the climate, restoring the earth, ending poverty, feeding people better, and building a new eco-economy. (2006)

Our Final Hour
A Cambridge professor and UK Royal Astronomer offers a broad catalog of risks from science and technology, especially fast-growing damage to the environment. The British edition has a more explicit title: Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival. (2003)

Collapse
This best-seller by a UCLA geography professor ably describes past societies that destroyed themselves by overexploiting resources, and points to three present countries (Australia, China, Haiti) and the state of Montana that face deep troubles. (2005)

The Weather Makers
An Australian scientist's lucid overview of climate change over 10 millennia, warning of "inevitable" collapse of civilization if business as usual continues. Suggests possibilities of rainforests turning to desert and huge amounts of methane released from ocean floors. (2006)

Catastrophe
Providing a catalog of four categories of risk -- natural disasters, scientific ac accidents, other unintended human-made catastrophes such as global warming, and intentional catastrophes -- the author warns that risks of global catastrophe "are growing, probably rapidly." (2004)

Field Notes from a Catastrophe
A New Yorker writer offers vignettes of today's climate change. "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." (2006)