****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
As the title suggests, this is a dark read, but a deeply interesting one. I picked this up because it seemed to be about the kinds of things I’d been thinking about. What’s going to happen when our natural resources run out (or the costs of extraction exceeds their value), when the ice caps melt, when the world is even hotter and drier than it is now, when food resources literally shrivel? These are not my personal concerns – I won’t be around to see the worst of it. But my kids and grandkids and further descendants will be, if I have descendants in a century or two. I intensely worry for them. It’s a pessimistic book, since there appears to be little or nothing to be done. It’s too late, even if the will were there to take long overdue measures, which it’s not. The bright side, if there is one, may be that it makes our current political squabbles pale into insignificance in the big picture. In two or three hundred years, no one will care whether Trump or Harris won this election. They’ll be far too occupied just trying to survive. This is not a wakeup call. It’s a report card on our current industrial world, and we all get an F.
