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Collapse Of Western Civilization: A View From The Future (2014)

by Naomi Oreskes(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1306836425 (ISBN13: 9781306836425)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Columbia University Press

review 1: This book is such a different way of approaching the climate change issue that I am ready to move North and get familiar with subsistence farming. It is very convincing and well-written scientific, dystopian, historical view of the future in about 2300. Not a read for the faint of heart but necessary if we are to survive the consequences of the"Penumbral" Age which is upon us now. Only wish that the authors could give us advice about how to change the political climate now without having to die in a revolution.
review 2: Naomi Oreskes was a professor of the history of science the University of California in San Diego for fifteen years and has been a professor at Harvard since 2010. Her professional interests include the processes of model validation in th... moree Earth sciences. Erik Conway is the historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. His professional interests include the influence of the Cold War on the development of supersonic commercial transportation.The two authors are popularly known for their prior book, Merchants of Doubt, which compares and connects the current obfuscations surrounding the issues of climate change and the purveyors of those obfuscations with science controversies of the recent past; e.g. the link between smoking and lung cancer. The conceit behind their newest book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, is that it is a fictional account. In many ways, it is not. The premise of the fiction is that the book in your hands is a historical analysis of the devastating, self-inflicted socio-economic collapse of the 21st century world order authored by a 24th century academic in the Second People’s Republic of China. The immediate cause of the collapse was the dramatic 21st century shift in the Earth’s climate that brought droughts, deluges, and diseases that decimated populations around the globe and drove that century’s mass migrations. The primary cause was anthropogenic; i.e. due to a number of human practices that interfered with the natural energy balance of the climate system; these included deforestation and the dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The shift came not without warning. The most startling thing to 24th century historians is “...just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power.”The science of the oncoming shift was sufficiently well understood. Within the scientific community and the smaller community of climatologists there was no significant controversy. But many of the governing bodies that could have taken action, first to prevent and later to dampen the severity of climate change, were paralyzed by the “carbon-combustion complex” and the socio-economic ideology of neoliberalism (Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) which had melded with structures of governance, especially in the west. The liberal philosophers of the 18th century recognized the rights of individuals and set the freedom of individuals above the tyranny of monarchs. Neoliberalism, very much a reaction to the expansion of communism during the Cold War, maintained that individual freedom was dependent upon the freedom of the market. The irony is that the inability of market fundamentalism to address the social, personal and environmental costs imposed by market economies led to the very pollution and deforestation that brought on the collapse of free market economies. In the words of Kim Stanley Robinson, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.” Those nations with strong central governments were better able to transfer populations to safe locales, enforce quarantines against the spreading plagues, regulate food production and the distribution of resources.The narrative of the book is very short, only 52 pages. You can read it in one sitting. The narrative is followed by a 24th Century Lexicon of Archaic Terms. It’s actually a very useful and interesting glossary that has just a hint of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. An informative interview of the authors by publisher Patrick Fitzgerald of Life Sciences, Columbia University Press follows the lexicon. An extensive list of notes and references take up the remainder of the volume. less

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