Eileen Crist

Contains a lot of essays refuting the claims of Nordhaus and Shellenberger that because there are no lands that have not at least been minutely effected by man there is no more wilderness and therefore we should give up on protecting for wilderness. Michael Soule does the best job of painting the current status of conservation (versus environmentalism) and how the big conservation NGO's have mostly gone over to the land as resource for people and corporations.

Makes me glad to be the puny show more David at Western Watersheds Project and Wild Utah Project still fighting the Goliaths. Torrey House needs some more narratives that express the intrinsic value of the natural world. Values that are intrinsic are hard to promote compared to values that benefit humanity. Story can do it. show less

This book should be required reading for everyone who...well, everyone who is alive in the world. Yes, that means you. The authors of this work of collected papers pull no punches. They don't pussyfoot around the population issue like so many national spokespeople. They present their case - very compelling - and then wrap it up with suggested solutions (that is the weakest section). There is very little disagreement about the scope and nature of the problem; it is when the solutions section show more comes up that the contributors begin to disagree and contradict each other, which demonstrates just how big a problem it is. Even when everyone agrees that something must be done, it's difficult to agree what. The book lost a half star for a handful of howlers that could have been resolved by just a bit of research (the noble savage; the "fact" that there are more people alive on the earth in 1950 than in all previous human history put together - not true; the statement that our species has been on earth for 5 million years. Our genus, perhaps, but not our species). Otherwise, a fine work, though it will not leave you feeling optimistic, since their solutions are sort of rosy, and are not likely to be implemented and probably wouldn't work that well if they did. But that's all right, because I don't believe you have to have all the solutions to a problem when you are pointing it out; that can come with further discussion once the problem is acknowledged. Just getting people to read this book would be the start to that. show less

Wuerthner wrote a valuable letter to the editor, High Country News, March 2020.

It's now available as an ebook on the MITpress portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/product/gaia-in-turmoil