In late January I posted an item about a list of the top 50 green books, which prompted one reader, Sublime Oblivion, to ask which one book I would pick. After some wandering about, I settled on Limits to Growth, easily one of the landmark books on sustainability.
Sublime Oblivion has now posted a lengthy, thoughtful, albeit not very upbeat review of LTG, which I encourage everyone to read.
(Note to SO and everyone else reading this: When you post something like this review on your site, feel free to drop me a note. I only found out about SO’s review, which I would have hated to miss, via his site’s RSS feed.)
If you haven’t read LTG recently, I definitely recommend it. Even with my mountainous reading list, I’ve bubbled it up to next in line, as soon as I finish Harold Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle.
Thanks, Lou.
I didn’t spend much time covering the upbeat stuff in LTG because I saw little point in doing so. First, they describe the success with limiting CFC emissions – but as you note in the very next post, it is “same song, different verse” in comparison with CO2. CFC emissions are orders of magnitude less central to industrial civilization than CO2 emissions.
Second, there’s a long, fat chapter in LTG on the kind of culture change we need to transition to sustainability. But I didn’t see it necessary to dwell on it since 1) it is obvious, and logically follows from the rest of the text, and 2) personally I find the chances of us successfully making said transition as a society to be extremely low – human psychology militates against it, so IMO it would only be possible if forced through by a strong, authoritarian state (a state I call an “ecotechnic dictatorship“). In conclusion, I would actually put more chances on a technological silver bullet that culture change.
PS. I looked up the reviews for The Lucifer Principle and I might take it out of the library myself tomorrow. You have good taste in books.