Posted by Donald Officer (Moderator) on May 12, 2008, 2:17 pm
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Dangerous World: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival by Marq de Villiers. Viking Canada; Toronto, Ontario, 2008. (362 pages). Reviewed by Donald R. Officer.
With oil topping $125 a barrel, a worldwide food crisis and of course, climate change, readers may think it pointless to consider the many potential calamities we can do little to nothing about. Since event probability can often only be approximately gauged within a boundless geological or astronomical framework, readers might likewise be forgiven for taking on an expression usually reserved for mutual funds salespeople hauling our their charts.
Marq de Villiers has enjoyed a long career as a writer of features and frequently award winning non-fiction books as well as a number of years as the editor and eventually publisher of Toronto Life. He is mercifully quite able to convert volumes of researched facts and information into engaging reading. In drawing or appropriately leaving us to draw our own conclusions about the fragility of our condition, he does not add to our list of risks that of suffocation by data dump.
While speculating on the survivability of humanity, de Villiers accomplishes something that seems counter-intuitive: he reassures us – at least philosophically. We live, as he demonstrates in various contexts, in a dangerous neighbourhood. Our solar system and galaxy are full of explosive happening or imminent events. While at any given moment the big traumas of exterior origin are several comfortable light years away, sooner or later we must accept that we live in an interstellar shooting gallery filled with erratic meteors, renegade asteroids and menacing comets. Given some lead time, we might be able to divert the course of some extraterrestrial projectiles by playing pool with ballistic missiles, but some are undoubtedly way too big for that.
We also face huge dangers from within. The interior of this planet is mostly molten, and as we know from continuous experiences with earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, the crust is all too thin and shaky. Once again predictability is as beyond our grasp as the capacity to control tectonic events and lava flows. Between them astronomical intruders and massive eruptions account for five known mass extinctions that reset the evolutionary clock on this planet. In their efforts to get a handle on either scale or significance of the primal physics involved, scientists have been less helpful than most of us would like. They are now suggesting the big bang was probably a (relatively) local or recent event taking away the comfort of a calculable start date for the world, while continued exploration of quantum issues suggests a murkier future than we used to believe in. Put plainly, at the most basic and broadest levels, the more we learn the less we know about what’s really happening.
De Villiers works through his well researched list of global risks systematically and concludes with a series of specific remedies and strategies for the species. Along the way he tries to inoculate us against panic with a suitable injection of inevitable folk wisdom. Humankind has indeed made things worse as all the Cassandras have been telling us for some decades. The population bomb was less immediately calamitous than we expected, but the time bought with technological fiddles has meanwhile depleted the earth and its fuel reserves. Transmissible disease is a whole other issue which can be mitigated with difficulty. In summary, Marq de Villiers notes in detail how we can improve our risk management considerably. Therefore this book is not just a doomsday prelude. He does conclude however, that our race with its tribalism and obsessions has a very poor track record on learning cooperation. Odds anyone?
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