'Only One Earth' an unofficial report by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos could hardly be more timely, yet it was written in 1972. It's subtitle, 'The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet', makes clear the subject matter of the book. How can industrialised and developing countries continue on with their high levels of living while surviving on a resource limited rock?
It's urgency couldn't be more felt today with books like Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything', George Monbiot's 'Heat' and David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' and the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg our impact on the Earth is well documented, well understood and catastrophic if nothing about it gets done.
This book struck me by being very well written in almost novelistic prose that catches not only the scientific instinct but the emphatic one too. Our increasing mastery of our world that has grown since the seventeenth centaury has given us extraordinary comfort and well being but, as Monbiot would put it, it is a Faustian bargain where the cost of all our luxuries maybe too high for us to pay.
Though this book is not a doom-and-gloom fest. It states the facts of our existence and gives a look at the stark future if we do not reduce consumption. But because I am reading this in the year 2020 it does seem that we are further down the knife edge of living and I find that frightening.
Drawn on from the collective knowledge of forty countries this is truly a global book that tries to take the whole world in it's entirety while compiling the facts. This makes sense as it was the first photograph of the Earth from the moon that was a catalyst for more environmental campaigning and political policies.
For the history of environmental writing this, for me, is a key book that puts all the data succinctly, comprehensively, and humanely. Compelling and gripping it may make you want to join Extinction Rebellion in the hopes of continuing life on this planet where we can experience new challenges and new adventures and for our grand children to experience.
We are bothers and sisters on this spaceship, or as Carl Sagan puts it 'a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam', this is our home and it's the only home we've ever known.
