ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Science journalist Vince chronicles a two-year journey around the globe to evaluate warnings that we face an ecological tipping point.

“Deserts are spreading…forests are dying and being logged….Wildlife is being hunted and dying because of habitat loss,” writes the author, who also notes that we currently use 30 percent more natural resources per year “than the planet can replenish.” Geologists are calling this the Anthropocene epoch due to “the changes humans are making to the biosphere.” As the author acknowledges, we are the first species “to knowingly reshape the living Earth's biology and chemistry. We have become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth.” Despite this dim picture, the author found grounds for optimism on her travels. Vince takes the hopeful view that we will act in a timely fashion to “preserve nature or master its tricks artificially.” In China and India, she chronicles government efforts to address atmospheric pollution and looming water shortages. Her main interest, however, is the inventiveness of people at the local level dealing with these problems. Vince believes that they are ushering in “an extraordinary new human age…creating artificial glaciers to irrigate their crops, building artificial coral reefs to shore up islands, and artificial trees to clean the air.” The author was most impressed by the cumulative effect of small changes in heretofore-inaccessible mountain regions that now generate electricity using microhydropower; these areas have also gained access to the Internet and improved sanitation. She discusses the work of “[h]ydrologists in Peru [who are] building tunnels to drain an Andean glacial lake” as a way to control disastrous flooding. On a smaller scale in the Indian village of Ladakh, a local engineer is leading a project to convert mountain wastewater into a series of man-made miniglaciers connected to irrigation canals. Everywhere she traveled, Vince continued to see great promise in human creativity.

A well-documented, upbeat alternative to doom-and-gloom prognostications.