The Future of the Earth : An Introduction to Sustainable Development for Young Readers

Rating:
Summary: Dubious Science
Review: This book is beautifully styled and cunningly manipulative. It is loaded with dubious science and gross oversimplifications that are often appealing to the 9-12 year-old-minds to which the book is targeted.

The authors reminisce about times past, when the world was technologically simpler, often without framing the issues in the proper historical context. The days before fossil fuel burning are celebrated while the authors conveniently forget to describe, for example, life in *New York City in 1900, when 100,000 horses walked the streets, creating 2.5 million pounds of manure requiring daily disposal, when 15,000 horses annually died in the city, requiring sanitary disposal, or the filth and disease that horse transportation bred, all of which amply prove the inaccuracy of that fable.

The Future of the Earth describes terrifying global warming scenarios and lays the blame squarely at the feet of mankind using dubious greenhouse theories, and the author fails to discuss the natural climatic changes earth has experienced through its history, a gross omission for an "ecology" book.

It vilifies agriculture technologies for permitting abundant food production. In spite of the fact that increased farm efficiency has tripled yields, while reducing the acreage needed for farming, thus opening up more land for habitat.

It claims that deserts are expanding and that mankind somehow caused the expansion (the Sahara are actually giving way to foliage and grasslands).

Many more falsehoods can be found throughout its 74 colorful, manipulative pages:*

Air pollution from cars will increase 25 percent in the next 10 years. (It is in fact significantly declining in spite of the fact that the number of cars is increasing.)

Twelve percent of all species are endangered. (Scientific study has yet to produce any accurate numbers, but a safe guess is well below 1 percent.)

More than 20,000 square miles of ice disappear each year. (That invented number of regional ice depletion fails to account for growing ice fields in other global regions.)

Pesticides are no way to treat insect infestations, no matter how bad.

Nuclear energy provides no safe hope for humanity.

We must return to fishing for our dinner rather than industrial fishing.

We cannot afford to feed meat to the world's population, so we must eliminate commercial animal herds.

Each year 50,000 square miles of forestland leave the planet. (Forestland has actually increased for many decades in all developed countries.)

This book should be critically read with children along side a more accurate, albeit, less colorful ecology book such as Campbell and Reece's Environmental science.

*Dr. Jay Lehr, Heartland Institute's Environment and Climate News