Present Trends and Possible Futures

Worldwatch Institute also releases a new volume of their Vital Signs series each year. Vital Signs documents global trends in a broad variety of areas. Vital Signs provides an excellent bird’s-eye view of the state of the world via numerous brief articles on current trends and findings. Articles are heavily supported through graphical representations of relevant data.

This book greatly added to my understanding of how multiple scientific disciplines combine to give us a picture of past climactic changes and their effects on the peoples of the world. It provides a detailed picture of the science surrounding the climactic changes discussed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse and how they pertain to today’s world where we are rapidly changing the conditions affecting the weather on Planet Earth. Highly recommended!

If you want to know more about the hidden bio threats that lie hidden in secret laboratories around the world, and are sometimes available for an exorbitant price to the highest bidder, then read this book. Sobering, chilling, and authored by the man who actually ran the Soviet biological weapons program before resigning his position and fleeing to the United States in 1992. Not a fun read, but very readable and very educational.

If you want to read a single book that summarizes clearly the current state of the world and how we got there, and then provides a clear road map for how we must change our personal habits and government policies to give us the best chance to turn over a decent world to our children and avoid global collapse, then this is the book for you. Brown shows us that if the United States would devote just one third of its current military budget toward his Plan B budget, we would stand a good chance for turning our world around. Highly Recommended!

This terrific book is even more pertinent today than when it was written in 1982. I can’t say enough good things about this book. Overshoot outlines ecological concepts, imperatives and terms more clearly and succinctly than any other book that I have ever read. If it were up to me, I would make this book required reading for both graduation from high school and entry into congress. Highly recommended!

I wish Natural Capitalism were required reading for all engineers, businesspeople, and politicians. This book provides a blueprint for a worldwide business revolution that could go a long way toward providing a sustainable future for our children. Natural Capitalism explores changes that could reduce our current use of resources (the “natural capital” of the planet) by factors on the order of 10 to 1, without reducing our standard of living, by applying existing technologies and redirecting the way we do business. A rational, well-documented book with many case examples, it was written by three well-respected members of the ecological movement, including founders of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Highly Recommended!