Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The best books to help us navigate the coming 50 years

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, Antarctica, and The Ministry for the Future.

In 2008, Robinson was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine.

One of the best books to help us navigate the next fifty years he tagged at the Guardian:
The population biologist Joel Cohen examines one central issue in How Many People Can the Earth Support?, approaching this question from various angles to help us understand why it has received such widely varying answers. I’ve seen published estimates ranging from 100 million to 12 trillion people, but even if you dismiss these polemical outliers, the range extends from two to 30 billion. Since values are inherent in this discussion, there can be no “true” answer. But Cohen’s clear description of all the factors involved offers an excellent starting point to inform future debates about the Earth’s carrying capacity.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue