Sick Planet

"All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles." --Guy Debord Guy Debord is one of the 20th Century's most prophetic critics. His bestselling work, Society of the Spectacle, decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life. Since his suicide in 1994, the accuracy and pertinence of his writings on those troubled times is ever more apparent. A Sick Planet brings together three of his key essays. The Rise and Fall of the "Spectacular" Commodity-Economy is an analysis of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, when much of the city's black population fought thousands of police and National Guard for several days. The Explosion Point of Ideology in China examines and celebrates the decomposition of bureaucratic power and its ideology in China. A Sick Planet presents an extremely prescient polemic on global environmental degradation

Shows how food and drug companies are destroying the planet and the health of the population.

All life — whether on land or in the sea — depends on the oceans for two things: • Oxygen. Most of Earth’s oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the sea. These humble, one-celled organisms, rather than the spectacular rain forests, are the true lungs of the planet. • Climate control. Our climate is regulated by the ocean’s currents, winds, and water-cycle activity. Sea Sick is the first book to examine the current state of the world’s oceans — the great unexamined ecological crisis of the planet — and the fact that we are altering everything about them; temperature, salinity, acidity, ice cover, volume, circulation, and, of course, the life within them. Alanna Mitchell joins the crews of leading scientists in nine of the global ocean’s hotspots to see firsthand what is really happening around the world. Whether it’s the impact of coral reef bleaching, the puzzle of the oxygen-less dead zones such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, or the shocking implications of the changing Ph balance of the sea, Mitchell explains the science behind the story to create an engaging, accessible yet authoritative account.

The Earth is experiencing an unprecedented climate crisis. The planet's average temperature is steadily rising, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods, cyclones, heat waves and droughts are increasing. Biodiversity is threatened, and the consequences of climate change are already having significant impacts on human health, agriculture, food production, air quality and hydrological cycles. The book "Atlas" explores these issues in depth, analyzing the causes and consequences of global warming and its implications for our planet. The book draws information and research from top universities, such as UC Berkeley and the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues generated by climate change.

Many of us have concerns about the effects of climate change on Earth, but we often overlook the essential issue of human health. This book addresses that oversight and enlightens readers about the most important aspect of one of the greatest challenges of our time. The global environment is under massive stress from centuries of human industrialization. The projections regarding climate change for the next century and beyond are grim. The impact this will have on human health is tremendous, and we are only just now discovering what the long-term outcomes may be. By weighing in from a physician’s perspective, Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach clarify the science, dispel the myths, and help readers understand the threats of climate change to human health. No better argument exists for persuading people to care about climate change than a close look at its impacts on our physical and emotional well-being. The need has never been greater for a grounded, informative, and accessible discussion about this topic. In this groundbreaking book, the authors not only sound the alarm but address the health issues likely to arise in the coming years.

We now live on a planet that is troubled—even overworked—in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature. In Paraguay, fast-growing soy plants are displacing both prior crops and people. In Malaysia, dispossessed farmers are training captive orangutans to earn their own meals. In India, a prized dairy cow suddenly refuses to give more milk. Built from these sorts of scenes and sites, where the ultimate subjects and agents of work are ambiguous, How Nature Works develops an anthropology of labor that is sharply attuned to the irreversible effects of climate change, extinction, and deforestation. The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.

** Winner of Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015 ** We live in epoch-making times. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.6 billion-year history. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing into the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans. Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age to see what life is really like for the people on the frontline of the planet we’ve made. From artificial glaciers in the Himalayas to painted mountains in Peru, electrified reefs in the Maldives to garbage islands in the Caribbean, Gaia found people doing the most extraordinary things to solve the problems that we ourselves have created. These stories show what the Anthropocene means for all of us – and they illuminate how we might engineer Earth for our future.