Rating: 
Summary: God's Last Offer
Review: Absolutely terrific! A highly readable and well-documented account of the dire future we face if changes aren't made. Ayres covers all the major environmental issues, especially the underlying core problem of overpopulation. And he explains how "information fragmentation" prevents us from knowing how serious the problems really are. Anyone even mildly interested in what humans are doing to the planet should read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Very important and timely analysis
Review: After reading this very well researched, cogent analysis, I am increasingly convinced that the world is threatened as perhaps never before, that it is urgent that steps be taken immediately to move the earth away from its present perilous path, and that a shift to plant-based diets is an essential part of the changes that must be made.
Ed Ayres is extremely well qualified to write this book as he is editor of "Worldwatch" magazine, the semi-monthly publication of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based thinktank that produces annual publications, including "State of the World", that aim to alert people to current critical environmental threats. Ayres is also editorial director of the Institute. His book makes it abundently clear why the following ancient rabbinic teaching that has been generally ignored over many centuries is extremely relevant today:
In the hour when the Holy one, blessed be He, created the first person, He showed him the trees in the Garden of Eden, and said to him: "See My works, how fine they are; Now all that I have created, I created for your benefit. Think upon this and do not corrupt and destroy My world, For if you destroy it, there is no one to restore it after you." Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:28
In his compelling, well written book, Ed Ayres stresses the importance of what he calls four megaphenomena that are having great effects on the world today and increasingly will threaten the world's future unless fundamental changes are made. These are four revolutionary changes or spikes in variables that had been relatively constant throughout history: the carbon spike, the extinction spike, the consumption spike, and the population spike. Here is a brief summary of Ayre's discussions of these four important spikes:
1) The carbon spike: There is an extraordinary worldwide concensus of climate scientists about global warming and its potential impacts. After a thorough study and several reviews of their findings, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a task force of leading climate scientists from 98 countries, unequivocally concluded that global warming is already rapidly occurring, that human activites that increase atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a major driving force, that global warming is a problem of enormous consequence that will continue to unleash devastating weather disturbances ranging from unnaturally heavy storms and floods to heat waves and droughts, and therefore it is essential that carbon emissions be cut sharply worldwide. There seems to be abundant reinforcement for these conclusions from many recent news reports of record temperatures, severe hurricanes and other storms, and severe droughts in Israel and other countries.
2) The extinction spike: While largely invisible to most people, this spike may ultimately be the most important one, because it threatens to unravel the web of life that sustains our everyday lives. Many biologists believe that we have entered the fastest mass extinction in the world's history, possibly even faster than the period when the dinosaurs died out.
3) The consumption spike: The global economy expands as much in a year today as it did in any entire century prior to 1900. This rapid increase in commerce is drawing down the earth's finite resources far faster than natural processes can regenerate them. Hence, along with rapid population growth, rising levels of unsustainable consumption contributes to many current environmental and climatic crises.
4) The population spike: while it took all of world history up to about 1800 for the world population to reach its first billion people, in recent years there have been increases of a billion people about every 12 years. While the world faces many critical environmental threats with its present 6 billion people, it is projected that there will be over 3 billion additional people by the middle of the 21st century.
Ayres skillfully shows how all of these spikes are interrelated. As world population grows and people consume more, more fossil fuels are burned, thereby increasing the carbon spike. As more land is used for housing, industry, and agriculture, habitats are destroyed furthering the extinction spike. When the temperature rapidly increases, many species are unable to migrate fast enough to higher altitudes or latitudes, and hence they begin to die off.
In addition to calling attention to these four megaphenomena that so threaten the world''s future, Ayres also analyzes why so little attention seems to be paid to these threats that are related to "the most world-changing events in the history of our species", and why so many people are unresponsive to the challenges that now loom before us. Among the reasons he thoroughly discusses and illustrates using many examples are the failure of the media to probe beyond immediate events for underlying causes and connections, the power of the fossil fuel industries and others who gain from a continuation of the status quo to control the U. S. economy and stands taken by politicians, media attention on side issues rather than critical issues, the fragmentation of knowledge caused by specialization so that few people see the big picture, and the creation of false extremes by corporate PR managers.
Ayres stresses that what we do now to confront the challenges of these spikes will determine whether human civilization can survive in the long term. In his analysis of the steps necessary to avert current global threats, Ayres, a long-time vegetarian who wrote an excellent article in the November 8, 1999 issue of Time magazine that argued that meat consumption will decrease in the 21st century due to the great environmental and other societal costs of animal-based diets and agriculture, emphasizes the importance of shifting to vegetarian diets. He indicates that the production and consumption of animal products is significantly related to increased disease rates, the wasteful use of water, land, and other respources, and many ecothreats.
In summary, I strongly recommend this book to every citizen, especially our political, religious, and industrial leaders, so that they will recognize the urgency of our current situation and the need for fundamental changes. It is especially recommended for vegetarians, because it provides much valuable information and arguments that can help in efforts to make other people aware of he importance of shifts to plant-based diets in order to reduce current global threats.
Rating:
Summary: Urgent Wake Up Call To Action
Review: Author, Ed Ayres, of World Watch fame, calls upon us to wake from our 20th century excesses, to initiate the last positive choices we may ever have a chance to make, to bring the eco-system back into balance, and to take individual responsibility for the future of our own species. While we wring our hands over tragic daily headlines (Kosovo refugees), we ignore the death throes of our own mother planet. This book is very disturbing to read --in a good way. As a thinking, careing person, I can't go back to sleep, I must take action. The time is now, the place is here. Each one of us must change the future and save our beautiful, fragile planet from mass extinction. Write On Ed Ayers!NOTE TO AMAZON EDITORS: Please remove my earlier pre-view and replace with this actual re-view. Thanks.
Rating:
Summary: The tide turns! A must read for the "naysayer"!
Review: Ayers is brilliant! I could not put the book down! In his characteristic style (from "Worldwatch") Ayers paints a clear picture of the dangerous place we are headed (if not already there) -a world that will require a collective concentrated focus on mitigation of the effects of the four megaphenomena (see above), and a reversal of those trends, if our species is to survive. This book is not for the light-hearted. If you have the slightest shade of "green" in your soul, this book will give you a paradigm shift that will change your life. If you don't, you will.
Rating: 
Summary: Right Sentiment, Wrong Apocalypse
Review: Ed Ayres gives us another example of breathless doomsaying replete with the usual warnings of environmental destruction and mass extinctions. What we really need to fear is the overwhelming hubris represented by people like Ayres! Yes, our climate is changing. It has changed many times in recorded history, with temperatures both higher and lower than the norms of today. The coast of Greenland was once habitable and verdant. In 1776, the Hudson River was frozen solid enough for soldiers to drag canon accross. The notion that our species can directly influence or "correct" global climatic shifts is ludicrous. Scientists can barely predict weather 48 hours in advance, yet they ask us to believe computer simulations of the Earth's climate projected 50 years into the future! The real danger to our way of life is the unchecked and growing powers of bureaucracies that whittle away at our liberties under the guise of environmentalism or security. Ayers glosses over this larger and more imminent threat.
Rating:
Summary: An Absolute Must-Read
Review: For those of us who are vitally interested in the details surrounding the global assault on the biosphere caused by humankind and the massive environmental changes wreaked on the earth by technological innovation and mass consumerism, this is a critically important book to read. In clear, unemotional, and incontrovertible terms, author Ed Ayres lays out the nature of each of the four major environmental threats, and traces each of them to their manifesting sources. Using the data collected as the editorial director of the environmental group Worldwatch, the author mounts a sometimes passionate, and always convincing argument against the wall of negative environmental change being unleashed on the earth by science and technology gone absolutely wild. After briefly summarizing the ways in which the overall environmental threats are interconnected with our overall problems and our unnecessarily wasteful materialistic lifestyles, he identifies the four most dangerous master processes (or mega-phenomena) that are quickly altering the basis for biological life on earth. First among these is the rise on carbon gas emissions, which he links to the overuse of private automobile transportation and the rapidly dwindling degree of forestation in the world, especially in the Amazon area of the new hemisphere. Among other things, this is quickly changing the nature of the world's weather, and this single fact is extremely worrying to Ayres. Next he describes the ways in which the various technological implementations have expedited the rate of species extinction, rapidly depleted and profoundly weakening the primordial basis for life on the planet itself. Likewise, this profound intrusion into the nature of the biosphere threatens the foundations of biological life itself, and we must recognize how threatening this is to us as a species. Third, he points out the number of ways in which the ever-accelerating degree of human over-consumption of the world's limited resources, and has the unfortunate side effect of also despoiling and polluting the world's potable water (and food) supplies. Finally, he shows how the explosion in world population combined with the other three master processes will soon stress the third world countries toward a catastrophic collision with their own degrading environmental conditions. Ayres also extends his argument to mount a stinging indictment of the relatively sophisticated and dangerously disingenuous efforts on the part of money-grubbing global corporations, international institutions, and various governmental bodies to mislead and misguide public perceptions and awareness of the increasingly dangerous situation. Their callous manipulation of the instruments of the media have lulled the masses of the so-called advanced countries into a frightening degree of apathy and complacency regarding the environment. In a world that revolves around making money and corporate profits, the last thing anyone in a position of authority and responsibility wants to have to publicly confront and recognize is the almost herculean effort (and the corresponding drastic alteration in our lifestyles and level of individual consumption) necessary in order to effectively change the practices and approaches of an economy so organized and so perpetuated. In concluding, the author recommends a number of practical approaches that would be instrumental in turning the tide into amore positive direction. While admitting the social, political, and economic difficulties associated with so doing, he argues that what is necessary in order to avoid the environmental catastrophes otherwise directly confronting us, we must rapidly shift our perspectives, values, and practices and learn very quickly to relate to each other and to the world around us in a much more responsible and comprehensive fashion. This is a wonderful book and is one I highly recommend for anyone concerned about learning more about the massive ways in which the human assault on the ecosystem is threatening our continuing survival as a society and as a species.
Rating:
Summary: Profound information with personal solutions
Review: I was impressed with the compilation of the massive amounts of information about the environment put in a way that creates an illumination of the actual problem that exists on earth. More impressively, it gives practical solutions that each of us personally can work to do in our lives.
Rating:
Summary: Right Sentiment, Wrong Apocalypse
Review: In this 1999 masterpiece of activist writing, Ed Ayres eerily predicts what the future holds if humanity continues upon it's suicidal path of rising carbon, consumption, population, and biodiversity loss. Reading this today (May 2003) will bring chills to your spine. Everything Ayres prognosticated in 1999 has come to pass: massive terrorism from non-aligned organizations (bin Laden-ism), widespread corporate deceit (Enron), rise of mega-viruses (SARS), and unimaginable species extinctions. And for those of us who aren???t in denial and choose not to ignore, we realize the worst is yet to come. There is little chance of reversing this downward spiral... but doing nothing is too shameful to contemplate. This book should be required reading for all graduating college - or even high school - seniors.
Rating: 
Summary: Clarity Amidst the Clamor
Review: Information. There's so much of it, how do we decide what is important and what isn't? Where do we look? Ed Ayres' new book is a plea for a new vision -- a realistic vision of what kind of world we have already, and what kind of world we will have if we don't take action. The warnings here are not new: overpopulation, excessive consumption, massive extinction of species, and the impending climate upheavals caused by escalating carbon emissions. What IS new in Ayres' approach is his tight analysis of how people become distracted from these problems and end up refocused on the trivial, the derivative, or the flat-out fantastical. The book is especially strong when he calls for new KINDS of forms to deal with global problems. For example, as rivers begin to run dry and drinking water becomes even more scarce, it doesn't make sense for nation-states to compete for the water -- upstream vs. downstream. What is needed is a bioregional system whereby the entire watershed is seen as a whole, set within its natural context. Only these kinds of solutions are sufficient for the future. All in all, this is a well-researched yet passionate appeal.
Rating:
Summary: Wake Up call that should be mandatory reading
Review: On November 1999, Time magazine published a set of fascinating and thought-provoking articles on a variety of subjects entitled "Visions of the 21st Century". Amongst these articles was one authored by Ed Ayres under the title "Will We Still Eat Meat?" and what a fascinating couple of pages worth of statistics and insight for those intelligent and sensitive enough to care!
While only the text of it can be easily found on the web (http://www.junkscience.com/nov99/ayres.htm ), it summarizes eloquently some of the resource-availability-and-impact issues which are masterfully detailed in this extremely important book "God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future".
Civilized countries should revise their educational programs to incorporate this book into their systems while there may be time to revert some of the human-made ecological disasters that result from the common "Quick Buck" mentality and particularly the cruelty associated with animal meat consumption - but, unfortunately they will not. Well established meat profiting industries, as well as, idiotic religious fervor will get in the way to promote the perpetual and biggest crime of humanity. What a shame!
By all means - BUY THIS BOOK if you haven't.
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