The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement annually, so with more than seven billion people live on this planet, that equates to 2.8 trillion pounds of human fecal matter generated each year. Consequently, we need to spend considerable time, effort, and expense managing all this waste lest we find ourselves in very deep…
The funny thing about trying to re-make the world after generations of humans have so effectively un-made it is that sometimes even the best intentioned of plans for a more environmentally friendly and sustainable future can end up producing undesirable, sometimes even environmentally harmful, effects. Solar panel farms, for example, may be seen as less destructive that fossil fuel extraction, however they require for land to develop, disrupting larger amounts of plant and wildlife habitat.
One of the great joys of my work reviewing books on natural history subjects is that, while many times the books arriving for review are expected, occasionally one appears that I otherwise may have quite possibly missed. In some cases this may be just as well; however in others, such as with the recently arrived “A Sustainable Future; 12 Key Areas of Global Concern,” not having the opportunity to discover what their authors had to say would be most regrettable indeed.