America’s Overpopulation Predicament: Blindsiding Future Generations


Book Description

America’s Overpopulation Predicament: Blindsiding Future Generations— The subject of this book will profoundly and adversely affect every man, woman and child on earth by 2050. Most of us have experienced a situation when we or someone we know has some critical knowledge to share that needs immediate action only to be told to wait our turn as other irrelevant topics are given attention. This author asks for his findings to be heard against an ocean of mediocrity as he relates his personal “eye opening” experiences from all over the world with similar emotion, I suspect, as Newton felt when he suddenly understood the force of gravity, or that of Archimedes when he shouted “Eureka” as he suddenly understood the method for measuring precious metal content in an object. Like the seer who catches a glimpse into the future, Wooldridge finds it hard to limit his efforts to the written word. For here we find as compelling a case for massive and immediate action as ever there was one. Here is a subject matter so extraordinary that it should be shouted from every rooftop. The information this book contains is imperative and irrefutable. It destroys the impotent etchings of any clay or gold tablets as a roadmap for humanity. Man or woman, young or old, it will entreat you to look ahead without bias to the stark reality of what is ahead for our nation and our world. Packed with references to support his case, and literally floating above contrary voices like whitecaps on the ocean, Wooldridge advances the case for the salvation of modern civilization. He suggests courses of action that will ultimately prove to be the only way to prevent humanity from vanishing like dust in the wind. K. R. Hampshire, Researcher and Entrepreneur, Denver, Colorado




Human Rights and the Environment in Africa


Book Description

The relationship between human rights and the environment, as evidenced by the recent UN Resolution on the human right to a healthy environment, is a topical, fascinating, uneasy, and increasingly urgent one. This timely collection explores the inextricable relationship between human rights and the environment as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key human rights and environmental issues confronting Africa. The work explores theoretical, philosophical, doctrinal, and empirical research to interrogate and provide clarity on how and whether the human rights-based approach to environmental protection and policy implications has been effective in enhancing environmental protection and sustainability in Africa. It brings together an elite group of African and international experts to investigate the increasing connectivity and problems with African human rights, environmental governance, and the quest for sustainability. The book is divided into thematic clusters, including: the right of vulnerable communities to sustainability; climate change, the right to development and natural resource governance; corporate environmental responsibility and sustainability; the philosophy of environmental ethics and theories of human rights approaches to environmental governance; procedural environmental rights; the role of the judiciary in environmental protection; and desertification. These themes provide a structure to investigate and clarify specific fundamental questions on Africa’s environmental governance paradigm. This innovative contribution provides an interdisciplinary approach to the philosophical interrelationship and use of human rights approaches to ensure and enhance environmental protection and sustainability. As such, the book will be of interest to African scholars, researchers and students in Human Rights Law, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Ecology and Conservation and Development Studies. It will also be a valuable resource for policymakers, governments, NGOs, practitioners, and all those interested in African environmental governance.




The Population Explosion


Book Description

Discusses our continually increasing population, its causes and consequences, and efforts by governments and individuals to control its growth.




Why Worry about Future Generations?


Book Description

The things we do today may make life worse for future generations. But why should we care what happens to people who won't be born until after all of us are gone? Some philosophers have treated this as a question about our moral responsibilities, and have argued that we have duties of beneficence to promote the well-being of our descendants. Rather than focusing exclusively on issues of moral responsibility, Samuel Scheffler considers the broader question of why and how future generations matter to us. Although we lack a developed set of ideas about the value of human continuity, we are more invested in the fate of our descendants than we may realize. Implicit in our existing values and attachments are a variety of powerful reasons for wanting the chain of human generations to persist into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing. This has implications for the way we think about problems like climate change. And it means that some of our strongest reasons for caring about the future of humanity depend not on our moral duty to promote the good but rather on our existing evaluative attachments and on our conservative disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. This form of conservatism supports rather than inhibits a concern for future generations, and it is an important component of the complex stance we take toward the temporal dimension of our lives.




Living Your Spectacular Life


Book Description

This book entertains, inspires and motivates. What I liked most about it: Wooldridge offers other adventure writers in each chapter to give you new ideas on living a spectacular life. If that means you enjoy a greater affinity to another writer, he gives you plenty of choices. He offers 12 concepts and practices that provide you with personal courage, self-confidence and empowerment. He offers you dozens of ordinary men and women living spectacular lives in various pursuits from world travel to growing a garden. He kept me reading through every chapter. Jake Hodges You learn and you grow from reading this book. The author grabs you by the seat of your pants. He takes you on a ride into self-confidence, self-acceptance and self-motivation. He shows you ordinary people breaking into spectacular lives through the principles he offers in his book. Effective, eloquent writing! Marie Jackson There must be a ga-zillion books showing you how to live a dynamic life. There are also thousands of therapists charging $100 an hour to move you into a productive life. Wooldridge takes you where you want to go much easier and more inspiringly than any therapist. He gives you the courage to get off your butt and discover what you truly loveand pursue it. Charles Hamilton This book gives you a better idea of who you are and where youre headed. Spectacular may not be a big enough term for this book. Stupendous may work better. By plugging into Wooldridges 12 points, you may lift off to Saturn if you are so inclined. All those people he writes about are just like you and me. If they can live spectacular lives, I can live a spectacular life. Jonathan Franks




A Short History of Progress


Book Description

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.




The Pandemic Century


Book Description

Like sharks, epidemic diseases always lurk just beneath the surface. This fast-paced history of their effect on mankind prompts questions about the limits of scientific knowledge, the dangers of medical hubris, and how we should prepare as epidemics become ever more frequent. Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge, as well as the role that human behaviour and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.




Teaching about the Future


Book Description

The faculty at the University of Houston's program in Futures Studies share their comprehensive, integrated approach to preparing foresight professionals and assisting others doing foresight projects. Provides an essential guide to developing classes on the future or even establishing whole degree programs.




Staying with the Trouble


Book Description

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.




The Space Merchants


Book Description

It is the 20th Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It's a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.