End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?

End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?
Professor Anthony Barnosky

Hadly Hadly

overconsumption / population growth / dwindling resources / climate change / disease / contamination / storms / thirst / war … will the struggle to simply stay alive become humanity’s future rather than its past?What happens when vast population growth endangers the world’s food supplies? Or our water? Our energy needs, climate, or environment? Or the planet’s biodiversity? What happens if these all become critical at once? Just what is our future?In ‘End Game’, world-renowned scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly draw on their work to explain the growing threats to humanity as the planet edges towards a resource war for remaining space, food, oil and water. And as they show, these wars are not the nightmares of a dystopian future but are already happening today. They explore the origins of Ebola in densely populated areas of south-eastern Guinea, witness raging fires in Yellowstone and Colorado and explain how drought-induced food shortages are already causing problems in the Sudan, Gaza Strip and Iraq. Finally, they ask: at what point will inaction become the break-up of the intricate workings of the global society?The planet is in danger now, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. We still have the chance to avoid the tipping point and to make the future better. But this window of opportunity is closing fast and will shut within ten-to-twenty years. ‘End Game’ is the call we need.

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Copyright (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf)

First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2015

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.williamcollinsbooks.com)

Copyright © Anthony D. Barnosky and Elizabeth A. Hadly 2015

The authors assert the moral right to be

identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007548156

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007548163

Version: 2016-04-28

Dedication (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf)

To our parents, Emma & Michael Barnosky and

Jane Grassman Hadly & William McKell Hadly,

whose work to make a better world, each in

their own way, made us who we are.

And to our daughters, Emma and Clara,

who carry on with the future.

CONTENTS

Cover (#u11a6ad2a-6ec1-57ce-b3d4-b891821b3abb)

Title Page (#ulink_ed14315d-8b7d-5915-8eda-0e214c972f10)

Copyright (#ulink_e5c2b8ce-2d51-5fe4-8a7b-28216758ce1d)

Frontispiece (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#ulink_db493511-f9df-538d-85d5-199c1abac9c7)

Introduction: The Journey (#ulink_ec945626-279c-5e79-b728-474fd866fd99)

1: Past or Future? (#ulink_d87949fe-c0dc-5be4-9f3b-6ca4dd8ac7e8)

2: People (#ulink_a97a6389-1503-52eb-ab1b-1d8a90a242af)

3: Stuff (#ulink_ea67a16c-601f-518a-a459-bf96191ac3a4)

4: Storms (#litres_trial_promo)

5: Hunger (#litres_trial_promo)

6: Thirst (#litres_trial_promo)

7: Toxins (#litres_trial_promo)

8: Disease (#litres_trial_promo)

9: War (#litres_trial_promo)

10: End Game? (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction

The Journey (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf)

This is a story of a journey. Like most journeys, it started out as a personal quest, but for us it has also been a professional one. It began when we were young scientists, driven mostly by curiosity and looking for the next big adventure. We found adventures aplenty, because our jobs as palaeoecologists – people who study how our planet changes through time – took us to remote places all over the world. Along the way we fell in love and got married, and then the personal and professional adventures started inexorably to intertwine. We had one daughter, and a few months later got her a passport and hopped a plane to Australia. Then another daughter, same routine, but this time it was six weeks in Patagonia. By the time our kids were two-year-olds, they’d spent many nights in wilderness tents with us, buried their fingers in koala fur, been carried on our backs as we forded waist-deep rivers and stared down grizzly bears, and fallen sound asleep in their snugglies as we skied back-country trails. By the time they were fifteen, they had their own list of exploits: they’d hunkered down in their own tent as lions paced through camp, taught our graduate students the Latin names of various species, trapped rodents in Patagonia, faced off angry rattlers in the Oregon desert, and watched grapefruit-sized chicken-eating spiders lead around their hundreds of young on a dark Amazonian night.

By now we’ve travelled to every continent in the world, save Antarctica; sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes with our daughters, sometimes not. All those trips were research expeditions as well as adventures, each of them undertaken to learn something about how nature worked in the places on which we hoped humans had not yet laid a heavy hand. And we did discover answers to some of the questions we were asking – like how animals respond to climate change that isn’t caused by people, what causes mass extinctions, how ecosystems are assembled, and how evolution works at the genetic level to keep species alive.