/lit/ - Literature

Toward the end of that book, I literally threw it across the room and never picked it back up. When he shifts from retrospective to prospective issues facing humanity and the planet, he casts some lazy and dangerous ideas around, that are contrary to academic understanding in the discipline of global sustainability studies (master of Env. here).

He asserts that despite ballooning human population growth and resource consumption rates greater than earth's capacity to provide/ regenerate, and externalities such as waste and carbon exponentially increasing, that humankind have such great ingenuity (increasing efficiency/ new tech / pivoting to new resource types), that we will likely overcome it all in our inevitable strides to advancement, and everything will be ok.

This a blatantly ignorant mis-characterisation of what our species and planet are facing right now. What he has drawn on, knowingly or not, is known as the environmental Kuznets curve (the notion that advances in efficiency are channeled into tempering resource use, rather than applied for more outputs, which is obviously a flawed notion in a capitalist market & species with a blistering population growth), an economic argument wielded frequently and heavily by the far-right governments as an excuse not to act on climate change. A claim that is widely discredited in environmental academic studies.

I'd say he should stick to history, but it seems perhaps he hasn't won friends in that department either.