Humanity's Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them
Humanity and our civilisation are facing the greatest challenge in the million-year ascent of our species. It consists of the coming-together of ten huge, man-made threats, which are now combining to imperil our future.
Surviving the 21st Century: humanity's ten great challenges and how we can overcome them (Springer 2017) is a powerful new book exploring these risks – ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, global poisoning, food crises, population and urban overexpansion, pandemic disease, dangerous new technologies and self-delusion – and what can and should be done to limit them.
Citing the world's latest and most authoritative science, author Julian Cribb explains clearly and in plain English the focal issue of human existence in our time – and what humanity as a whole and we, as individuals, can do about it.
"Over recent years I've encountered many well-educated, well-informed people – scientists, parents and grandparents and millennials especially – who expressed the fear that we may be entering the end game of human history. That civilisation, and maybe even our species, will not survive the compound dangers we are building for ourselves," the Australian science writer explains.
"Surviving the 21st Century assesses whether they are right or wrong. It surveys the objective evidence for these ten mega-issues – and what we can and should do as a species and as individual citizens to overcome them," he says.
"Existential risk is not a cheerful topic – but with ten or eleven billion people crowded onto a heating, resource-depleted and over-weaponised planet, it is something that all of us now face. Ignoring it will not make it go away."
The third volume in Cribb's scientific trilogy about the human future, Surviving the 21st Century explores in detail the scientific evidence for the ten intersecting existential threats, and the importance of developing cross-cutting solutions that do not make matters worse in other areas.
"To take one example, many of the solutions now being adopted by industry and governments to sustain the world food supply also involve making the climate worse for agriculture, create water scarcity, ruin more landscapes, extinguish more species, throw small farmers off their land and spawn a worldwide consumer health crisis. In other words, they mostly defeat their very purpose.
"However the good news is that there are ways to produce food that involve ameliorating the climate, repairing landscapes, saving water and endangered species, raising farmers' incomes and improving consumer health. It is these cross-cutting solutions the world needs to discuss and pursue."
The book also probes two controversial themes. The first is whether our cherished beliefs in areas such as money, politics, religion and the human narrative now hinder our recognising the real risks we face and prevent us solving them together – and how these powerful human artefacts can be reinvented to focus on our survival.
The second questions whether our species, Homo sapiens (wise man) is fit to bear the title and whether or not our collective behaviour can be described as 'wise'.
Surviving the 21st Century also identifies uplifting and positive solutions, being developed around the world, to our most pressing problems. And it explores two paradigm-shattering developments in society – the evolution of our ability to 'think as a species' through global connections made at lightspeed on the internet, and the emergence of women as world leaders to a safer, more sustainable future.
Finally, it sets out a 'report card' which will enable the whole world to judge how well we are progressing towards a safer, more sustainable future.
The author: Julian Cribb FTSE is an Australian science writer and former newspaper editor, with over thirty awards for journalism to his credit. The author of 9 books and 8000 media articles, his other works in this series include The Coming Famine (UCP 2010), chosen as a 'Book of the Times' by the NY Times, and Poisoned Planet (Allen&Unwin 2014).
The book: Surviving the 21st Century: humanity's ten great challenges and how we can overcome them by Julian Cribb is published by Springer NY, 2017. ISBN 978-3-319-41269-6. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2 is available online in softback and e-book formats from the following suppliers and from quality book shops.
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