End Game

overconsumption / population growth / dwindling natural 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 if population pressures finally hit a threshold that tumbles the dominoes of food, water, energy, climate, pollution, and biodiversity, which in turn break up the intricate workings of the global society? Just how close we may be to a global tipping point becomes apparent when you take a helicopter view and see what's happening at the scale of the entire planet. In 'End Game' Professors Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly have compiled a giddying single overview of the calamities which we face from huge human population growth. We know that resources, climate change and environmental contamination are all at dangerous levels, but what if they all become critical at once? Unless things change this tipping point will be reached. Our carbon footprint is now a carbon acre, global warming is now simmering - we each probably use up about about 194 pounds of stuff a day and an Olympic swimming pool's worth of water each year. And soon there will be 9 billion of us. The combination of this spend will plunge us quite suddenly into a global knife fight for remaining space, food, oil and water. The danger is palpable, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. The most important wake-up call since Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 'The Population Bomb', 'End Game' is globally relevant and increasingly crucial.