In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system. Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a ‘clash of civilisations’ as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself. This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.

Our most widely respected environmental writer brings together the essential voices on global warming, from its 19th-century discovery to the present With the rise of extreme weather events worldwide–witness the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Sandy, Irene, and Katrina, and the sustained drought across the American West–global warming has become increasingly difficult to deny. What is happening to our planet? And what can we do about it? The Global Warming Reader provides more than thirty-five answers to these burning questions, from more than one hundred years of engagement with the topic. Here is Elizabeth Kolbert’s groundbreaking essay “The Darkening Sea,” Michael Crichton’s skeptical view of climate change, George Monbiot’s biting indictment of those who are really using up the planet’s resources, NASA scientist James Hansen’s testimony before the U.S. Congress, and clarion calls for action by Al Gore, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, and many others. The Global Warming Reader is a comprehensive resource, expertly edited by someone who lives and breathes this defining issue of our time.

We host a roundtable discussion about the terrorist attacks, and the response to them, in New York, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota, where a man named Dahir Adan is accused