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Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
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Narrated by:
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Adam Grupper
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By:
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Alan Weisman
About this listen
A powerful investigation into the chances for humanity's future from the author of the best seller The World Without Us.
In his best-selling book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman considered how the Earth could heal and even refill empty niches if relieved of humanity's constant pressures. Behind that groundbreaking thought experiment was his hope that we would be inspired to find a way to add humans back to this vision of a restored, healthy planet - only in harmony, not mortal combat, with the rest of nature.
But with a million more of us every four days on a planet that's not getting any bigger, and with our exhaust overheating the atmosphere and altering the chemistry of the oceans, prospects for a sustainable human future seem ever more in doubt. For this long awaited follow-up book, Weisman traveled to more than 20 countries to ask what experts agreed were probably the most important questions on Earth - and also the hardest: How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? How robust must the Earth's ecosystem be to assure our continued existence? Can we know which other species are essential to our survival? And, how might we actually arrive at a stable, optimum population, and design an economy to allow genuine prosperity without endless growth?
Weisman visits an extraordinary range of the world's cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems to learn what in their beliefs, histories, liturgies, or current circumstances might suggest that sometimes it's in their own best interest to limit their growth.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
Download the accompanying reference guide.©2013 Alan Weisman (P)2013 Hachette Book GroupListeners also enjoyed...
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Personal
- By Robert F. Jones on 09-15-17
By: Matt Ridley
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One Child
- The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment
- By: Mei Fong
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birthrates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society.
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Best Book Club Discussion Ever!!
- By Rachael W. Schettenhelm on 05-01-17
By: Mei Fong
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The Big Necessity
- The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
- By: Rose George
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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We prefer not to talk about it, but we should. Disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, nearly two million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable. Moving from the underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York (an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen) to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, The Big Necessity breaks the silence, revealing everything that matters about how people do - and don't - deal with their own waste.
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Utterly fascinating
- By Clayton on 03-31-19
By: Rose George
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Banana
- The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
- By: Dan Koeppel
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Banana combines a pop-science journey around the globe, a fascinating tale of an iconic American business enterprise, and a look into the alternately tragic and hilarious banana subculture (one does exist) - ultimately taking us to the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes, in a race to save the world's most beloved fruit.
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Very Good Book - History, Science, and Economics
- By Jose on 11-08-17
By: Dan Koeppel
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Progress
- Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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It's on the television, in the papers, and in our minds. Every day we're bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is - financial collapse, unemployment, growing poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. But the rarely acknowledged reality is that our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented. By almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive.
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Global Uptrends That May Surprise You
- By Alexandra Hopkins on 09-22-17
By: Johan Norberg
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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
- Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland
- By: Miriam Horn
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.
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great stories
- By GMMT on 05-15-18
By: Miriam Horn
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The Fever
- Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
- By: Sonia Shah
- Narrated by: Maha Chehlaoui
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names - and opened their pocketbooks - in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?
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Solid but not amazing account of malaria
- By S. Yates on 04-11-16
By: Sonia Shah
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Fordlandia
- The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Fordlandia by National Book Award finalist Greg Grandin tells the enthralling tale of Henry Ford’s failed attempts to transform a Connecticut-sized chunk of Brazilian rainforest into a homespun slice of American utopia.
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An eye-opening account of an arrogant man's folly
- By Melissa on 09-17-13
By: Greg Grandin
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 27 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
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Jared Diamond Downs You in Explanation
- By Rob on 07-20-18
By: Jared Diamond
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Strangers in Their Own Land
- Anger and Mourning on the American Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country - a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets.
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Performance undercuts thesis
- By married, one tall dog, one smelly dog on 01-02-17
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Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?
- The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization
- By: Andrew Lawler
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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From ancient empires to modern economics, veteran journalist Andrew Lawler delivers a sweeping history of the animal that has been most crucial to the spread of civilization across the globe: the chicken. Queen Victoria was obsessed with it. Socrates' last words were about it. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using it. Catholic popes, African shamans, Chinese philosophers, and Muslim mystics praised it.
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Never imagined the volume of bird trivia
- By Neuron on 11-04-18
By: Andrew Lawler
What listeners say about Countdown
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- jeff911rn
- 03-13-17
Could have been 5 stars but...
Where does Countdown rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
The book was an excellent listen, with many important facts and statistics about humanity's path to it's overpopulation demise. What got very annoying was the author's continual liberal jabs and opinion. The information presented and possible solutions to the problem was spot on. One of the best books out there on the topic.
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- Jim Harris
- 12-08-15
This is tremendous work.
We have to decide how to live with less and do more. Weisman travels the world to illustrate why.
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- Hank
- 01-09-20
The Future of humans on Earth
Interesting and important but sometimes exhausting discussion of the serious and troubling damage burning of fossil fuels is doing to the natural systems that keep life functional on Earth
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- Douglas
- 10-16-13
A very important book
Where does Countdown rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This is one of the best audio books I've ever listened to. The performance is engaging, the writing uses a very accessible narrative story telling format and the subject matter is extremely important and timely.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
An incredibly important and very frightening topic was made very human by examining the case studies through the eyes of real people experiencing the consequences of Overpopulation first hand. The history and personalities that brought us this far and show us the path forward are presented in an engaging and accessible manner.
Any additional comments?
This is a must read. Right up there with "World on the Edge" and "Collapse". A very loud warning bell and call to action.
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- Concerned Reader
- 11-20-13
Our Overly Reproductive Species
Any additional comments?
Recently in a class I teach a student summed up an article that concluded climate change could lead to a 2% decline in food production each decade of the 21st century. The article and the student proposed solutions that were all predicated on the premise that food production had to be increased to feed the increasing human population. Neither the article nor she proposed doing something about population. Countdown makes the case that humans may be about as intelligent as algae in a pond about to suffocate themselves with overpopulation. If people don’t do something about population nature will intervene. The combination of a (perhaps) climate change induced superstorm in the Philippines and the population of that island nation is a case in point. Weisman discusses the Philippines intransigence to population control and the involvement of the Catholic Church as a bulwark of opposition. The Philippine population was 7.9 million in 1900. By 2010 it has exploded to 94 million and projected to grow to 150 million. Seven children per woman is not unusual. The TV footage of the typhoon destruction and the narrative brings up examples of women who lost 5, 6, 7 children. Our DNA pushes us to reproduce ourselves creating a tragedy of the commons. Weisman illustrates that well when he compares the prolific ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel with the Palestinians urged by Arafat to overwhelm Israel with population growth. In recent times worldwide access to family planning has improved but is it too late? Male driven cultural imperatives to have large families also are slow to change. Enraged social conservatives in the US are intent on limiting and even abolishing abortion rights while curbing access to contraception. This all ties into climate change as a corollary to Paul Ehrlich’s formulation that implies an impossible technological leap would be required for projected global population to avoid food shortages and the very real prospect of warfare and civil unrest. Is there hope? Weisman points out reducing birth per woman to 1.5 children would bring global population down to 1.6 billion by 2100. Are we heading there? It seems unlikely. China has reversed its draconian one child policy though economic constraints will probably keep child bearing below replacement. Religion and tradition are impediments to controlling persistent population increase. And, of course, our capitalist system that demands growth. The source of that growth is largely a growing population. We need to rethink our economics and our cultural norms or we’ll be proving Malthus was correct but his timing was off by a bit.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Greg Peterson
- 01-23-14
Arduous at best, yet there are redeeming qualities
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
In many ways as I read through this 18 hour text I feel as though Weisman repeats himself over and over. I get it already that there are many cultures around the world that have a lot of babies. Weisman is a long winded academic that has a hard time getting to the point. That being said I am enjoying parts of the book and the data is strong, however get to the point!!!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Greg
- 03-31-18
An insightful, amazingly researched book.
Insightful, fascinating and appropriately terrifying - an incredibly compelling read on what it would take for our species to survive.
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- NorthFLADiver
- 01-14-14
Boring
This is THE most boring audio book I have ever listened to. It is not the fault of the reader; it is the fault of the writer, who jammed what might have been an interesting 1-hour listen into a 12 hour insipid monologue full of banal information that is not even slightly enlightening. I could not finish it.
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3 people found this helpful