Earth Then and Now - Hardcover

Fred Pearce has reported on science, environment and development issues from 64 countries over the past 15 years. Environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to the Independent, Fred has also written reports and articles for WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Intermediate Technology Development Group, and the UK Environment Agency. His books have been translated into eight languages.

We can shrug off environmental reports, theories, and narratives, but photographs do not hedge or obfuscate. In this compact and engrossing book, 250 photographs in before-and-after pairings document the environmental consequences of the last 150 years of human construction and destruction, ingenuity and folly. Of particular drama are images of disappearing sea ice and glaciers and the demise of Central Asia’s once enormous Aral Sea. Urbanization also makes for arresting images, including two photographs taken by the same photographer of the same spot in Katmandu, one in 1970, one in the present when the city is hugely built up and smothered in smog. Versatile environmental writer Pearce provides pinpoint commentary for this visual tour, which includes photographs of nature’s own havoc delivered by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and hurricanes. The continual and unnecessary devastation we cause by industry, war, and waste is most aggrieving and alarming, yet one can’t help but marvel at the complex structures we build. Surely we, the species who dams rivers, moves mountains, erects skyscrapers, and heats the planet, can learn from our mistakes. --Donna Seaman