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Our Dying Planet, Here Be Dragons, Rat Island, Harnessed

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by Peter F. Sale
University of California Press, September 2011

Our Dying Planet is a crash course in the ecological crises that face us all, starting from ecologist Peter Sale’s own observations of the “unfolding tragedy” of the world’s coral reefs. It’s not just the reefs that concern Sale: overfishing, deforestation, and climate change all get their turn. All of these cases are the result of the interconnected ways in which humans interact with the environment, whether through deliberate, wholesale destruction of rainforests or by accidentally bumping into coral reefs while diving for pleasure. Sale asks why we tend to view ecology as little more than “advanced nature study” (when according to E.O. Wilson it is “more complex . . . than physics”) and wonders ...

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