| Genre: | Non-Fiction / Climate Change & Sustainability |
| Uitgever: | L.S. |
| ISBN: | 978-90-245-9760-4 |
| Edition: | Hardcover |
| Page Count: | 335 |
| Release Date: | September 2021 |
Cover text:
As Prince William, founder of The Earthshot Prize, said, “The Earth is at a tipping point and we face a stark choice: either we continue as we are and irreparably damage our planet, or we remember our unique power as human beings and our continual ability to lead, innovate, and problem-solve. People can achieve great things. The next ten years present us with one of our greatest tests – a decade of action to repair the Earth.”
Earthshot – How To Save Our Planet is not an easy book, and that’s a very good thing in this case. It’s a very confronting book about all of our current day problems regarding our home world. Pollution, climate change, deforestation, plastic, carbon emissions, mass extinction, you name it and this book covers it. But despite showing us what all of these problems are, this book also gives us hope that we can make a change for the better. With the added caveat that we need to hurry if we want to prevent irreversible damage to our planet.
Earthshot is divided into three parts. The first part is all about this crucial decennium. The years ’20 should be spent on preventing more damage to our planet, lowering or even nullifying damaging effects and changing our way of living to become more sustainable. Five crises have been identified that we need to work on:
- Reduction of nature
- Life in our oceans
- Air pollution
- Climate change
- Waste management
The book also states that although things look grim, we shouldn’t become pessimistic. There are plenty of examples of people, or even whole countries doing a great job to bring about change for the better, by reforestation, designating no-fishing zones and coming up with all kinds of clever ways to recycle things. Careful optimism is what will ultimately set change in motion and that’s exactly what we should all have when it comes to saving our planet.
The second part of the book handles all five aforementioned crises and what can be done to reverse the damage we’ve done. It gives us examples of how we can go about doing all of this, but also tries to create a complete, but slightly distilled view of our problems. This felt a bit like how Bill Gates handles his book ‘How To Avoid A Climate Disaster’, which I read last year. But where I felt that the latter sometimes had maybe too much of a “birds-eye-view” of the problems, Earthshot shows us what some people are already doing to bring back nature, or reduce carbon emissions. What becomes clear is that it’s impossible for each person to do something about all of this individually and we’ll have to rely on everyone to help in any given area that needs our attention.
The third and last part of the book tells us how we should try to handle each of these problems, but also gives the reader tips on how to do something themselves. That’s also what Bren and I have started this blog for, to help share ideas for a better, healthier and sustainable lifestyle. The book not only tells us what we can do individually, but also as a collective. The thing is that never before we have known just how bad all of our problems are, but this is also a time where we have all of the means to make a change for the better. This book was inspiring to read and it has shown me even more that we should all be doing our part for our planet. There is no planet B (definitely not within reach for us with our current technology) and we should do everything we can to save our beautiful world. If not for ourselves, definitely for future generations.
Earthshot is one of those books that’s characteristic for its time. We have lived in a very unsustainable way for a long time, even when it was already clear that carbon emissions were harmful to our planet, that plastic waste is very bad and we have just let everything linger on. The urgent message of the book is clear: “We only get one chance to do it right and we shouldn’t wait any longer to make changes for the better of our planet.” Bren and I are doing our part, having changed and continuing to change our lifestyle to be more sustainable, but it’s important that not just individuals make a change, large corporations need to show us that they care too and governments will need to enforce laws that punish anything that damages our beautiful planet and ecosystems even more. This is the way.
Cover: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Storytelling: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Originality: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Content: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Font: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Paper Smell: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Overall: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Jeffrey