Product Description

300 stunning before-and-after photographs that show the staggering transformation of our world.

Earth Then and Now records the dramatic way our planet has changed over the past century. On one page is a specific part of the world as it was 5, 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. On the facing page is the same place as it looks today. Each stark visual comparison tells a compelling story -- a melting glacier, an expanding desert, an encroaching cityscape, a natural disaster.

Earth Then and Now reminds us that nothing is without a cost. Highly topical and thought provoking chapters in this book include:

• Environmental change: Bearing witness to the effects of global warming
• Industrialization: Revealing the hidden costs of "progress"
• Urbanization: Showing the effects of our spreading cities
• Natural disasters: Reminding us of the power of nature
• War: Using comparisons to show the impact of armed conflict
• Travel and tourism: Illustrating the predatory nature of development.

Concise captions explain the facts and then allow the reader to draw personal conclusions. Anyone concerned about the environment will enjoy and appreciate Earth Then and Now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443190 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781554072989
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Review
Selected as a 2008 'Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers' by the Young Adult Library Services Association. (YALSA 20080126)

An engaging coffee table book. (Christina Leadley Embassy Magazine 200708)

An interesting and often beautiful look at our planet, warts and all. Recommended for all residents of said planet. (Brian Soneda Skagit Valley Herald (Mount Vernon, WA) 20071006)

An eye-opener [and] definitely a book that environmentalists ... may want to purchase and present to their favorite politicians. (Anne Kyle The Leader Post (Regina) 200803)

It will absorb and surprise you in unexpected ways.... a thought-provoking view of humankind's best achievements and worst mistakes. (Sunset Magazine 20081130)

This collection proves, perhaps once and for all, that a picture's worth a thousand words. (Science News )

These pictures drive the point home with a vengeance. (Laurence As. Marschall Natural History )

These stark visual images show that as human population increases, the impact on the environment is soaring. (Meg Traumer & Ford Library Fuqua School of Business, Duke University )

That times have changed is immediately obvious when you leaf through this book.... a must-read for all generations. (Liz Grogan Good Times (Montreal) )

If you keep thinking the world ain't want it used to be, well, you may be right. Compare for yourself with Earth Then and Now. (The Reader's Digest (Montreal) )

About the Author

Fred Pearce has reported on scientific, environmental and developmental issues from 64 countries. He is environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the London Independent. He is the author of The Last Generation.

Zac Goldsmith is the editor and director of The Ecologist, a leading environmental issues magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Two years ago I stood on the promenade at Muynak, an old seaside resort on the shores of the Aral Sea in central Asia. Behind me was a fish-processing factory that had once sent canned fish across the Soviet Empire, from Warsaw to Vladivostok. No longer. Looking out to what should have been sea, I saw fishing boats abandoned on a beach that went on forever. The sea had disappeared more than 30 years ago, and its bed had turned into a new and entirely unexplored desert. Over the horizon, I was told, a remnant of what had once been the world's fourth-largest inland sea remained. But the shore was more than 60 miles (100 km) away now and nobody in the town had ever gone to see it. I spotted a fox trotting where fish had once swum. In the far distance, a dust storm was brewing.

The Aral Sea died because Soviet engineers removed all the water from the two great rivers that once kept it full. They took the water to irrigate vast expanses of cotton farms -- to grow the uniforms for the Red Army. The Russians have been gone for more than a decade now, of course, but the abstractions continue, and the fields are today growing cotton for shirts and jeans and underwear on sale in almost every high street in the world. We are to blame now, as the sea continues to evaporate in the heat of the desert sun. It will probably be entirely gone within a decade.

UN scientists call the emptying of the Aral Sea the greatest environmental disaster of the 20th century. But I only really understood the scale of what had happened when I returned home from Muynak and looked at the pair of satellite images that appear in this book. They show a whole sea reduced to a toxic sump by human action. It is an unprecedented humanmade change to the shape of the world. This book is full of such pairs of images, showing how our world has been changed. Most show bad things we have done, but by no means all. There are good stories here, too. This is the latest chapter in man's use and abuse of planet Earth. But all the images beg the question: What will happen next?

Humans have been making their mark on the landscape for a long time. Our hominid ancestors discovered how to make fire more than a million years ago, and they hunted animals across the plains of their first home, Africa. By the time of the last ice age our own species, Homo sapiens, had learned to combine these two skills to good effect, setting huge fires across the grasslands to drive animals toward their spears. It was the start of what has probably been mankind's biggest and most destructive impact on the land surface: deforestation. But we soon ceased to be hunters and gatherers alone. For at least 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, we have been farming. To make way for the crops needed to feed a fast-growing human population, we chopped and burned down ever-greater areas of forests, plowed the great roaming grounds of wild animals and drained huge areas of marshes. Nature was on the retreat.

But, thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of many human settlements, nature has demonstrated a remarkable ability to recover. Many apparently natural forests contain evidence that ancient human civilizations, of which we know virtually nothing, cleared them thousands of years ago. Afterward, nature returned. Modern explorers have rediscovered the great Mayan ruins, for instance, buried in thick jungle in Central America. And those ruins are far from unique. Six hundred years ago there were cities with substantial populations in the Amazon jungle. Go back 1,500 years and the forests of central Africa were being turned into charcoal for metal smelting.

So, the good news is that nature can recover from the impact of human activity. But the bad news is that nature has never experienced anything like the intensity of our current interventions. Today there are almost seven billion humans on the planet, a thousand times more than 10,000 years ago. And we now have advanced technology at our disposal. Once, we damaged small areas and then moved on; now very little of our planet is untouched by human occupation, and often the damage looks terminal.

Photographs can not document those early footprints of humanity, but they do cover the past 150 or so years, during which our population and our impact has soared. In these pages you will see some of the consequences. In that time we have chopped down half the world's forests, doubled the area of land under the plow, all but eliminated large mammals, drained the majority of the world's marshes, and reduced most of the oceans' fish stocks and whale species by more than 90 percent. We have paved huge areas of the planet and broken much of the rest of the natural environment into tiny fragments by our extensive road-building. We have replumbed the rivers, plugging most of them with dams so that many no longer deliver water to the sea, and we have diverted their water instead through thousands of canals to irrigate fields. The demise of the Aral is only one albeit the worst -- outcome of that hydrological plunder.

We have dug deep into the bowels of the Earth. Look at the pictures of what we have done to Bingham Canyon in the U.S. and to Chile's Atacama Desert -- all in the pursuit of copper. And consider the way in which we have mined the South Pacific paradise of Nauru until there is, more or less literally, nothing left. Meanwhile, by releasing chemicals into the air we have burned a hole in the ozone layer and fundamentally altered nature's methods of recycling key elements such as sulfur, nitrogen, and -- perhaps most dangerously for the future habitability of our planet -- carbon.

Even seen from space, our handiwork is glaringly obvious. It is visible in huge reservoirs and megacities, in land drained from the sea, in whole coastlines that shift under our hidden hand, in dust storms that circle the globe, and in disintegrating ice sheets.

And yet there are things we can be hopeful about. Who can fail to be moved by the architectural magnificence of the Millau Viaduct in southern France, or by some of the dazzling modern cityscapes, or even, for its sheer joie de vivre, by the Paris beach? The construction of the Panama Canal killed thousands, but it remains an extraordinary monument to entrepreneurial and engineering endeavor. We should marvel, too, at the civil determination behind the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, the war-damaged Frauenkirche in Dresden, and the new Mostar Bridge in Bosnia.

Our creativity and inventiveness may have got us into our current environmental mess, but we must hope that they can get us out of it too. And there is evidence that they can. Look at some of the environmental rehabilitation projects undertaken after the closure of old mines. And think how the bleak, smog-filled industrial heartland of Bilbao has been transformed by an imaginative cultural vision. Scars can be healed.

Despite this, there is no denying that these chapters also contain evidence of tragedy, stupidity, venality, and short-term thinking in abundance. And, sadly, it is these misdemeanours that, for the time being at least, hold sway over the various examples of rehabilitation. Why, for example, care about coastal mangroves when they can be turned into toilet paper and the land annexed for prawn farms? Why worry about drying up the Aral Sea when there is cotton to be grown? Such human willfulness has, of course, been immensely compounded by advancing technology. We have shovels that can lift a hundred tons of ore in one scoop and dig holes up to a kilometer (3,300 ft) deep. We plug rivers with concrete barriers hundreds of feet high, and drain marshes and defoliate rainforests because we can. Sometimes the scale of our endeavours is overwhelming. In Tokyo, for example, we have paved an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 sq m).

But we don't just inflict damage on nature. We do it to each other, out of fear and hate. The wars of the 20th century, I sincerely hope, will be looked back on by future generations as outbreaks of collective madness, never to be repeated. Thanks to the industrialization of warfare tens of millions of people have died, often for causes that were illusory or have long since ceased to matter. For me, trying to sum up in a couple of hundred words what exactly happened, and why, at Passchendaele -- an event nearly a century ago -- was almost unbearable. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the siege of Leningrad also chill the soul. But perhaps the worst is over. Horrific as modern terrorist outrages such as the destruction of the Twin Towers are, they are orders of magnitude smaller in scale than the state-sponsored carnage of the two world wars. Nuclear weapons have not been used in anger since the summer of 1945. But, of course, while they continue to exist we remain under their shadow.

Nuclear weapons famously claimed to unleash the power of the sun. And, for all our inventiveness and technological sophistication, the forces of nature remain supremely powerful influences on the habitability of our planet. At times we simply have to stare in wonder: at the power of floods to wash away our world, at the force of earthquakes as the Earth's crust shifts, at tsunamis and avalanches that wipe out tens of thousands of people in their path and at volcanoes that throw the molten contents of the Earth's core in our faces and shroud the planet in dust. One such volcano, 73,000 years ago, cooled the planet so much that our species came close to being wiped out.

And yet the truth is that we humans are beginning to change these great geological and planetary processes. Witness the extraordinary images of how the ozone hole opens up over Antarctica each southern spring. This is an entirely humanmade phenomenon. The chemicals that make it happen did not exist in nature before we invented them in the early 20th century. Discovering the ozone hole in the mid-1980s was the moment when scientists realized that we truly could accidentally destroy our world.

And witness, too, the many im... (20071209)

Customer Reviews

Disturbing yet totally captivating
I work at a library, and as I was covering this book, I just had to look inside. I'm a fan of satellite images of the Earth to begin with, so naturally my interest in this book was piqued. I only opened to a random page to take a peek, but I ended up completly hypnotized by the images and the concise captions. I literally could not put this book down. This book has an amazing magnetism to it; it draws you in and takes you for a ride around the world.

Unfortunatley, a majority of the photos and explanations reveal the horrid and destructive ways of man altering the Earth and choking the environment. If anyone is in doubt that the Earth is being ravaged, this book will make clear to anyone of any age just how abusive we are of the planet. The section on glaciers is seriously scary. The images are just unbelievable, but sadly, they show the truth.

From aerial shots of New Orleans before and after Katrina to satellite images of the recent growth of Las Vegas, this book explores not just the United States, but the world as well. Mountains after avalanches, volcanos after explosions, land after flood and drought, page after page you are assaulted with powerful imagery.

Mostly focusing on the effects of climate change and deforestation, Earth Then and Now shows the "progress" that modern man has acheived on this noble planet.

I reccomend that everyone on planet Earth read this book. It is a shocking eye-opener, and just simply unbelievable. A perfect coffee table book or addition to any library, you will not be dissapointed in Earth Then and Now.

I just hope they printed it on recycled paper...

Browsers will love this one....
Fred Pearce in his Earth: Then and Now manages to capture the attention of anyone that picks this book up. Wonderfully done, the book compares current photos to historic photos of the same scene from various places around the globe.

Organized into 6 units or chapters ( Environmental Change, Urbanization, Land Transformation, Forces of Nature, War and Conflict, and Leisure and Culture) the images demonstrate how man can change his enviroment whether in a town or around a lake. Perhaps the most striking comparison are the images on page 30 of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia. Having said that, there are other stunning images throughout the book. The most touching of the chapters in my opinion is the unit dealing with War and Conflict.

At 288 pages, Earth Then and Now will be a book you want to return to again and again. This would make a wonderful gift.

Spectacular views of Earth
While looking through the new books at the library, this one caught my eye. It wasn't that it was large, but rather the premise: looking at the Earth, the cities, rivers, glaciers, at different moments in time. In many of the photographs, they take the same picture, separated by centuries, decades, years, or minutes.

Contents:
Map Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Environmental Change
Urbanization
Land Transformation
Forces of Nature
War and Conflict
Leisure and Culture
Index and Acknowledgements

The basis of the book, Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World by Fred Pearce, is set in the Foreword (written by Zac Goldsmith) as a showcase for climate change. The first chapter, Environmental Change, shows hard evidence that we are changing our environment. The pictures of glaciers, ice shelves in Antarctica, the Rhine River, and the Aral Sea are staggering (the latter is a direct result of man - an eco-disaster on par with the Dust Bowl). Once you have reviewed the pictures and the text of that chapter, Pearce brings more change to your attention, urban sprawl, deforestation, strip mining. The results of earthquakes, volcanic activity, hurricanes and tsunamis. The detestation of World War I and II and Vietnam. Finally, beaches in the heart of Paris, resorts at the top of the world, and more.

The photographs are stunning and the text is sobering. By taking photographs and placing them on facing pages, separated by time, the result is an amazing "before and after" affect. The results, as shown in the photos, cannot be disputed. Not only are you shown retreating glaciers, but the effects of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and the United States. Not satisfied with simple photographs, Pearce also bring satellite imagery into play. Thought provoking.

If those stories and photos were not enough, you have to witness the chapter on War and Conflict. Man against man. And yet, we seem to have reclaimed some of the worst effects of war to create some beautiful areas of remembrance and reconstruction. The photos of Dresden, Germany and Caen, Normandy, France are wonderful. The rebuilding of Mostar Bridge in Bosnia (originally built in 1705) is especially touching.

This is an amazing book. It should reach you on almost any level, between the spectacular photos or the text that accompanies the shots, you may not look at the Earth or your environment in the same way. "Thought provoking" is a good phrase and it is definitely worthy of your time.