The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity

James Lovelock and Crispin Tickell

"I wanted to read the Revenge of Gaia in large part 'cause I'd read about it in another magazine, Ad Listed magazine; it had a reference to it about sort of - it's about the environment largely. The only other book that I've read on global warming recently is An Inconvenient Truth, and it is much more - it's certainly much more left, not in the sense that it's politically left in telling you what you have to do, much more left in the sense that it's very realistic about the consequences. It's not couched in what we can do buying compact fluorescent light bulbs as An Inconvenient Truth is, and all these small solutions. In fact, it's the first book I've ever read that touted nuclear energy as a quick fix.

The argument the author gives certainly about nuclear energy is more persuasive than every - anything I have ever read. I mean I have been getting the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since I was a kid, and reading it religiously and thinking it's very interesting, and really always had a very anti-nuclear stance in every sense. But this book, even though, as I said, I think it's very sort of left, is very realistic and just says, "Like it or not, this still produces less waste and effluvia than coal." Any of the other options - biofuel, which takes a lot of resources to grow the food. So even though I'm not politically sympathetic to nuclear fuel, he makes a good argument for why that might be what we have for the time being while we're figuring everything else out.

I would recommend this book for just about everybody. I feel that it definitely needs to be read more widely, much like the Inconvenient Truth. It should be part of the canon of books that up-and-coming young people are reading if for none other than the philosophy of Gaia and thinking about the planet more on a wholesale perspective and not that it's just a small space but actually a much larger space. I would rate this book four out of five stars. I did enjoy it and I - although it's not the absolute best book I've read, I liked it as much or more than An Inconvenient Truth."

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