Earth

Every country in the world is actively participating in preparations for Rio+20, the follow-up Earth Summit in Brazil, June 2012, to stimulate the transition to a green economy.

With all the depressing news of raging wildfires and killer tornadoes in the Southwest USA, the threat of climate change is now real, but where are the solutions? After all, this can only get worse.

Your great-grandmother may have known a lot more about sustainable living than you do. That’s the thesis of What’s Gotten Into Us? (Random House, 2011). Author McKay Jenkins (http://mckayjenkins.com), a University of Delaware English and journalism professor, takes aim at the tens of thousands of industrial chemicals that manufacturers have been adding to household amenities over the past 70 years. If we want to protect our health and the planet’s health, he says, we will do away with these substances and learn to live much like people did at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What can stop eco-disasters? Advanced technology? Perhaps, but the savior also might be a 40-million-year-old plant… Bamboo is shooting into prominence as a flexible friend of humanity. The skinny stalk with the whispering leaves and white roots is exhibiting a husky talent as a cure for multiple planetary illnesses.

We are going headlong into a new era of increasingly scarce energy resources. The impact on economies will no doubt be dramatic.