Review: The Little Earth Book

I picked up The Little Earth Book by James Bruges as a bargain price title at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago; it was a small book, I figured it might be a nice little time killer while waiting for appointments and before falling asleep.

The back cover is promising; it has bullet points stating, among other things:

• If everyone lived as we do in the U.S., it would take four earths to support us
• Three-fourths of all plant species have become extinct since 1900
• The number of people living on two dollars a day in the world has risen by 50% in the last twenty years
• Charging interest is a major contributor to inequity among nations and billions of people
• Genetically modified crops have farmers using more herbicides and pesticides, not less

The chapters are small and flow rather well as segues into the next topic.

Though interesting, every time I stop to think for a few moments about a point the chapters are trying to make I mentally stumble. The information slams you like a street preacher telling you every reason you're going to purgatory, or in this case an armchair activist telling you about all the ways the government and big pharma are trying to pull the wool over your eyes and destroy not just America but the whole planet.

Take this from the chapter "Making New Plants: improving on Creation":
"GM (Genetically Modified) foods have been consumed for seven years without harm, they say. But during this period food-derived illnesses have doubled. In California the number of children with autism has doubled in the last four years. The sperm count of men is steadily reducing. Allergies have greatly increased. But no one knows if this is consequence or coincidence because no monitoring of the long-term clinical or biochemical effects of GM has been done."

None of that has scientific proof of causality; it's speculation. But it throws in a lot of scary effects that maybe coulda sorta be contributed to or caused by this scary thing called "genetically modified food"...it's an abomination (improves on CREATION! Man tinkering with power we shouldn't be encroaching upon!) and so this is why you must be afraid.

The book runs the gamut of social, political, and economic woes and how these faceless corrupt politicians and corporations seem largely to blame. There's a lot of fascinating information, but in the end I find the book to be a bit like watching an accident...I'm drawn back to reading more chapters, slowly, but then toss it aside because I get fed up with the one-sided bias that gives me the impression it's trying harder to make me afraid to leave my house than educate me about a problem and the possible solutions.

I think this book is one of the great preaching-to-the-choir books. If you have a friend that likes telling you how natural foods will cleanse your colon and herbs are far superior to prescriptions because big pharma is out there spreading lies about their antibiotics (plus they will eventually lead to superbugs that will wipe out all of humanity then this could be a nice gift for them. If you're mildly curious about various planet wide ills and issues, this is a nice starting point from which to start researching some information...but I think you definitely need to pull from other sources to get a less biased and more rounded perspective on the problems than this book presents.