NON- FICTION

Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them by JULIAN CRIBB

WELL- KNOWN AUSTRALIAN science author Julian Cribb has long made it known that he considers the formal binomial nomenclature for our species woefully inappropriate. Homo sapiens translates as ‘wise man’, an odd label, he points out, for an ape that seems intent on doing its level best to destroy the planet.

It’s a theme Cribb runs with in his latest book, in which over nine crisp chapters he dives deep into anthropogenic environmental damage and climate change. Each section is cast in the mode of a destructive human shortcoming, and the revised binomial that characteristic might, or should, attract.

Thus our tendency to overconfidence and self-worship attracts Homo suilaudans, our role in global warming sees us cast as Homo pistor (The Baker), our development of nuclear weapons and tendency to go a-warring attracts the epithet Homo carnifex (The Butcher), and so on.

It’s a neat device that serves well to aid the author’s task of organising a phenomenal amount of information – from recent science to ancient history, from geology to geopolitics – into a surprisingly breezy 216 pages, excluding references.

Any book that takes a broad view of the multiple ways in which agriculture, conflict, industry and urban development are combining to foul up this planet six ways from Sunday risks, of course, becoming little more than a droning litany of doom-laden prediction (however accurate and necessary).

Cribb, however, a veteran journo and winner of several Eureka Prizes, is too skillful a writer to allow that to happen. In each chapter he leavens his careful analysis of what’s going wrong with a selection of carefully crafted suggestions about what we can do to ameliorate the situation. These range from education to corporate lobbying to civil action.

They are useful, if occasionally obvious, things to put on the to-do list, and, in the context of the book, a necessary antidote to the bad news it contains in great amounts.

He is mindful to include suggested pathways by which change may be effected. His ideas here, while generally sound, are perhaps the weakest element of the book.

Cribb frequently advocates market mechanisms – such as price signalling, taxation, or eliminating subsidies – as means to curb environmentally destructive practices, or to encourage benign ones. These might well work in certain contexts, of course, but the focus on such strategies arguably neglects a broader analysis of whether – echoing French economist Thomas Piketty here – the capitalist system itself is inherently incapable of producing just outcomes.

Still, Cribb does at least reference Piketty, and in the final chapter makes much of the need to “reframe our economic, political, religious and narrative discourses” to achieve more humanfriendly outcomes – so perhaps I’m being a little harsh.

For all its unpleasant facts, Surviving the 21st Century manages not to be a depressing read. Cribb’s skill at storytelling, his ability to manage pace and tone, never let the narrative bog down. Occasionally, too, the idiosyncrasies of his thoughts provide surprising and welcome distraction. His tirade about teddy bear collectors, in particular, is a gem.