2 minute read
Planet in Peril
MICHAEL D. BESS PLANET IN PERIL
UK publication October 2022 US publication October 2022
350 pages 9781009160339 Hardback
£20.00 / $24.95 USD / $28.95 CAD
At a glance
• Offers a single explanatory framework for understanding the seemingly disparate challenges facing humankind • Describes a realistic pathway for modifying the United Nations to become a more effective instrument for coordinating planet-level solutions to humanity’s mega-problems • Puts forward an integrated set of planet-level solutions that can be implemented incrementally over the coming century to head off potential catastrophes caused by these four mega-dangers • Written in vivid prose with illustrative examples drawn from history • Combines history, science, technology and politics in reflection and analysis
Planet in Peril
Michael D. Bess
Written by an award-winning historian of science and technology, this book describes the top four mega-dangers facing humankind – climate change, nukes, pandemics, and AI. It outlines the solutions that have been tried, and analyses why they have thus far fallen short. These four exponential dangers present a special kind of challenge that urgently requires planet-level responses, yet today’s international institutions have so far failed to meet this need. The book lays out a realistic pathway for gradually modifying the United Nations over the coming century so that it can become more effective at coordinating global solutions to humanity’s problems. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic - but pragmatic and constructive - the book explores how to move past ideological polarization and global political fragmentation. Unafraid to take intellectual risks, Planet in Peril sketches a plausible roadmap toward a safer, more democratic future for us all.
Michael Bess, Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Europe, with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change. He is the author of four books: Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future (Beacon Press, 2015); Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006); The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize (2004) of the American Society for Environmental History and an Honorable Mention (2004) from the Pinkney Prize committee of the Society for French Historical Studies; and Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989 (1993).
Advance praise
‘We are threatened by our own cleverness, and it is easy to get paranoid. This book, by one of our best historians of science and technology, offers a sane, balanced, and deeply informed look at the major threats and lays out a rational way forward.’ Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth and A Passion for Nature
