Section 2: Four Not-So-Fun Essays About Broken Natural Systems

The essays in this section explain how we humans are damaging the systems outlined in Section 1. This will not be enjoyable to read, but it serves as a crucial foundation for this book: these essays provide context for why we need the methods that I describe later in this book. Namely, we are:

• Destroying forests and grasslands
• Turning soil back into dirt, which affects supplies of fresh water
• Killing the majority of life
• Releasing carbon back into the atmosphere in great quantities

Much like the previous section, I will simplify topics for the sake of making these essays easy to read and understand. There are many other serious issues that are inexorably woven through the fabric of these topics. Two examples are poverty and energy production. Consider poverty: for those doing their best to simply survive, how can they possibly worry about the health of this planet? They are trying to pay rent and feed their children at a time when both costs are rising steeply in comparison to wages for the average person. And what about energy production? These topics and many others are beyond the scope of this book. I have provided additional reading suggestions in the Appendix.

Lastly, some hope! I am not going to leave you in the lurch, I promise. The whole point of this book is to empower you to make appreciable, positive changes. These begin in Section 3.