Overview

"Gerard Piel brings to the monumental issues addressed in Only One World the knowledge and understanding accumulated in his four decades as publisher of Scientific America?. Under his leadership, the magazine has distinguished itself not only by bringing the achievements of science to the wider audience, but also by monitoring the industrial revolution, the effects of human activity on the environment, the arms race and arms control, population growth, and economic development. In nine languages and 10 editions, Scientific American has a worldwide circulation of more than one million readers. The June 1992 United Nations Earth Summit will focus on the tremendous human and environmental devastation caused by the gap that divides the world's rich and poor nations. Written in anticipation of that conference, ""Only One World"" is Gerards Piel's vision of how to heal this division - how to make this only world ""One World"", and 'keep' it so. It is an urgent message about the survival of the planet. In ""only One world "", Piel describes how the current disparity between industrialised and pre-industrial nations developed over the course of history. He then shows how the acceleration of economic development in poor nations can reduce the costs of poverty to the environment - and how rich and poor nations alike can adapt their appetites and their technologies to sustain and develop the planetary ecosystem."

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Reviews

Saturated with facts but consistently engaging and readable, Piel's prescription for global salvation marshals history, anthropology, economics, and ecology to demonstrate the measures necessary to create an equitable and sustainable economy - one that's capable of absorbing a final doubling of the world's human population. While not quite starry-eyed, Piel, Chairman Emeritus of Scientific American, is more optimistic than might seem justified. Applying the observation that high birth-rates drop as a society achieves lower child-mortality rates (one of the first results of the increased wealth of industrialization), Piel believes that the next doubling of human population, from five billion to ten billion, can be the last. As the Western industrialized nations have stabilized at zero or near-zero population growth, it will, he says, take only the redistribution of wealth and techniques to the preindustrial world to bring the whole world into an Earth-friendly, sustainable economy. Piel argues that the Industrial Revolution, which required centuries of misery to run its course in Western Europe, has required progressively less time and hardship in each of its successive incarnations; and he believes that the preindustrial world can be brought aboard in the next 50 to 75 years. Thus united, its population leveled off, the world can face the task of preserving itself. Published in conjunction with the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Piel's scenario depends on much human goodwill and longer-range self-interest - and wouldn't that be nice? (Kirkus Reviews)

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