Alan Weisman

Alan Weisman Alan H. Weisman (born March 24, 1947) is an American journalist, professor, and author of 7 books (as of 2025). He has received several awards, including the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology for his book Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (awarded in April 2014). Quotes Outside of Ciudad Juárez, they were reputed to be bigger than anyone else in Chihuahua (state) Chihuahua, with diversified investments in marijuana, cocaine, and Mexican brown heroin.Fleets of matching new Pickup truck pickups began zooming around Ojinaga. The Pablo Acosta Villareal Acosta family became one of the city's more prominent employers.** La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986 9780151473151 https://books.google.com/books?id=ne5OAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=brown+heroin 77 (200 pages; with photographs by Jay Dusard) A generation ago, humans eluded Nuclear holocaust nuclear annihilation; with luck, we'll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we've poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We've also used and abused water and soil so there's a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren't coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we're not among the hardy survivors?The truth is, we don't know. Prelude: A Monkey Koan The World Without Us HarperCollins Canada 2010 9781443400084 https://books.google.com/books?id=QCeTe12ipFMC&pg=PT8 (432 pages; 1st edition 2007 St. Martin's Press) The nature part of human nature is to make copies of ourselves — as it is with any other organism. Alan Weisman "Countdown" September 28, 2013 Politics and Prose, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPUPcEyzUW4&t=104s (quote at 1:44 of 49:14 in video) We’re facing some questions in this century that are existential in their nature. One is, have we inadvertently pushed so many other fellow species off this planet, species that we coevolved with, that we depend upon for our food and for all kinds of other things that they do, filtering the air, filtering the water? Have we pushed so many of them off that we have started a cascade that is ultimately leading to a Holocene extinction sixth major extinction that’s going to include ourselves?Second, the climate. We have lived in balance through most of the history of our species with this very thin layer of air that surrounds the planet. But then we jet-propelled our society because we discovered how to tap the energy that nature didn’t need for its own cycle, the excess carbon it had buried away. We’ve dug it all up, and we’ve burned it, and we’ve created these marvels, including the internet that you and I are speaking to each other with right now. In the process, however, we packed the atmosphere with some invisible gases that [hold heat]. We’re basically baking ourselves right now because we have created the Greenhouse effect equivalent of a greenhouse overhead. Are we going to be able to stop that process in time? We’re exceeding limits that scientists have warned us we should learn to live within. New book ‘Hope Dies Last’ tackles humanity’s existential questions Yale Climate Connections, an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Yale Center for Climate Communication of the Yale School of the Environment May 19, 2025 https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/05/new-book-hope-dies-last-tackles-humanitys-existential-questions/ (interview by Michael Svoboda) External links Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from the United States Category:Journalists from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States