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Cliched and Trite Have to admit I approached it skeptically. After all, how many `the sky is falling' books was I bombarded with in high school and college....95% of which were total bulls__t. By 2005 we were suppose to be broke, starving, gasping for fresh air and either freezing in nuclear winter or broiling under greenhouse gases. Anyway, Diamond didn't disappoint. I try to remember that publishing is a business, and one needs to be a bit of an alarmist in order to sell books. My problem is that he lines up all the usual suspects. Thus the List Of Bad: Cars, Mining, Logging, Big Business, First Worlders then paints then with the exhausted rhetoric that frequently spills from the mouths of aging academics. Cars are always a popular target for hysterics, but he never bothered to point out that the air in our cities is cleaner than it's been in 150 years. No longer is the air filled with micro-particulates from horse manure, or the belching smoke from early automobiles. Yes, third world countries suffer bad air, but is there any reason to think that rising living standards in those places won't bring them the same environmental benefits? Think Seoul. Think Singapore. Think East Europe. My biggest complaint is that he totally frames the food dilemma in ways that appeal to old cannards that died out with Erlich's 'The Population Bomb' 30 years ago. The fact is that in the past 50 years, the US has reduced land under cultivation by 30% while quintupling food production. Hell, the yield we can get from an acre of corn has jumped 15% in the last decade. The food problem has more to do with oppressive political systems than anything else. He might have done a better job pointing out that protectionist agricultural policies in the US and Europe keep the third world from developing their land for agricultural export crops....a vastly more beneficial use than subsistence farming. Thus they would have a greater incentive to care for the land. His biggest failure though, is not appreciating the enormous power of basic capitalism to address the issues he raises. One thing vastly different from most of the cases he describes is that today we in the West have extensively distributed economic and political power. We also have strict private property traditions. All the cases he describes in the third world are classic `Tragedy Of The Commons' scenarios brought about because of collectivist economics they have in place (we have our own `Commons' problem with Social Security) Private property rights would solve 80% of the problems he describes. A good counter to this book is `The Skeptical Environmentalist' by Bjorn Lomborg. While equally polemic in places, Lomborg's is a much more thoughtful work than Diamond.