快猫短视频

Earth: A tenant鈥檚 manual by Frank H.T. Rhodes, a guide to using Earth鈥檚 resources, is a nice idea but the end result is slapdash

IMAGINE you live in a home with heating and water systems that run themselves. Food gets delivered regularly, stale air is exchanged for fresh, and waste removed promptly. But lately, instead of working beautifully, warning lights are flashing at an alarming rate 鈥� yesterday it was too hot and today the water doesn鈥檛 taste so good. What to do? You pull out the instruction book.

Frank Rhodes had such a guide in mind when he wrote Earth: A tenant鈥檚 manual. It鈥檚 a splendid idea for a book and the 鈥渢enant鈥檚 manual鈥� metaphor provides an excellent organising principle. Rhodes, a geologist and former president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, begins by describing the property: its location, its contents and what makes it unique. Next, he reviews the history of the place, starting with the formation of the solar system and continuing through the origin and evolution of life, the evolution of humans and our rise to dominance. He follows this with a quick look at some recent environmental problems: climate change, pollution and overpopulation.

Rhodes gets down to the nitty-gritty in the last third of the book, when he surveys each of the main ways in which we rely on Earth for sustenance: water, air, soil, food, energy and materials. For each, he describes where it comes from, the current state of supply and prospects for the future.

Unfortunately, like many product manuals, this book comes across as a hasty, unedited hotchpotch that never quite delivers what the reader needs.

Rhodes rambles and repeats himself, often devoting several pages to a minor sideline such as the history of petroleum drilling, while skipping over other, more important subjects, such as Canada鈥檚 carbon-intensive Tar Sands, in half a sentence. His figures and tables are often poorly explained and only tangentially relevant to the text 鈥� occasionally even duplicated in different chapters for no apparent reason. Most worryingly, Rhodes is sloppy with his facts. On one page, Earth鈥檚 oldest rocks are 4.03 billion years old; a few pages later, they鈥檙e 3.8 billion. Our atmosphere鈥檚 greenhouse effect keeps Earth either 32 掳C or 15 掳C hotter than it would otherwise be. If he can鈥檛 get these little things right, can we trust him on the big ones?