The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline

We have plenty of single-issue environmental books, but few writers explore the interconnectedness of all environmental problems: how we feed another few billion people as oil becomes increasingly expensive, as fish populations crash, as disease and insect infestations spread. North Americans may be the most vulnerable to this tangled web: we have moved further away from sensible earth-based sustainability than any other civilization, and we have built our cities and our agriculture, health and service sector systems on the shaky assumption that we will always have cheap oil, and that if it starts to run out we have the time and the technology to turn to something else—hydrogen, say. Roy Woodbridge tries hard to connect everything in his somewhat despairingly named book, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline (University of Toronto), in which he calls for a “war on ecological decline”—a war on the forces that degrade nature. This is a logical and thoughtful book, perhaps because Woodbridge apparently has no political axe to grind. He is concerned with questions of how governments and other leaders can work together to avoid an enormous crisis in feeding and caring for the world population—six billion of us, which will mushroom to eight billion within twenty-five years. But he worries—legitimately, I think—that our world leaders will not wake up unless a catastrophe occurs.