One of a collection old environmental nonfiction books from NQCC’s fundraising garage sale in June. Not good enough to keep, The Gaia Peace Atlas was too interesting to pass over completely.
The lavish production and big-name contributors (Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu and more) don’t make up for the fact that the authors assumed their future would resemble their present – but perhaps their timing was just incredibly unfortunate.
The Gaia Peace Atlas was published in 1988 when, hindsight tells us, the Cold War had already been won (the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the USSR was dissolved in 1991) and the seriousness of the climate crisis was just beginning to be recognised (the first IPCC report came out in 1990 and the Rio Earth Summit was held in 1992). The Peace Atlas anticipated none of those changes.
What can we learn from it, then?
Most importantly, that we don’t know what will come at us next. Planning for the foreseeable future is important, of course, but we must also plan for the unforeseeable future. Increasing our flexibility and resilience should therefore be a very high priority.
The failures of the Atlas might also encourage us to doubt any experts whose predictions seem too definite.
One of the other large-format books among these time capsules was the very first IPCC report, Climate Change: the IPCC Scientific Assessment.
Reading merely the ‘Summary for policy-makers’ reveals that already, in 1990, we knew enough of the science to know what we had to do to avert catastrophic change. We have learned an enormous amount about our climate since but our new knowledge has clarified, refined and broadened our understanding without changing it fundamentally.