MOTHER EARTH: The Fight to Save Her

Seven grams of plastic — about the weight of a plastic spoon — now sits in the average human brain, and the amount rose by half in just eight years. Nobody decided to put it there. That is the whole problem, and it is also the way out.

MOTHER EARTH: The Fight to Save Her follows the damage across the planet in plain language: a Louisiana river corridor lined with some two hundred chemical plants, a heat event that struck eighty-four percent of the world’s coral reefs, a Southwestern river whose water was promised away a century ago, vanishing insects, emptied fishing grounds, and an oil industry whose own scientists understood the warming decades before the public did.

Then it does what most environmental books never get to. It proves the damage can be reversed — with a hole in the ozone layer that is closing, rivers once declared dead that now hold seals and salmon, bald eagles that came back from a few hundred nesting pairs to more than three hundred thousand birds, and electricity from sun and wind that is now the cheapest ever produced.

And it names what stands in the way of the rest: more than two thousand gigawatts of power projects stuck in a years-long waiting line, first-of-their-kind factories no bank will finance, government awards canceled after companies had already built around them, and working cures — iron-air batteries, thousand-degree heat bricks, enzymes that eat plastic bottles — left sitting on the shelf.

The final part lays out a plan in plain order: what to do first, what to stop doing, and what one person actually controls.

The carbon budget for 1.5 degrees is nearly spent. This book is about how much of the fix already exists — and how little stands between knowing and doing.