Ed Ayres
God's Last Offer
Negotiating for a Sustainable Future

Now in paperback!

"Level-headed, closely argued… A vital companion to the Worldwatch Institute's popular annual report State of the World." — Publishers Weekly

"Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees." — Revelations 7:3

With six billion natives and an onslaught of problems, old Mother Earth has become a strange and agitated place. Catchwords and clichés about the planet abound. "Save the whales." "Hug a tree." "Global warming." But what exactly is happening, and what can we do about it? God's Last Offer sorts through the jumble of rumor, hyperbole, and indolence that colors environmental coverage of today. Vast fires rage out of control in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Mexico. Floods overrun China, Bangladesh, and the American Midwest. These are not disparate events sent to test human heroism, but are instead interdependent symptoms of a planet in trouble. God's Last Offer emphasizes connectedness as it warns and inspires us to take heed — now.

Ed Ayres identifies the dangerously intertwined megaphenomena that are altering life on Earth and may annihilate it if left unchecked. He designates the threatening quartet as

• the rise of carbon gas emissions
• the rate of biological extinctions--both plant and animal--that has gone from one species per year a few decades ago to more than twenty thousand per year today
• the unsustainable consumption that undermines ecological systems upon which all the world's health and wealth depend
• and the exploding human population, which has increased more in the last eleven years than it did in the ten thousand years prior to the Industrial Revolution.

God's Last Offer goes beyond identifying these four destructive spikes to a public overwhelmed and underinformed. It exposes the sophisticated techniques used by the multi-nationals and other institutions of higher capitalism to perpetuate public indifference. Ayres points the finger at the specialization and marginalization of scientific and economic knowledge and at corporate spinmasters--who outnumber news reporters--concocting false perceptions about the effect of their industries on the environment, lobbyists, ratings-driven news media, and biased science reporting. These distortions and distractions accelerate in the intensified frenzy of information accumulation in which no one can focus on the complexities of global warming, outbreaks of new diseases, refugee flows, agribusiness fraud, climactic disasters, etc.

Ayres doesn't stop with concisely and aptly forecasting the situation and assigning blame. Advising strategy with urgency and intelligence, he suggests professional standards for news reporting and new measures of accountability for global corporations and for governments, and reins on personal and corporate consumption. He addresses the worldwide threat of "shadow" economies, such as large-scale smuggling of ozone-depleting refrigerants banned by international law, as well as the accidental spreading of lethal viruses through international air travel, and the looting of natural resources of poorer countries.

Ayres decries the continued apathy and indifference from people endowed with an excess of information and power. Yet despite our unprecedented gifts of intelligence and technology, we pursue our planet's destruction with our eyes wide open. God's Last Offer is just that: an offer of hope, an offer of possibility. But an offer that must be snatched immediately, before it expires.

Ed Ayres has been editor of World Watch magazine since 1993. He is editorial director of Worldwatch Institute. He is coeditor of The Worldwatch Reader (W.W. Norton, fall 1998) and Vital Signs: The Trends that Are Shaping Our Future (W.W. Norton, 1993). Founder of Running Times magazine, he was also its editor for fourteen years. He has covered environmental issues for Outside, Buzzworm, The Washington Post, Time, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, and others. His "Notes to the Reader" column in World Watch is syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.