Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-apocalyptic World

by Marq de Villiers

Global warming, energy shortages, overpopulation — it's no wonder that as a society, we're in an apocalyptic mood. Out of an endless stream of gloomy prognoses for humanity's future, we have emerged with little inspiration and few concrete ideas for change. Our Way Out is the first time that our most urgent global challenges have been treated as aspects of a single, larger crisis — and the first to acknowledge that while crises reinforce each other, solutions enable each other. The transformation to sustainability is already happening, in many small ways, in many parts of the world. Our Way Out shows us how we can scale up these efforts to create meaningful and lasting change.

This is not a book on climate change, energy, or any other single issue — it is the story of how within the solutions to the global crises we face, lie the seeds of something greater. It is a handbook for immense and exciting worldwide change. And, not least of all, it offers us robust hope that we can make things better.

Genres: Nonfiction

416 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2011

About the author

Born in South Africa, Marq de Villiers is a veteran Canadian journalist and the author of thirteen books on exploration, history, politics, and travel, including Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction). He has worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and through Eastern Europe and spent many years as editor and then publisher of Toronto Life magazine. More recently he was editorial director of WHERE Magazines International. He lives in Port Medway, Nova Scotia. [Penguin Canada]

Reviews

[Mary Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the title, this is not a book of doom and gloom. DeVilliers objectively examines our present and some of the elements of the past that led to it, and he creates a road map for the future. He outlines big problems with the environment, over population, farming practices, with governments and business leaders who do not understand or who willfully ignore the problems, and with citizens who feel uninvolved and helpless or unwilling to change - and he suggests and insists on big solutions. It’s all well and good for people to be doing a few ‘green’ things like recycling and composting, but that alone will not fix the mess we’ve polluted and populated our way into. Renewable energy sources are not mature or powerful enough yet to replace oil and, though we must continue to develop them, deVilliers makes a convincing case for the increased use of nuclear power. His comparison of the real damage of coal fired power plants as compared with the real damage of nuclear plants has made a convert of me - and that’s something I would never have thought possible. I had no idea of the parlous state of the electrical grid in NA, a problem that he contends must be fixed and soon. He had interesting chapters on food production (not much I didn’t already know in that one - interesting factoid: calories on North American plates have travelled an average of 2400 km!) and the democratic deficit, the fix for both of these problems (and indeed for much of the energy problem) being localization. There were several chapters dealing with economics, and there is a reason it’s called the ‘dismal science’. I found these hard slogging but I did slog through enough to come away with a better understanding of why GDP is a poor tool for measuring the economy as it does not measure damage done to either the environment or to people, and that damage can actually appear as profit. To survive the mess we’ve got ourselves into we need to radically rethink our society, our politics, and our economy. DeVilliers outlines a prescription for this, one I find palatable. I hope his book finds enough readers to make an impact.

[Phobos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this book at the end of October and it took me until the beginning of January to finish it. Not because of lack of time (I started and finished other books in the meantime) but because parts of it are incredibly dull and literally put me to sleep. That's not to say that there isn't some good stuff here -- there is, like de Villiers talking about localization. There's also some things I don't agree with --- advocating the use of nuclear power to fulfill our needs when oil "runs out".

His views on democracy aren't exactly up my alley either. He briefly mentions democratic methods like the World Social Forum which started in Brazil but never touches on the factories which are run by the workers themselves in Argentina. There is a movement of anarcho-syndicalism in the world but he doesn't even mention this. He believes that corporate capitalism, properly controlled will continue to be our best bet. I disagree.

Not a bad book because of some of the environmental ideas. It's refreshing to hear it's not *all* doom and gloom.