Clive Hamilton at the RSA back in May 2010.

I've seldom read a book which brings our current predicament so accurately to the point as Clive Hamilton's "Requiem for a Species". The book discusses primarily the human nature, how we deal psychologically with reminders of death and how our divorce from nature has led us on a path where a 4 degree temperature rise is pretty much certain in 2100. He also includes the obsession with economic growth and explains how this has led us to a new kind of religion or raison d'etre.

This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature - and those that, in the end, have won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures. (from earthscan.co.uk)

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