Reddit reviews The Future of Life

OH YEAH. He is one of my favorite authors, ever. The Diversity of Life won him a Pulitzer if I recall correctly, and is a must read for anyone who loves non-fiction and biology. Consilience is a heady read and well worth the time. The Future of Life is a call to arms in defense of the environment, and as well written and straightfoward as anyone could ask. Kind of like An Inconvenient Truth, if it was written by one of the most brilliant and silver-tongued biologists of our time instead of the inventor of the internet.

Since we're talking about Edward O. Wilson, I highly recommend The Future of Life. It's a little bit dated now, but it remains one of the most important books one can read about climate change.

I read this book about a decade ago, and it gave me a heads up as to what was eventually going to happen to the Great Barrier Reef, the melting of the Siberian permafrost, etc. Even so, he somehow managed to write the whole book with a sense of optimism.

Here's an interesting book you should check out. It might explain why biodiversity is important. In overly simplified terms ecosystem services, and more specificially the [resilience](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience_(ecology) of these services is often dependent on their diversity (which can help to withstand perturbations such as climate change and invasive species).

I urge you to take some Environmental Science courses, or at the very least, read The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson. It is a great book because it retains being factual while looking at the problem from an optimistic perspective. The dangers of global climate change are not only unexaggerated, they're underreported and misunderstood, which is largely marred by society's growing cynicism toward the science behind it.