Geologist Charles Officer and science writer Jake Page aim to make us feel a little more in control. Convinced that knowledge is power, they conduct a hair-raising educational tour of “instances of nature making trouble for humanity and still others of humanity making trouble for nature.” “Tales of the Earth” begins with volcanoes and concludes with global warming. Along the way it examines everything from the 1975 Haiching, China, earthquake-foretold by pigs that “bit each other and tried to run up walls”-to the only known victim of a meteorite, an Alabama woman who was hit on the arm in 1954 when a meteorite plunged through her roof
And lately people have proved more than a match for nature when it comes to punishing the earth. Decrying pollution, resource depletion and overpopulation, Officer and Page shrewdly note that the most worrisome thing about human mischief is the speed with which it has been accomplished: mindless of the consequences, “we are changing the Earth’s environment far faster than natural forces have done in the past.”
“Tales of the Earth” reads like “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” with footnotes, but the authors are never less than scholarly. They respond to catastrophe with curiosity, not panic: if we can’t banish natural disasters, we can at least learn to be better stewards of the planet. “Humans now control the world as a habitat for life,” they argue. It’s high time we got good at it.
