Customer Reviews
Glimpses of the neighbourhood - By: Stephen A. Haines, 13 Mar 2007 
Anybody left harbouring doubts about the reality of climate change will be relieved of them by this book. The images of how glaciers are disappearing, the sea rising to threaten coastal communities or the ravages of intense storms are a jarring sight. The Collins team has performed an outstanding service in compiling such a span of places & conditions in demonstrating what is happening & is likely to occur in our future. With added commentary from a selected group of those interested in environment issues, this is a valuable visual package.
The book is comprised of eight chapters of categorised imagery & one of comment on future conditions. Opening with such natural phenomena as earthquakes, tsunamis & cyclones & tornadoes, the images of human activity follow. Although the natural forces are the stuff of The Weather Channel, there are some human-created conditions that will be novel to many. Dutch land reclamation from the sea was depicted in our childhood reading, but the images of a set of man-made islands off the coast of Dubai may be something of a jolt. Looking like some flower or a bizarre insect, they are known as the "Palm Islands" for their resemblance to that plant.
Water, in one of its many forms, takes up a significant portion of the book. Glaciers may seem remote & of little value except for tourism, but some cities, such as Lima, Peru, rely on glaciers as a water source. The loss of glaciers means far more than the loss of a city's supply. As the Polar, Greenland & Canadian snow & ice melt away in rising temperatures, lowland civilisations are threatened with inundation. It may be easy to overlook the drowning of a Pacific Island nation like Tuvalu, but the millions of people displaced by flooding in Bangladesh will be a challlenge its neighbours will have to cope with. The map depicting this flooding is hard to interpret in human terms - the scale is too smalll. Nevertheless, there are people in that zone of beige marked on the map.
The comments concluding the book are of interest, but reading them is a chore. In its effort to give modernity to the book, the page & print colours are far too close for proper readability. However, the reading is worth the effort for such articles as those by Mark Lynas & Tim Flannery. The editors, struggling to deliver a "balanced" presentation, slipped Bjorn Landstrom, the "Sceptical Environmentalist", in as a naysayer. Claiming to have observed the images, he then puts forward the notion that "technology" will save the species. Where Lima will obtain its water or how the Bangladeshi will be replanted elsewhere without social impact, seems to have escaped his notice. The editors might have found a more rational sceptic to include, but those are becoming as rare as the Golden Toad. Nevertheless, it is the images & explanations of their import that render the book an indispensible tool. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
A must buy! - By: D. Newman, 04 Jan 2007 Having brought 2 of these books as presents i took a sneaky peek inside them. Wow! fantastic pictures, information & very thought provoking. I am about to buy one for myself having heard that one of the presents (a Christmas present) was picked up by a visitor of the receiver & they stayed up half the night looking / reading it! Can't get a fairer review than that!
awesome! - By: Not my real name, 23 Oct 2006 A fantastic, thought provoking & somewhat frightening view of our planet. This book is a must for anyone with even a vague interest in environmentalism, its superb photographs tells a shocking story of the changing face of this earth.
unputdownable.
Chilling vision of how we are transforming the planet - By: JD, 20 Oct 2006 Stunning book showing breathtaking photographs of changes happening to the world. Many of the photographs are shown as before & after giving real context to the rapid changes that are happening such as coastal erosion, glacier melting & rivers flooding. There are also informative pages with statistics, maps & text on each subject discussed in the book.
The final chapter gives an interesting insight into what the future may hold for us.
This book reallly brings geography alive - I just wish it had been available when I was at school.
Was a great gift for my environmentalist sister... - By: Catherine Hunt, 19 Oct 2006 Beautiful book, & the images are absolutely amazing - how can anyone deny that global warming doesn't exist (George W Bush!?). My sister reallly liked it as well - backs up everything that she has been saying for a long time. It's an ideal gift for anybody who cares whether or not their coffee table is built from wood sourced from sustainable forests or not - great pictures & a conscience.
