De Villiers, Marq. Dangerous world: natural disasters, manmade catastrophes, and the future of human survival. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008.
De Villiers begins with a quote from Stephen Pacala, an ecologist from Princeton University. “All kinds of terrible things could happen, and the universe of terrible things is so large that some of them probably will.” If, from this, you determine that this is a book full of gloomy predictions and prognostications, you would be entirely wrong. In this engaging and wide-ranging treatise, de Villiers has given us a context for the dangers of the world we live in, and more than a few points to ponder about how we interact with that world. After a lengthy philosophical, metaphysical and scientific discussion of the probabilities of how and when the world will end, the author gives us his take on the matter:
“Given enough time, and enough people, individually improbable events become increasingly likely to happen. Some of them will be calamitous, but we don’t know how calamitous. Some of them might not happen for decades, or centuries, but happen they will. May people will die, though we don’t know exactly how or when. But most people, most of the time, from most of the calamities, will survive. That’s the rest of the good news.” (p. 28)
De Villiers spends Part Two describing the context of the “endemic” violence of the universe. He covers cosmology (Chapter Three: Our Perilous Neighborhood), geology (Chapter Four: This Plastic Earth), climatology (Chapter Five: Our Ever-Changing Climate) and paleontology (Chapter Six: Fragile Life). Part Three, entitled “Peril by Peril” takes a similar piece-by-piece approach, describing and analyzing the various catastrophe scenarios that might take place in the near future: comets and asteroids, earthquakes, volcanoes, poisonous emissions and noxious gases, tsunamis, floods, tropical cyclones and tornadoes and plague and pandemic. With a journalist’s touch, de Villiers documents histories, personal stories and probabilities in an exceptionally easy to read way. Part Four is called, “What is to be done?” and in the final three chapters, the author covers what we have done (Chapter Fifteen: Making Things Worse) and can do (Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen: Making Things Better(i) and (ii)) to mitigate natural calamities and undo human-made calamities. For what is, essentially, a work of journalism, the notes and bibliography are well-done, and would lead the reader to further scholarly resources on the topics discussed. An extensive index completes the work.
