Josh Berson, an independent anthropologist, invites readers into a world that turns upside down conventional arguments about how we are to best meet the challenges of climate change in the 21st century.
His thesis takes time to unfold in five complex, interwoven chapters, but the final message is clear: Technology will not save us. Berson says we will need to adapt more wisely and swiftly to all live more lightly on the planet.
The environments we find ourselves living in are, he writes, changing our very physiology, our intellectual, and our emotional lives. That is where, he argues forcefully, we need to better place our attention and our commitments.
Berson is at his best and most prophetic when he explores the impact of urban noise, industrial food and chemical pollutants in these first decades of a new century — how they are altering perception, values and public policies. His analysis of consumerism and our addictive accumulation of material goods is sharp and chilling.
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Berson closes with the sentence: “We need a public conversation about what the environmental crisis demands of us not as consumers of material things but as biological beings whose first and last interface to the world is the body.”
[Editor’s note: Find The Human Scaffold here.]
