Once Upon a Planet Summary and Analysis

The final chapter summarizes the rest of the book in light of the conversation being had in today's media. Some camps subscribe whole-heatedly to the observations of science and their suggestion that industry urgently needs change if the planet is to survive, while others do their best to discredit the people making the claims in order that the money-making machines be allowed to continue. The enormous number of media outlets cover the conversation, and with news cycles moving fast, no conclusion is ever reached, and so the conversation stalls with no decisions made. It is left, then, to private industry instead of government to innovate and to hold itself to the highest standards of environmental responsibility. The authors describe what the owners' manual for earth might be like, explaining its unbending laws of physics and...