Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living - Hardcover

In Collapse, Jared Diamond explained why civilizations disappeared in the past; in Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman tried to chart a course through the economic and environmental afflictions that imperil our way of life; in Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan taught us to worry about our food supply, as did Paul Roberts in The End of Food. Others have focused on the threats of peak oil, global warming, and shrinking water supplies.

Now, in Brace for Impact, Thomas A. Lewis does what only a veteran reporter, historian and environmental writer could do: explains and analyzes all the gathering threats to our society's life-support systems, and the inability of our political and economic institutions to preserve them. With chapters on food, water, oil, electricity, politics and finance, he makes a convincing case that we can't win the race against catastrophe, that our industrialized society is in fact running the wrong way -- toward catastrophe.

What sets Brace for Impact apart is that after it faces the conclusion from which others shrink -- that industrial society cannot survive -- it then shows how easily individual families and communities can weather the collapse through sustainable living.

Our only hope, Lewis writes, is to turn away from the hopeless task of trying to preserve the industrial world, and embrace the promise of sustainable living; there is no way to solve the problem for everyone, but we have the knowledge and the technology to solve the problem for anyone.

Lewis is a veteran print and broadcast journalist and author of five previous books (his work has drawn praise from reviewers coast-to-coast) who for six years wrote the authoritative "Environmental Quality Index" for National Wildlife Magazine and World Almanac, and who was the executive editor of a 16-book Time-Life Books series on the earth sciences called Planet Earth. He is currently Artist in Residence at the Department of Mass Communication, Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.