Geotimes - November 2000 The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet, edited by Jill S. Schneiderman. W. H. Freeman and Co. (2000). 441 p. ISBN 0-7167-3397-8. Hardcover, $27.95. Allison R. (Pete) Palmer A sustainable future for humanity is one of the major challenges we face in the 21st century. Many of the decisions we will need to make are rooted in geological understandings that most people don't appreciate. The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet is ideal for an undergraduate seminar that should be a core requirement in every college and university curriculum in the country. A creative faculty member with a solid base in the geological sciences can use most parts of this book to provide the kind of guidance that will shape the way future leaders in politics, business and education look at the Earth around us. What better time for such guidance than now, as we come to grips with the challenges created by the human impact on Earth and its environment. Jill Schneiderman, an associate professor of geology at Vassar College, has enlisted a fine group of authors to focus public attention on the importance of understanding Earth's history and its processes when considering a sustainable future for humanity. This book is not an anthology. Except for well written and pertinent chapters previously published -- John McPhee's story of James Hutton's discovery of deep time and Stephen Jay Gould's "The Golden Rule: A proper scale for our environmental crisis" -- the essays were commissioned for this book. The writers include two former presidents of the Geological Society of America, two MacArthur Foundation fellows, three former Congressional Science Fellows and a former director of the U. S. Geological Survey. It is difficult to choose which ones to highlight. I was attracted most to those providing fresh insights into ways of looking at and thinking about Earth. In the introductory section, "Records of Time and History," Sue Kieffer, a geologist and MacArthur Foundation fellow, asks what we mean by "rare" when we describe geologic events that affect humanity. Lauret Savoy, an associate professor of geology and geography at Mount Holyoke College, offers a new perspective on how we perceive the landscape. She suggests that the words we use to describe the landscape subtly influence land-use decisions. She sees a connection with history's alterations of much of the American West. And Paul Bierman, who teaches geology at the University of Vermont, weaves a good bit of hydrogeology into a delightfully written essay about a New England farmer and the story of his land. Today's landscape, he shows, is often not that of even the recent past. The book's middle sections provide real-world examples of how society has dealt, or attempted to deal, with both human-caused environmental problems and the inexorability of earth system processes. The essays illustrate the complexity of policy issues that emerge when dealing with human impacts on Earth. David Applegate, director of government affairs for the American Geological Institute and editor of Geotimes, opens this section with a good overview of policy issues and the conflicts involved in managing public land. One message from these sections is that, in human attempts to control Nature, apparent solutions may become the sources of new problems. In the section on "Whole Earth Perturbations," Steve Stanley discusses the potential impact of global warming on the present interglacial period. Stanley teaches at The Johns Hopkins University and recently authored a textbook on earth systems. His message is reinforced by Tamara Nameroff's "Lessons from the Past for Future Climate." Nameroff is an oceanographer who recently served as climate task force coordinator for the President's Council on Sustainable Development. She asserts that climate policy must be designed to adapt to inevitable change if we are to build a sustainable future. Robin Hornung and Thomas Downham II, dermatologists specializing in the biologic effects of ultraviolet radiation, provide a medical perspective on how atmospheric ozone depletion could affect the health of the total biosphere. The book finishes on a high note with "Let Earth Speak," by Victor Baker, a hydrology professor at Arizona State University who was president of the Geological Society of America in 1998. Baker eloquently develops the important distinction between the perspectives of the "hard" sciences and the geological sciences regarding the problems of human relationships to the Earth. Ed Buchwald, an environmental studies professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, finishes with an excellent essay that provides a clear layman's explanation of the mathematics of doubling time as it affects human population, along with the unavoidable consequences of the laws of thermodynamics as applied to the human enterprise and the need to perceive the human impact on Earth as a new force of geological dimensions. This compilation can educate the current generation of undergraduates about key geological perspectives that should be in the public domain. The Earth Around Us is a book that any geoscientist should own in order to share appropriate sections with friends and neighbors as they join the growing chorus calling to maintain a livable planet. Palmer works with the Institute for Cambrian Studies in Boulder, Colo. He is chairman of the Critical Issues Committee for the Geological Society of America.