Outside Reading - #1

The World in 2050
I recently finished reading, The World in 2050, by Laurence C. Smith. It was a fantastic read about climate change and what the world might look like by the year 2050. The book has plenty of information and data pertaining to the climate crisis the world faces today. The book was loaded with age distribution models, economic projection statistics and climate dynamic graphs. The part of the book that I found most intriguing was the ethnography of the people living close to the Arctic circle. Laurence C. Smith actually travelled around interviewing and gathering accounts of people that have already experienced some of the drastic impacts of climate change. I personally felt that without the ethnography aspect of his book, it would just be a science textbook. Instead, the ethnography really tied everything together so that when you were done reading it you really felt a sense of loss, much like the people that he interviewed. Much like the books we read this semester, Laurence was able to take something that would normally be boring and a drag, and turned it into personal information.

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