Nature's End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century

I really liked this book. I read it many years ago, and picked it up again last year to read once again. It was written back in the early 80's, but set in the near future. I enjoyed how the authors would take real excerpts from newspapers and put them at the beginning of every chapter. It was also interesting how they would add their own articles for the events that happened later (ie: they would have more excerpts that would be from the year 1990, or 2000, or 2010, etc. etc.) They painted a dark image of how the world may end up, but I think they did a fantastic job of keeping you interested and wanting to read more and more. If you like Fiction that's got a swirl of truth, than you will love Nature's End.

This is one of those books that is quite literally unforgettable. It is set circa 2025. In this future, the world is horrendously overpopulated, and has been devastated by ecological havoc and neglect to the point where Earth's biosphere is in jeopardy of collapse. A new world politician, Gupta Singh, believes he has the answer: the "Draft." Under this proposal, which has been secretly adopted by the United States and other countries, on a certain day all human beings would be required to simultaneously take a drug. One third of the doses will be fatal, thereby reducing the world's population by a third in a single day, alleviating the world's population problems.The authors do a wonderful job projecting current technology and ecological trends in a manner that projects a nightmarish future American and world society. The rich enjoy extended life spans, penthouse living, and the benefits of high technology including sentient laptop computers and refrigerators that talk. The rest of the world including most of America (which seems largely to be comprised of illegal aliens) lives in grinding poverty supported by a government dole. Freedom is largely a thing of the past, the Tax Police have the power to effect summary arrests, and society in general is teetering on collapse. This novel is intended to be a cautionary novel warning us against neglect of the world's ecology, and it delivers this message successfully, and in my opinion, devastatingly. I am a conservative Republican, (a school of thought not always noted for its ecological conciousness) but nevertheless I admit that this novel heightened my concern for our preservation of the world's forests, oceans, and ecology. Although I doubt that the future will be as grim as the authors show in this novel, nothing in the novel struck me as impossible, and much of it was too plausible for comfort. This is a book that is worth reading because it will challenge the reader to think "outside the box" and examine his or her belief system.

If we continue to consume and destroy as we have in the 20th century, we may face the hell that Strieber and Kunetka describe in the 21st in Nature's End. The book's dramatic elements are exciting, and the story of fugitves on the run from a sort of mutated Ghandi/Hitler hybrid is fun and though-provoking, but it is the depictions of everyday life in the 2020s with the terrifying consequences of over 100 years of environmental degradation that both enthrall and alarm. This book should be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks. Maybe the attention it would thus receive will serve as a warning call to the world that we may be entering a time of living (or more likely, dying) in a poisoned planet unless we do something about it. An amazing and shocking vision of what may await us all in a few decades, many of the predictions of events in this book (written in the 80s) have come to pass with alarming accuracy.

My father recommended this book to me. I read it and now I fear the very meaning of it. If you want to be terrified everytime droughts occur or wide-spread fires erupt, read Nature's End. I would like to believe the Earth can tollerate those ungratful inhabitants. Everything has a threshold. This book is a frightening depiction of what could await if Earth's is crossed.

In this book, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka attempted to warn readers of how Mankind's remorseless corrupting of nature would come back to haunt us. Not only did he show how perhaps one day pollution and deforestation and political gridlock over the environment would nealy nullify the planet, he also provided something not often seen in this type of book: He provided suspense. Unlike WARDAY (The pair's previous novel) There was a reason that the people traveled where and how they did. This book is a few years old, but IT more than any Commercial, fact, or group scared me into worrying about the status of Nature itself. Imagine a place where cities are so pollutted that smog is black and thicker than any fog you have ever been in. Imagine a place where the MAPLE Tree has become extinct. Imagine a place where once the greatest forest on the planet was, there is now a desert as large as the Sahara. This impossible menagerie of horrors is what Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka have concocted. Read it and realize that anything is possible. Review by Martin J. Zmiejko