As The World Burns is not a comfortable book. It is not a fun book. It is honest and deeply disturbing. It tells us what we already know but can't face up to: it is our lifestyle and our economic system that is rapidly making our planet uninhabitable.
The book begins by heaping well-deserved scorn on the idea that we can somehow 'save the planet' by taking shorter showers and replacing our incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. The main character, a goth-looking girl, walks us through the absurdity of the various little things that we are supposed to do to help the environment. She moves on from there to demonstrate that it is actually our political-economic system (i.e. corporate capitalism) that is the root-cause of environmental destruction, and that the things we are told we 'need' to do to 'save the planet' are, in fact, a deliberate corporate-sponsored distraction from the core problem, which is that corporations and the corporate state will literally consume our planet for the sake of profit.
The book's solution is to call for the complete dismantling of the corporate/industrial way of being, acknowledging that it is probably too late.
Sadly, the book is right that corporations own the state and the media, and that no amount of non-violent grass-roots action will have any effect as long as that is the case. You can sign petitions until you run out of ink, and it will accomplish nothing. You can vote for this candidate or that one, but in the end nearly every elected official is owned by corporate America. You can install compact fluorescents in every fixture and you will have accomplished nothing but put more money into the hands of General Electric.
The book's claim is that we have to give up nearly every part of industrial civilization: cars, factories, televisions, computers - everything. I don't see how that is even possible. But there are things that we (I mean, our society) can do. Europe has managed to build a very livable undustrial technological society that uses far less energy per capita than is used in the U.S., and Europe has specific plans in place to reduce their use of carbon fuels still further. The people of the United States must demand that we, as a society, do whatever it takes to catch up to Europe.
And, of course, even if most of us do make such a demand, it will accomplish nothing as long as the Democrat and Republican parties and their corporate sponsors remain in power. My plan is to vote Green from now on. I will waste my vote, but no more than I have wasted my vote in every previous election when I voted for one sellout Democrat after another.
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