BBC's "Planet Under Pressure."

For the past six months, the BBC has been running an online series called "Planet Under Pressure," exploring the interaction of six of the most pressing areas of Earth's distress in light of the seventh - human population. Wisely Alex Kirby writes in the series' Introduction:

Living within the planet's means need not condemn us to giving up what we now assume we need for a full life, just to sharing it. The challenge we face is not about feeling guilty for our consumption or virtuous for being "green" - it is about the growing recognition that, as the human race, we stand or fall together. Ingenuity and technology continue to offer hope of a better world. But they can promise only so much. You do not need ingenuity and technology to save the roughly 30,000 under-fives who die daily from hunger or easily preventable diseases. And facing up to the planet's pressure points is about their survival, and ours.

I find the series excellent, and each of the six areas explored contains outstanding, multi-form content:

• PART 1: Species under Threat


• PART 2: World Water Crisis


• PART 3: Soaring Energy Demand


• PART 4: Feeding the World


• PART 5: Facing Climate Change


• PART 6: Tackling Pollution

The main criticism I have of the series in general - and it is no small criticism - is its refusal to acknowledge that in each area the situation has been brought to a critical point largely by the habits of the First-Third World, and the industrialization process that brought its hegemony. Indeed, this tendency shows itself in the features that focus each area to a local case: without exception they are in the Two-Thirds World, largely represented by nonwhite bodies. While a sense of the collective destiny is absolutely necessary to mobilize needed change, one would think that there is only a single, equal, collective responsibility and culpability in the problem.

One needs to turn somewhere else to get the fullest picture, and for that I commend a book that is now on my short list of Required Reading for Everybody I Care About: Larry Rasmussen's Earth Community, Earth Ethics, which offers a sweeping history of industrialism, a stirring indictment of nonsustainable habits by the elites of the First-Third World, and a reconstruction of Earth-creatureness through the norms of Cross and grace. It is precisely the kind of humane, interdisciplinary, profound work that I think of as the essence of good scholarship. Read it now!