o you have a personal eruption plan, if you don’t mind me asking? This is the term used to describe how one intends to get away in the event of a volcano going off. Even if you don’t live near one – such as the underwater Kolumbo volcano near Santorini, which hasto reveal a filling magma chamber – really big eruptions can have planetary consequences, through the climatic effects of the ash they pump into the atmosphere.
So runs one urgent message of this rich and fascinating book, which sets out to tell the story of Homo sapiens from the point of view of how we have suffered natural ecological disasters, and engineered our own in turn.
This is one of those books that aims to tell the whole story of everything from a cute new angle, so inevitably there are longueurs where the focus on climate is temporarily forgotten and a few pages of potted history or comparative religion take over. A mini-essay on the geopolitics of oil in the 20th century cannot compete with specialist books on the subject, for instance Helen Thompson’s