the Apple Tree at End of World: Why Prophets Doom Keep Being Wrong — and Future Is Still Open

For two centuries, many of the smartest people have been predicting humanity's imminent collapse - and being wrong with remarkable consistency. Malthus, the population bomb, the exhausted planet, the coming ice age, the end of oil: the doom keeps arriving late, and then not at all. So Rom Lammar - who spent thirty-seven years teaching geography - did something the doom-mongers rarely do. He looked up the right numbers. The Apple Tree at the End of the World is a witty, wide-ranging, and relentlessly factual tour of the state of humanity and the planet earth - and a full-throated case that clear-eyed optimism, not fashionable despair, is the only reasonable response to the century ahead. Along the way you'll discover: - why the "population explosion" is already ending - and why we'll likely never reach the catastrophe we were promised;- how extreme poverty collapsed from 40% of humanity to under 10% in a single generation;- why solar and wind blew past every forecast to become the cheapest power in history;- how enough food, water, and energy for everyone is not a fantasy but an engineering problem we're already solving;- and, in a second half that turns from humanity to the world itself, just how improbable, interconnected, and wonderful this planet really is.Part popular science, part sharp social commentary, it is a geographer's tour of both halves of our world - the human and the physical - from the slums of the megacities to the fire at the Earth's core. Sharp where the news is lazy, sincere where it counts, and armed with more surprising facts per page than a year of headlines, this is a book for anyone who suspects the world is more hopeful than we're told - and enjoys being proved right. A revised, updated, and expanded English edition of Rom Lammar's 2013 German book - with every statistic brought into the present day. If you loved the spirit of Factfulness or The Rational Optimist, you'll feel right at home here.