Award-winning travel journalist Tidwell (who predicted a Katrina-like catastrophe in his 2004 book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast
) ramps up the rhetoric to a category 5 intensity in this assessment of how global warming is swelling the volume of water lapping against the world's coasts. Because of society's insistence on re-engineering natural waterways and shorelines, we are committing a form of "group suicide." And, Tidwell goes on, President Bush, by refusing to fund a $14-billion plan to bring back wetlands and barrier reefs to protect the Louisiana coast, is committing "federal mass murder." His central thesis is that two conditions threaten to inundate nations like Bangladesh and cities like Calcutta, London and New York: land-based glaciers are vanishing, their meltwater seeping into the seas at the equivalent of a Lake Erie every year,; the slowly warming water temperatures causes sea levels to rise even more dramatically. Drastically slashing greenhouse gases is the only way to save the planet, writes Tidwell, who proves—his dire prognostications notwithstanding—to be an optimist, pointing to Japan's success in reforesting its islands as a model for other nations to emulate. (Aug. 16)
