EATING THE EARTH

For readers of Big History (think Fukuyama's The End of History) and challenges to conventional economic wisdom (e.g. Dubner's Freakonomics), and for fans of Naomi Klein, David Wallace-Wells and Michael Pollan, Eating the Earth is an entertaining and accessible account of our journey to our fossil-fuelled modern world, through the rise of industrial capitalism to the relentless march of climate change. Eating the Earth argues that capitalism has morphed into a planetary Ponzi scheme and that we must change the way we do business with nature.

Money talks, but it doesn't always tell the truth...
Fossil fuelled capitalism, although generating riches for billions, is underwritten by a planetary pyramid scheme - one in which withdrawals from the natural world are not supported by underlying capital replenishment, resulting in global impacts such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

Former investment banker Justyn Walsh argues that the failure to properly value nature is more than just a glitch in the system, but in many ways is the system - one enabling a 'cowboy economy' that relentlessly rolls forward to new frontiers of exploitation, and gives the appearance of wealth being created when in fact much of it is being destroyed.

Stark in its warnings but hopeful in its prescriptions, Eating the Earth argues that we need to embrace a new story - one acknowledging that humankind is a part of nature rather than apart from nature, that measures how life is enriched rather than destroyed, and that lives off nature's dividends rather than eating into its capital.

JUSTYN WALSH is a former corporate lawyer, investment banker and asset manager, and has worked in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. He is currently the chair of a financial technology company and sits on the advisory board of a venture capital firm, and is the author of Investing with Keynes (Black Inc, 2021). Now Sydney-based, he holds degrees in Law and Economics.