One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (association copy)

Washington DC: Island Press, 2004. First edition. Hardcover. Near fine/Fine. An association copy, inscribed on title page: "For Dick Sikora, with best wishes --great to meet a philosopher. Paul Ehrlich." Uncommon signed, with no other copies available online as of this writing. 

Richard Sikora was a longtime professor at the University of British Columbia. Among other contributions as a philosopher, he was the co-editor of the influential 1978 collection Obligations to Future Generations, one of the first to take on "whether and to what degree it can be morally incumbent on us to make sacrifices to bring happy people into the world or to avoid preventing them being brought into the world." This urgency of this question has of course only grown with time in light of increasing environmental crisis. Sikora's work thus overlaps to a significant degree with the work of the Ehrlichs.

Paul Ehrlich is best known for his deeply influential and controversial book The Population Bomb (1968) about overpopulation and resource scarcity, a topic which has defined his career and perhaps overshadowed his distinguished achievements in ecology and conservation biology (including classic butterfly studies). The book was called alarmist by some, but Ehrlich years later said that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future." Anne Ehrlich, his wife, has been his steady collaborator and co-author, for which she probably has been unjustly under-recognized. 

In One with Nineveh, the Ehrlichs "spotlight the three elephants in our global living room--rising consumption, increasing world population, and unchecked political and economic inequity" and their role in environmental degradation. It takes its title from a Kipling poem that alludes to the collapse of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization due to unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices. 

A near fine book due to a bump to front corner and resulting very small tear there. In a fine jacket.