Climate change is no longer a concern for the future - it's happening right now. Tipped as the No Logo of climate change, this book travels the world to show that the impacts of global warming are already having a tangible effect on people's lives. But this isn't just an inventory of disaster - it looks at how people are coping as the world they've always known changes at unprecedented speed. Lynas spent 3 years travelling the world to witness at first hand the effects of climate change.
Mark Lynas is an activist, journalist and traveller, based in Oxford. He was editor of the website www oneworld.net, has been involved in protests against GM crops, road-building, Manchester's second runway etc, and as a result has made many appearances in the press and TV as a commentator on environmental issues. He also throws custard pies at lunatics who pronounce global warming a fantasy.
"Mark Lynas has abandoned the scientific disputes and the political wrangling, and spent three years travelling to find out from ordinary people how massive changes to the climate are devastating their lives, not in the future, but now. He recounts in meticulous detail the realities of life for indigenous Alaskans as the ice melts and the food supply disappears, Tuvaluan fishermen as their islands slipbeneath the waves, Mongolian herders faced with blinding sandstorms, Peruvian cities facing the decimation of their water supply as a result of fast-retreating glaciers, Caribbean victims of hurricanes of unprecedented violence, and British families flooded out by the worst river eruptions in a century."
– Michael Meacher, The Times, April 2004
"With High Tide, Mark Lynas has given us a tremendous gift: he has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future, a future that has already arrived in the farthest reaches of the globe. Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey – to island nations being engulfed by rising tides, to towns swallowed by encroaching desert, to glaciers melting into oceans – and I promise that you will come back changed, determined to alter the course of history."
– Naomi Klein, author of No Logo