Plenty of evidence points to environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, and resultant human misery in the decades to come, yet we fail to respond in rational, meaningful ways. Uncommon Sense identifies the root cause of most of our problems: ourselves. Beyond the typical surveys of immediate threats, Uncommon Sense delves instead into the shortcomings of the human mind for dealing with such big-picture, long-term problems as climate change, biodiversity loss, and the o...

Peter Seidel spent decades studying the long-term consequences of unchecked economic growth. 2145 is where he put those findings into human form.In the year 2145, the 21st century has a name. People call it the Wasteful Century. A hundred years of growth at any cost has produced what the data always suggested it would. Water costs $130 a bottle. The former American tropics are uninhabitable. Pythons spread north through Tennessee because the ecological systems that once stopped the...