Through lucid explanations, telling anecdotes, and incisive analyuses, the eminent scientists Paul Ehrlich and Anane Ehrlich here spotlight the three elephants in our global living room - rising consumption, increasing world population, and unchecked political and economic inequity - that together arre icreasingly shaping today's politics, undermining the planet's ability to sustain us, and determining humankindd's futuree. The result is a book that brilliantly puts today's policy debates in a larger context and makes a compelling case for the critical discussions that we should be having. One with Nineveh takes it title from Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" ("Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!"), his famous 1897 poem alluding to the pride and arrogance that went before the fall of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Their undoing, in addition to warfare, was deforestation and unsustainable irrigation, practices whose destructive effects were ignored by the elites at the time. In One with Nineveh, the Ehrlichs suggest that the hubris of our own civilization could be leading us to an end similar to Nineveh's - whose ruins lie near the Iraqi city of Mosul - if environmental trends such as loss of biodiversity and acceleration of climate change are not halted. Unlike the regional ecological collapse of Mesopotamia, this time the collapse could be global." Both a cautionary tale and a call to action, One with Nineveh is remarkable in its sweep and in the range of solutions it proposes, from local actions to reform of national government to international initiatives. Grounded in science, economics, and history, the Ehrlichs' forthright discussion of the underlying issues of our time gives cause for considerable concern yet reason to hope. - Dust jacket.