Since Hard Rain was first launched in May 2006 (a few months before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth blazed a trail) literally hundreds of books have been published attempting to further crystallize the challenges of climate change and our related problems. If you are bewildered by the choice of titles on offer, I strongly recommend the following books, each of which has left a deep impression on me:
Understanding the Present by Brian Appleyard, Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman, Common Wealth by Jeffrey Sachs, Collapse by Jared Diamond, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet by Chris Goodall, and The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock.
If you want to understand the horrors that lie ahead if our mounting problems lead to nothing less than the collapse of civilization, Cormac McCarthy's The Road will take you there. The movie adaptation opens in the UK in January, and I would urge you to read the novel in advance. My colleague Mark Reynolds saw the film in preview at the London Film Festival and rates it highly, despite the usual Hollywood concession to something approaching a happy ending...
Other films you should look out for are Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid and Rupert Murray and Charles Clover's The End of the Line, two documentaries that definitively capture humankind's incapacity for joined-up thinking.
This section of the website will soon feature a comprehensive list of books, films, organizations and news sources that will help towards an understanding of the issues illustrated in Hard Rain. Please explore these issues as widely as you can, and share your responses with your friends and colleagues – and with the team at Hard Rain.
Mark Edwards
