Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots

Alexander Craig is a freelance journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec.

Alanna Mitchell of The Globe and Mail was named the best environmental
reporter in the world by the World Conservation Union and the Reuters
Foundation. In this dramatic and well-written book, she takes the reader
on a journey to the world’s environmental hotspots, including
increasingly water-hungry Jordan; the Canadian High Arctic, where the
native Inuvialuit people see apocalyptic portents in the warming of
winters and the thinning of sea ice; the Alberta Badlands, where the
dinosaurs were lost due to climate change; and rapidly deforesting
Madagascar (“the world’s top extinction hotspot”), where only 10
percent of the original stands survive.

Can humanity learn, Mitchell asks all sorts of specialists, or is it
suicidal? She goes to the Amazon region and the Galapagos to work out
what Darwin would have thought of what’s happened since he visited
there. She finds encouragement in Surinam whose tropical rainforests are
being protected as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. She reports on
how Iceland is “doing away with fossil fuels in favor of harnessing
the mythical energy of hydrogen.”

Something has to be done before “the world hits the wall.”
Mitchell’s thought-provoking book is both a tour de force and a quest
for hope.