World on Fire: Humans, Animals, and the Future of the Planet

by Mark Rowlands

Mark Rowlands presents a novel analysis of three epoch-defining environmental climate , extinction , and pestilence . Our climate is changing at a rate that is unprecedented and, if unchecked, disastrous. Species are disappearing hundreds or thousands of times faster than normal. COVID-19 has wreaked social and economic havoc but is merely the latest off a blossoming production line of emerging infectious diseases, many of which have the potential to be far worse.

Rowlands establishes that all three problems are consequences of choices we have made about energy, which can be divided into two major fuel and food. Focusing on food choices as far more central to the issue than commonly recognized, he argues that the solution is breaking our collective habit of eating animals. Rowlands shows that in doing so, we stem our insatiable hunger for land, which he identifies as central to the problems of extinction and pestilence. He explains that reversing the industrial farming of animals for food will first, substantially cut climate emissions, rapidly enough to allow sustainable energy technologies time to become viable alternatives; and most importantly, make vast areas of a land available for the kind of aggressive afforestation policy that he shows as necessary to bring all three problems under control.

With World on Fire , Mark Rowlands identifies the source of our environmental ills and provides a compelling and accessible account of how to solve them.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published June 4, 2021

About the author

Mark Rowlands was born in Newport, Wales and began his undergraduate degree at Manchester University in engineering before changing to philosophy. He took his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and has held various academic positions in philosophy in universities in Britain, Ireland and the US.

His best known work is the book The Philosopher and the Wolf about a decade of his life he spent living and travelling with a wolf. As The Guardian described it in its review, "it is perhaps best described as the autobiography of an idea, or rather a set of related ideas, about the relationship between human and non-human animals." Reviews were very positive, the Financial Times said it was "a remarkable portrait of the bond that can exist between a human being and a beast,". Mark Vernon writing in The Times Literary Supplement "found the lessons on consciousness, animals and knowledge as engaging as the main current of the memoir," and added that it "could become a philosophical cult classic", while John Gray in the Literary Review thought it "a powerfully subversive critique of the unexamined assumptions that shape the way most philosophers - along with most people - think about animals and themselves." However, Alexander Fiske-Harrison for Prospect warned that "if you combine misanthropy and lycophilia, the resulting hybrid, lycanthropy, is indeed interesting, but philosophically quite sterile" and that, although Rowlands "acknowledges at the beginning of the book that he cannot think like a wolf... for such a capable philosopher and readable author not to have made the attempt is indeed an opportunity missed."

As a professional philosopher, Rowlands is known as one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism or the extended mind, and also for his work on the moral status of animals.