REVIEWS

A Review in Cambridge Journal
Robert Paehlke, Ph.D., has this to say about Life in the Hothouse in his review for the Cambridge journal Environmental Practice: "This intelligent, well-written book makes a substantial contribution to the climate change debate. … this volume adds a great deal to the discussion of climate change and should be widely read."
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Lee Gutowski for Zócalo
In Life in the Hothouse, Melanie Lenart puts her formidable writing chops to work to produce a highly readable examination of Earth's survival mechanisms — including spikes in hurricanes and volcanic activity — through countless episodes of global warming and cooling spanning millennia.
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Bryan Walker for Celsius
Lenart does an excellent job of pulling together information from numerous studies, often updated by direct communication with the experts involved, and building it into a sustained overall picture. The story is enlivened by some of her own direct experience in forest and desert.
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Starre Vartan for Mother Nature Network
Starre Vartan called Life in the Hothouse "the best global warming book I've read." The environmental writer and author of The Eco Chick Guide to Life wrote this in a tweet about her review/Q&A piece in Mother Nature Network.
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Lois Henderson for Book Pleasures (rated 5 out of 5 stars)
Her skill in expressing the most scientific and complex phenomena enables her to convey her message so clearly that even someone with only a very basic knowledge of how the planet functions will be able to understand what she has to say. … Lenart establishes a certain rapport with her audience, which makes her arguments all the more convincing.
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Michelle Kaye for Good Reads (rated 5 out of 5 stars)
I found the topics covered in this book compelling to read. It was a learning progression that I truly enjoyed.
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M. Evans for CHOICE Reviews
Environmental scientist/writer Lenart presents a readable narrative of Earth's role as a living organism ...
Summing Up: Highly recommended for lower- and upper-division undergraduates and professionals.
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Melanie Lenart discussed her recent book, Life in the Hothouse: How A Living Planet Survives Climate Change, at the Tucson Festival of Bookson March 12 as part of a panel called Hot Times: Can Nature Survive Us? Other panelists were Laura Lopez-Hoffman, author of Conservation of Shared Environments, and Mitch Tobin, author of Endangered. The authors talked about their findings and took questions from the audience.

Gary Dillard of Focus on Bisbee interviews Melanie Lenart during a December 10, 2010, show that coincided with her book-signing event at Atalanta's Music and Books in Bisbee.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Our living planet has been through hot times before when greenhouse gas levels were high. Comparing earlier hothouses and past ice ages to our climate of today can help us gauge what’s in store for the near future, if we continue adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The higher temperatures that come with higher greenhouse gas levels spur on stronger hurricanes and bigger floods. The news is not all bad, though. Evidence from the past also highlights that forests and wetlands expanded during warmer times and contracted during ice ages. It turns out that bigger hurricanes, floods and forests – including the wooded wetlands known as swamps – play crucial roles in keeping the planet suitable for life.

These findings make sense in the context of Gaia theory, which maintains that the living Earth has some means for regulating its temperature. Of course, the premise assumes the planet and its natural systems have leeway to respond to climate changes. Yet humans have claimed much of the Earth’s surface for farms and factories, cars and cities. This, in turn, affects air, land and sea, as well as society. Can the planet's regulatory system function under these conditions?

After describing the complexities of some of the planet’s temperature moderating skills, the author suggests how people can fit into the regulatory system in ways that will promote life’s continuation. The findings suggest that the more the planet can count on forests and wetlands to moderate climate, the less it will need to employ hurricanes and floods to cool off.

The good news is, the same practices that make the Earth more resilient to global warming also make conditions better on the surface, where the world’s many species, including humans, live.

Q&A with author Melanie Lenart

Press Release

Source Notes
For scholars and other readers interested in footnotes, this link shares additional references that informed the book’s content.