One minute to midnight.

One with Nineveh By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich Island Press US$18.95

Rudyard Kipling, the bard of Imperial Britain during the 19th century, marked the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 with a poem that reflected on the ephemeral character of empire: Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget--lest we forget!

Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, of the Department of Biological Sciences and Demographic Studies at California's Stanford University, take that verse of the poem as the source of the title of their book on a pending catastrophe, as well as the remedies for it. According to the authors, the greatest threat of our time, as with England in Kipling's time, is the arrogance of the world's economic elites.

The same as Spain's Carlos V four centuries before, Victoria believed she had created an empire upon which the sun would never set. In a moment of uncertainty before the power of this empire, Kipling, the colonial poet and journalist, compared the pomp and urbanity of his time with the pride and ostentation of the Assyrian Empire. The sudden fall of this apparently all-powerful state sowed in Kipling doubts about the permanence of British rule.

Why did this ancient civilization collapse? Continual war, as well as deforestation of its lands and an unsustainable irrigation system, which failed. In the same way, the Ehrlichs fear that the current phenomenon of the destruction of the environment will lead to a disaster along the lines of Nineveh, much like the other great societies that fell to ruin as a result of their weaknesses.

The difference, however, is that after two-and-a-half centuries of development, the effect of an empire's collapse is not merely regional, it's global. As argued by Barry C. Lynn in End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, the close connections of the world economic order has created not just an increase in prosperity but the danger that a sudden problem on one side of the planet could have devastating consequences on all of the others.

The Ehrlichs divide their work into nine chapters, each one dedicated to a specific field of inquiry: ecology, demographics, migration, economy, biodiversity, ethics, climate, politics and globalization. Based on the most up-to-date research, the authors analyze in detail each field, reaching alarming conclusions. For instance, the significant decline seen since 1994 in the quantity of edible fish in our oceans; the rapid increase in global population (they believe that the current figure of 6 billion people is three times the optimal number of human beings); and the complacency of governments faced with increasing petroleum consumption and their denial when it comes to developing non-polluting alternative fuels, like solar energy.

The book's main criticisms are directed at the current U.S. administration of George W. Bush, whom they accuse of putting into place the politics of short-term greed, like letting fuel prices spiral out of control, which this year gave the big oil companies huge windfall profits. They also criticize Bush for his negative stand on environmental protection, such as the U.S. refusal to back the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Europe and the Third World do not escape from the Ehrlichs' criticisms.

The authors talk of an international catastrophe in the relatively near future, but they also describe a hopeful way forward based on the adoption of a series of governmental and personal measures, mostly aimed at conservation. The implementation of such measures, they write, could stave off a fate such as that of Nineveh, whose ruins sit today beneath the sands of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

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