With rare insight, clarity, and compassion, Richard Heinberg helps us face the music. Over the years, since The Party's Over, his books have earned our trust with their accuracy in delineating the limits of the possible. Now in this bold collection of essays, he helps us see the landscape being bequeathed us by the Great Burning -- an understanding that is necessary to the Great Turning -- and will save us considerable time and confusion. With ever more gratitude I bow to those who shake us awake. --Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life:The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. Afterburngives us a sense of a survivable future -- hope fed by Heinberg's realistic deeper analysis, a sense of the trends ahead, and a bold (largely local) plan. Few are as good at the craft of synthesizing this powerful package then Richard Heinberg. This book will help fuel the future. --Randy Hayes, Rainforest Action Network Founder & Director of Foundation Earth In my business we have a saying: hope is a terrible investment strategy. Let's go further and say hope alone is a terrible strategy, period. Yet most of society continues to simply ignore the freely available and terribly important information about where we are headed on this planet, and simply hope that things will work themselves out somehow. They won't, and we all know that now on some level. Afterburn bravely and thoughtfully examines the predicament we face, one idea and one fact at a time. Those who can stir in a few facts along with their hope will be able to both understand and foresee what the future holds. Pick up this book. Read it. Discuss it. Let it sink into your bones, and then understand that this book is not asking you to abandon hope, it is inviting us all to greatness. --Chris Martenson, PhD, Co-founder of Peak Prosperity Afterburn is like a "Richard Heinberg's Greatest Hits" compilation, drawing together a selection of his prolific output from the last few years. To choose what went in must have been to pore over an embarrassment of riches, given his seemingly untiring creativity and brilliance. He writes with incision, with passion, with rage, with compassion, and Afterburn captures in one single publication why he's such a shining light of insight in times of much darkness. The Party's Over changed my life. Perhaps Afterburn will change yours. --Rob Hopkins, founder, Transition Town movement and author, The Power of Just Doing Stuff

Richard Heinberg is the author of eleven previous award-winning books including The Party's Over, Powerdown, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. A recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award for excellence in energy education, Heinberg has given hundreds of lectures on resource depletion to audiences around the world. He has been published in Nature and other journals, and has been featured in many television and theatrical documentaries.