Book Launch: “Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life” by Prof. Saleem H. Ali

The Covid-19 Pandemic has brought forth global anxiety about linkages between the environment and society at a fundamental structural level. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life provides an accessible exposition of the latest foundational knowledge on how natural and social systems science can inform planetary crises. Humanity has either tried to conquer or capitulate to natural order, whereas we should be seeking to understand latent structures and patterns that permeate all systems and develop an “earthly order,” that is socially functional and sustainable.

“In an ambitious, yet eminently readable book, Saleem Ali uses a search for order as an organizing principle across all the scales of the world, from submicroscopic to the way human societies interact. I learned something on nearly every page; so will you, as the author draws us into an affirmative view of a changing, interrelated, and wondrous world.” 

Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and Poet, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, Cornell University

“School is all about teaching students about the basic order of life. But the education of order is not exactly an orderly education. Broken up across multiple subjects- mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics – students never get a holistic picture of how natural laws string together to create the basic geometry of the human experience. ‘Earthly Order’ fixes that. Saleem Ali’s new book builds a bridge across the sciences using the scaffolding of natural laws, delivering the reader a unique and unifying perspective of life on Earth.” 

Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer, Microsoft Corporation”

Earthly Order educates, illuminates and challenges, making connections across great swaths of the domains of knowledge, with climate change as the overarching motivation for this intellectual exploration. I found myself pausing after many paragraphs to consider what Ali had written, often re-reading, as much to experience the pleasure of the prose a second time as to clarify something. To capture Ali’s purpose with this book, and to quote from one of my favorite paragraphs, here is the last sentence of his Introduction: ‘The goal here is to stretch that specter of inquiry across the full spectrum of human learning about ordered systems so as to make the quest for sustainability more meaningful in both literal and figurative ways.’ And, that’s just what he does, with elegance and great insight.” 

Jared Cohon, President Emeritus Carnegie Mellon University, Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering

Saleem H. Ali was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts (USA) but grew up in Lahore, Pakistan until his college years, receiving his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Tufts University, and his Masters and Ph.D. degrees in environmental policy and planning at Yale and MIT, respectively. He currently holds the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professorship in Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware (USA) and is Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland (Australia). Dr. Ali’s laurels include being a National Geographic Explorer (having travelled for research to over 150 countries); being chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and serving on the seven-member science panel of the Global Environment Facility (the world’s largest multilateral trust fund for the environment held in trusteeship by the World Bank). His earlier books include Treasures of the Earth: Need Greed and a Sustainable Future which was hailed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus as providing “welcome linkage between environmental behavior and poverty alleviation.” Professor Ali was profiled in Forbes as “The Alchemist” and Bookseller called his earlier work “a pioneering exploration of human wants and needs and the natural resources we consume.” He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Geographical Society in the United Kingdom and also serves on the boards of Adventure Scientists and Mediators Beyond Borders International. Along with his wife Maria and sons Shahmir and Shahroze, the family are citizens of Australia, Pakistan and the United States. Twitter @saleem_ali