Ed Ayres is the founder of Running Times magazine and former editor of Worldwatch, a monthly environmental magazine frequently quoted by textbooks and the mainstream news media. In 1999, Ayres wrote God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future, a book that warns of four "spikes," out-of-control phenemona that threaten the biosphere. These include rising carbon gas emissions, the rate of biological extinctions, unsustainable consumption, and the exploding human population. Word of mouth spread rapidly and the book soon sold out. Ayres considered the environmental movement to be mostly a failure, with the exception of some notable successes on issues such as ozone depletion. He retired from his position at the Worldwatch Institute in 2004. In 2005, he and his wife, Sharon, were pla