I used to live in an apartment building where I would find old pulp sci-fi books in the laundry room.  Many of these I would read and then return to the shelving in the basement, but I collected and kept a number of them when I moved out so that I could continue to read them.  I left behind a number of my own books to pay back the small library.  I read a number of novels that I enjoyed: Joe Haldeman's Forever War, a couple by Mack Reynolds (After Utopia and  Satellite City), Out of Time by James P. Hogan, and Level 9 by Mordecai Roshwald.  All of them are pulpy but have interesting ideas, and some are better written than others.  I read a few that I didn't care for -- Them   by Robert French topping the list --  and Philip Wylie's The End of the Dream was one of them.
The novel's concept is to present a collection of evidence from a future world that reflects poorly on the environmental policies of the current day.  The novel came out in 1972 and posits the year 1975 -- a long-past date in the present time of the novel -- as the point of no return for humanity before crisis.  There isn't much of a plot or any kind of character development.  Wylie tries to humanize it a bit by including two characters who head up a sort of futuristic conservation league, but the confines of the epistolary format keep them uninteresting and undeveloped.  They are only names at the bottom of blocks of text.
The novel is a sledge-hammer and it is worse for it.  I am all for sci-fi novels that use the future as a means of critiquing the present, I think sci-fi at its best always does this, but this is just too far.  There are burning rivers and plagues.  It might line up with biblical plagues of Egypt but I didn't end up caring enough to find the parallels.
The opening pages of the book contain blurbs about Wylie's greatness.  I know that all books have these, but I am curious about the author's other work.  He seems to have a good grasp of the science of the day and has some imagination.  One of the more vivid reports is the narrative of a fisherman who witnesses hyper-evolved salt water leeches that can travel onto land and attack humans and other land mammals.  This is actually one of the more developed scenes and characters in the novel and it makes me hope that Wylie can do this on a sustained level when on less of a mission than he was with this book.
Most of the book leads from the darkness of 1975 when things can no longer be fixed to some point in the 21st century that is the narrative present.  At that future point, things are looking up and the remainder of human society that has not been killed off in some horrific way have recreated civilization and want to move forward.  It all ends with some shocking news I can't quite recall and refuse to look up even though the book is within easy reach that all of their efforts were for nothing and the world is actually going to end again, probably for real this time.
This book was not really enjoyable and I glossed over large portions of it because they were the kind of faux-technical writing that is extremely boring and not at all informative.  The cover, I think, is more interesting than the book.