The magazine "Psychology Today" wrote that it "reads like a volcano erupting ... Tobias throws sparks like an evangelist and has the old-fashioned, wide-ranging erudition of a Renaissance scholar." Scientist Marc Lappé described "World War III" as "a lengthy and complex treatise that is a distillation of a lifetime of thought and action concerning the human condition. ... It provides a thread of hope, offering a new vision about how humankind may ultimately come to peace with nature." Anthropologist Jane Goodall, writing of the book in 1998, said, "Tobias describes for us a path that we could take – a path mapped out by a combination of scientific, logical, intuitive, and spiritual reasoning – towards a future where all is not, after all, lost." In her foreword to "World War III", she also said that Tobias has provided "ample scientific proof of the large-scale habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity that has and continues to take place." In 1994, during the UN International Conference on Population and Development, the "Montreal Gazette" quoted Tobias: "For purposes of absolute clarity I call it World War III," as The Gazette extrapolated from Tobias's perspective, "the most terrifying problem humanity has ever faced."