Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is coming out in paperback. (Does that matter in the digital age?) She is pretty scathing when she describes how her fellow humans are messing up our civilization project (this is the New York Times book review):

To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.

That philosophy — ­neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, ­carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.” …

In democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”

Holmes’s Brain

Sherlock Holmes knew that science and problem solving are about logic and reason, supported by facts. Creativity is the opposite of all that, right? Not so fast, according to an article and book by Maria Konnikova. Facts play a role, and Holmes had a large but carefully organized “attic” of the ones that he felt were most useful. To solve problems, you need a lot of information in your head, and access to a lot more, because you never know in advance which facts are going to combine in which way to produce an answer. The process of putting those facts together is not always cold, organized, and logical. In fact, you can’t force it. Holmes was willing to sit and contemplate as long as it took, distract his mind with music and recreational drugs, and let his mind access the facts in the background and bring him the solutions.

 

edible forest gardens

Now this truly is uplifting summer reading. It takes the idea of “perennial polycultures”, which are typical in the tropics, and asks whether they can work in eastern North America. I’ve spent some time in the tropics (Thailand in particular). Some people are worried about whether climate change will affect industrial agriculture in the tropics. But in my experience, people in the developing tropics are surrounded by more food than we are here in the developed temperate zone. Peoples’ yards are overflowing with mangoes, payapas, bananas, coconuts, peppers, eggplants and squashes of various sorts (mostly spicy sorts). Throw in some chickens foraging around, farm ponds full of fish, and bamboo for both food and timber, and you could really get by for awhile if the grocery store suddenly disappeared. Gardening there really doesn’t take much effort – once the plants are established. the effort is keeping the plants under control, if you are inclined to do that. If you don’t they just keep growing and producing food. Such is the amazing gift of solar energy.

It turns out we can grow fruit in the temperate zone too. Persimmons and pawpaws are native American trees, for example, but there are also hardy Asian persimmons and Asian pears, which are tougher than our native pears. There are hardy kiwis and yams that can grow here. There are “invasive” native wildflowers like Jerusalem artichoke that grow 10 foot tall stalks with edible, supposedly potato-like tubers. Not to mention some of our favorite perennials like strawberries and asparagus. The books go into a fair amount of detail on soil science, nutrient cycling, attracting pollinators, and other ecological topics, which is fun.

evil empires

Part of my light, uplifting summer reading program. The 80s were my grade school years. I certainly remember the Cold War being a big deal. But knowing that by 1989 it was pretty much over, and knowing about what went down in the 60s, I just always assumed that things were winding down by the 80s. This book has changed that perspective. By the 80s, the arsenals were  at an all time high, and communication was at an all-time low. What is really chilling is the picture painted about the Soviet paranoia in the early 80s – the leaders really were terrified that a U.S. nuclear first strike could come at any moment. The book describes how Reagan gradually came to realize this, that the Soviets could actually see the U.S. as the bad guys, and at that point he dropped the “evil empire” rhetoric and started talking with them. So although you can argue that he was recklessly belligerent early on, you have to give him some credit for at least partially defusing the situation. Then when Gorbachev comes along, he gets the rest of the credit. Another interesting sub-story here is how the KGB just completely got the best of the U.S. intelligence. And ultimately, that played a role in the U.S. being in the dark and misreading Soviet intentions throughout much of the period.

Even if there are no clear good or bad guys in this story, the Soviets are certainly not the good guys when it comes to biological weapons. They pursued them secretly, vigorously, and cynically for decades. It is truly chilling to think some of these weapons are still out there. Luckily, genetic engineering technology hadn’t really come into its own yet, so all they had to play around with was garden variety germs like smallpox and plague. Today of course, the technology is here and much more accessible to the average Joe Dictator or madman than back then. Even if there are no “evil empires” out there.

recycling

The Washington Post has an interesting article on recycling in the U.S. The prices of most recyclables are down, and although people are putting more recycling on the curb than ever before, there is more non-recyclable material in it than ever before. The technology has improved, but packaging design has also changed a lot towards extremely lightweight, plastic packaging that is cheap to make and ship.

This reminds me of the classic book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, which talks about truly sustainable product design. Clearly, the companies that design this packaging have no incentive to consider how it is disposed of. They don’t pay any of that cost and it is not their problem. Their incentive is to produce cheap, lightweight materials. If on the other hand, they considered the recycling process alongside the manufacturing and transportation process, and designed products with all three in mind, they could produce truly reusable and recyclable materials.

gators and tigers and extinction, oh my!

The extinction rate is now 1000 times normal, says Duke University.

Not to worry, say Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the University of Florida (and what would they know, those ‘gators with their beady dinosaur eyes), it’s only 114 times normal using “conservative assumptions”.

And according to a surprisingly edgy book review in my favorite special interest publication Civil Engineering (because what could be more special than my own interest), there is a new book out:

You probably don’t subscribe to Civil Engineering, so here is the Amazon description:

A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.

Tennesen discusses the future of nature and whether humans will make it through the bottleneck of extinction. Without man, could the seas regenerate to what they were before fishing vessels? Could life suddenly get very big as it did before the arrival of humans? And what if man survives the coming catastrophes, but in reduced populations? Would those groups be isolated enough to become distinct species? Could the conquest of Mars lead to another form of human? Could we upload our minds into a computer and live in a virtual reality? Or could genetic engineering create a more intelligent and long-lived creature that might shun the rest of us? And how would we recognize the next humans? Are they with us now?

The End Of Plenty: The Race To Feed A Crowded World

Here’s a new entry in the running-out-of-food genre.

I’ve embedded a Fresh Air interview about this book at the bottom of the post. You can find a transcript here. And here’s an excerpt:

And so suddenly, you had an instance where the world began consuming fairly consistently more of these major grains than it was producing, whittling down stockpiles to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. So, for example, in the 1970s, we consumed or utilized more grain than we ate only about four years out of the decade. In the drier ’80s, it was about five years. Since 2000, we’ve consumed or utilized more of these feed grains in eight of the first 12 years of the decade. So really, we’re starting to see the demand pressures outstrip our ability to produce food. All this while our yield gains, that have been spectacular since Norman Borlaug introduced the Green Revolution agriculture in the ’50s and ’60s, started to plateau.

So it – just as our demands are starting to rise, we’re starting to plateau in the amount of grain we’re getting per hectare, while things like climate change are really starting to hammer us. So we’re looking at, you know, these major disruptions of our food supply. Now, there was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed, like, 73,000 people in Europe. And yet what – that one made headlines all over the world, but what people didn’t realize was that a third of the wheat and grain and fruit crops were decimated that year.

You know, Russia has had these enormous droughts events where they’ve lost up to a third to half of their crop. Here in the United States, we’ve had 2012-2013, you know, we had the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days – cost us $30 billion. So – and what we’re dealing with is sort of the new normal. You know, the researchers say that now we’re going to have to, because of the increased demand from population growth, increased meat consumption in developing parts of the world, that we’re going to have to double our grain production, our food production, by 2050 to make sure everyone’s reasonably fed. And yet, climate change is just starting to really hammer it down, so we’re in a bit of a pinch.

Robert Reich vs. Amanda Ripley

Interesting ideas. Free college, free child care, and universal health care are the kinds of bold ideas we need to be talking about to build a resilient 21st century economy.

I recently read The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley. I liked the book because although it followed a plot of human interest and anecdote to keep the reader engaged, it had a hard core of data underneath. Data doesn’t always lead you down the path you expect, and sometimes it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. For example, there is no clear evidence that better outcomes are linked to teacher pay, class size, or funding levels, three of the policies Robert Reich advocates above. What seems to make a difference is very high expectations of both teachers and students. Finland for example closed most of its teacher colleges, moved the few remaining into a few elite universities, and made them hard to get into and hard to successfully complete. Those who successfully complete them do get paid well, but there are other countries like Spain and Norway that also pay teachers well and don’t have nearly as good outcomes. High expectations can also come from parents, but they have to be academic expectations. Parental involvement is not that helpful if it is focused on sports and activities other than academics. Parental involvement outside of school, such as reading, is also very, very important. You come away from the book kind of scratching your head about how important school really is and whether any of it is really under your control as a parent, but at least you know the factors outside of school are important and under your control.