Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

more on Ebola

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

NPR has an interview with the author of this book. An excerpt:

How did we go from a virus that’s found largely in animals to a virus that can be deadly for humans — and spread across four countries?

Human behavior is causing this problem. More and more, we’re going into wild, diverse ecosystems around the world, especially tropical forests.

Some scientists believe that each individual species of animal, plant, bacterium and fungus in these places carries at least one unique virus, maybe even 10 of them.

We, humans, go into those wild ecosystems. We cut down trees. We build mines, roads and villages. We kill the animals and eat them. Or we capture them and transport them around the world.

In doing that, we expose ourselves to all these viruses living around the world. That gives the viruses the opportunity to spill over into humans. Then in some cases, once the virus makes that first spillover, it discovers that it might be highly transmissible in humans. Then you might have an epidemic or a pandemic…

The experts I talk to say the next big one will almost certainly be caused by a zoonotic virus, coming out of animals. And it’s likely to be one that is transmissible through the respiratory route — that is, through a sneeze or cough.

Ebola is not an easily transmissible virus. It requires direct contact with bodily fluids. It doesn’t travel on the respiratory route.

Viruses such as the and SARS are much more of a concern to scientists that study these things than Ebola because they are already transmissible through the respiratory route. They are also highly adaptable, and they mutate quickly.

In terms of the next big one, SARS and MERS stand higher on the watch list than Ebola.

Ronald Reagan, peacemaker

I didn’t know this about Ronald Reagan (from the New York Times review):

Reagan had already spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, “he was pretty much on his own,” Adelman writes, “which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.” But much of what the president said on his own — that he wanted to share missile-defense technology, eliminate offensive nuclear weapons in 10 years and plan a “tremendous party” in 1996, to which he and Gorbachev would tote “the last nuclear missile” from their countries’ arsenals — “scared everyone,” one assistant said. Reagan’s own national security adviser was so dismayed that he restricted distribution of the meeting notes. “After Reykjavik,” a staff member told the journalist James Mann, “Reagan was watched by someone all during the rest of his term in office.”

I see – so it wasn’t nuclear weapons that “scared everyone”, but having a leader with a vision to get rid of them. We have reached a new height of cynicism today, when abolition of nuclear weapons is barely even being talked about. And if we can’t deal with nuclear weapons, which are in only a few hands, how will we deal with potentially even worse weapons, in potentially many more hands, in the future?

Subirdia

Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife

NPR reviews an upcoming book called Subirdia, which says that in temperate areas, there are more bird species in the suburbs than in cities or even forests:

So what have suburbs got that forests don’t? Suburbs, he says, offer a wide range of artificially designed garden habitats, providing a smorgasbord of nuts, fruits, seeds, insects and ponds, in dense concentrations. Because they are rich with different kinds of bird food, suburbs are rich with different kinds of birds…

But let’s not get crazy about this: suburbs are not the birdiest zones on earth. Any patch of tropical forest, with its dazzling populations of plant and animal life, will trump a garden-rich suburb. But if you are comparing suburban bird diversity to temperate wild spaces — say the Cascades, the Smokies or the Adirondacks — the suburbs, shockingly, win.

So maybe our goal in denser cities should be to create a landscape with more of this variety of garden habitats. That is doable, and a much more attainable goal than trying to create forest-like habitat in cities. There are some shy species that won’t come to the city, but the city can be pleasant for a wide variety of species, even humans, if we work at it.

Lords of Finance

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

This book was kind of a hard read, but I’m glad I read it. My favorite part of the book was the last five pages, particularly these quotes explaining just how bad the Depression really was.

Anyone who writes or thinks about the Great Depression cannot avoid the question: Could it happen again? First it is important to remember the scale of the economic meltdown that occurred in 1929 to 1933. During a three-year period, real GDP in the major economies fell by over 25 percent, a quarter of the adult male population was thrown out of work, commodity prices fell in half, consumer prices declined by 30 percent, wages were cut by a third. Bank credit in the United States shrank by 40 percent and in many countries the whole banking system collapsed. Almost every major sovereign debtor among developing countries and in Central and Eastern Europe defaulted, including Germany, the third largest economy in the world. The economic turmoil created hardships in every corner of the globe, from the prairies of Canada to the teeming cities of Asia, from the industrial heartland of America to the smallest village in India. No other period of peace time economic turmoil since has even come close to approaching the depth and breadth of that cataclysm…

[The Great Depression was] a crisis equivalent in scope to the combined effects and more of the 1994 Mexican peso crises, the 1997-98 Asian and Russian crises, the 2000 collapse in the stock market bubble, and the 2007/8 world financial crisis, all cascading upon one and other in a single concentrated two-year period. The world has been saved in part from anything approaching the Great Depression because the crises that have buffeted the world economy over the past decade [writing in 2009] have conveniently struck one by one, with decent intervals in between.

Bayes’ Theorem

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

There aren’t that many popular books on hard-core statistical approaches to predicting the future. Here is the Amazon description of this book:

Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, “The Theory That Would Not Die” is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest scientific controversies of all time. Bayes’ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years – at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA decoding to Homeland Security. “The Theory That Would Not Die” is a vivid account of the generations-long dispute over one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics.

Dense as all this might seem, it matters as we enter a more data-driven future, and we need people with the knowledge and training to deal with it. We should no longer assume that steering our sons into math, statistics, and actuarial science majors means they will never get a date.

There’s a much more hard-core set of slides on Bayes’ Theorem available on R-bloggers.

 

 

1909 – Europe’s Optical Illusion

Europe’s Optical Illusion

I was just looking at this classic from 1909, in which Norman Angell argued that any major wars would be highly unlikely in the modern era of free trade and interlinked financial centers. (I’ve linked to a paperback version, but note that this is in the public domain and a free electronic version is available at archive.org.)

It’s interesting to think about all this as we approach the 100-year anniversary of the first shots being fired in World War I on July 28, 1914. There are two stories I’ve heard told about World War I – first, that Germany was itching for a fight and found its excuse in what could have been a contained confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia – it was looking to grab some territory and thought it could do that quickly without provoking a major conflict; alternatively, that the whole thing was an accident, where Austria-Hungary made a bad decision that ended up sucking in Germany, Russia, France, England, and even the United States.

Today, I don’t think the rational leaders of any country would expect to enrich their country economically by provoking a major war. However, they might seek an advantage by blustering and bluffing just short of actual war. Then if a miscalculation causes one side or the other to cross that line, or some party exercises extremely poor judgment, or an accident simply happens and neither side has the good sense to back down, war can happen. The most obvious danger today is a naval confrontation between China on one side and any number of nations on the other – Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan or South Korea. Any of these would almost surely draw in the United States, and the situation could escalate from there. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail if something like this were to happen.

 

parking design

ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

As I mentioned recently, I will return frequently to urban design and urban infrastructure issues because I think these are key to long-term sustainability – and I am talking about sustainability in the dictionary sense of a system (in this case, our human civilization here on Earth) that is built to last. I think of urban sustainability as having two major sides, which are obviously intertwined. The first is green infrastructure, which I am convinced is the answer to managing water and ecosystems. The second is the built environment – buildings and the manmade infrastructure we need to move people and stuff around (roads, rail, pipes, electric lines, and so on).

In the short term, we might think of land use as driving the type of transportation systems we build. But in the longer term, it is really a chicken and egg problem – the way we choose to get around will have a big effect on how urban areas are built. Parking is a big part of this, because currently most cars sit idle most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space that is then taken out of the picture for any other kind of use. Not only that, but car parking takes up so much space that we then need to use cars just to cross the distances taken up by other cars – stuff is just so far apart that walking is not as practical, not to mention hot, dangerous, and deadly boring.

So on that note, here is a new book about parking. Here is the Amazon description:

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth’s supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It’s official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, as he points out, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century.

Can’t parking lots be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible? Used for something other than car storage? Ben-Joseph shows us that they can. He provides a visual history of this often ignored urban space, introducing us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served–from RV campgrounds to stages for “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.” He shows us parking lots that are not concrete wastelands but lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It’s time to change that; it’s time to rethink the lot.

 

Biophilic Cities

Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning

Yesterday I mentioned Blue Urbanism by Timothy Beatley. An earlier book of his was called Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning. This echoes some of my personal ideas about building a civilization that is truly in harmony with nature. Here’s the description on Amazon:

Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the “greening” of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And any vision of a sustainable urban future must place its focus squarely on nature, on the presence, conservation, and celebration of the actual green features and natural life forms.

A biophilic city is more than simply a biodiverse city, says Beatley. It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans in conjunction with nature. A biophilic city cherishes the natural features that already exist but also works to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded.
In Biophilic Cities Beatley not only outlines the essential elements of a biophilic city, but provides examples and stories about cities that have successfully integrated biophilic elements–from the building to the regional level–around the world.
From urban ecological networks and connected systems of urban greenspace, to green rooftops and green walls and sidewalk gardens, Beatley reviews the emerging practice of biophilic urban design and planning, and tells many compelling stories of individuals and groups working hard to transform cities from grey and lifeless to green and biodiverse.

“blue urbanism”

Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans

Blue Urbanism by Timothy Beatley is about building awareness among people in cities about their impacts on the oceans. Here’s the description on Amazon.com:

What would it mean to live in cities designed to foster feelings of connectedness to the ocean? As coastal cities begin planning for climate change and rising sea levels, author Timothy Beatley sees opportunities for rethinking the relationship between urban development and the ocean. Modern society is more dependent upon ocean resources than people are commonly aware of—from oil and gas extraction to wind energy, to the vast amounts of fish harvested globally, to medicinal compounds derived from sea creatures, and more. In Blue Urbanism, Beatley argues that, given all we’ve gained from the sea, city policies, plans, and daily urban life should acknowledge and support a healthy ocean environment.

The book explores issues ranging from urban design and land use, to resource extraction and renewable energy, to educating urbanites about the wonders of marine life. Beatley looks at how emerging practices like “community supported fisheries” and aquaponics can provide a sustainable alternative to industrial fishing practices. Other chapters delve into incentives for increasing use of wind and tidal energy as renewable options to oil and gas extraction that damages ocean life, and how the shipping industry is becoming more “green.” Additionally, urban citizens, he explains, have many opportunities to interact meaningfully with the ocean, from beach cleanups to helping scientists gather data.

While no one city “has it all figured out,” Beatley finds evidence of a changing ethic in cities around the world: a marine biodiversity census in Singapore, decreasing support for shark-finning in Hong Kong, “water plazas” in Rotterdam, a new protected area along the rocky shore of Wellington, New Zealand, “bluebelt” planning in Staten Island, and more. Ultimately he explains we must create a culture of “ocean literacy” using a variety of approaches, from building design and art installations that draw inspiration from marine forms, to encouraging citizen volunteerism related to oceans, to city-sponsored research, and support for new laws that protect marine health.

Equal parts inspiration and practical advice for urban planners, ocean activists, and policymakers, Blue Urbanism offers a comprehensive look at the challenges and great potential for urban areas to integrate ocean health into their policy and planning goals.