Sea Sick by Alanna Mitchell - Book Review #304

I found this book most illuminating and upsetting.

Being landlocked in Alberta I seldom think about the oceans.  I had never considered how our local agriculture can damage the oceans.  But fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide runoff make it from the rivers to the oceans creating lasting damage to the ocean environment.  Just Google Gulf of Mexico dead zone to get an understanding of how everybody touches the oceans.

Overfishing is nothing new, we've heard about it for decades.  Just think of the shutting of the Atlantic cod fishery in eastern Canada.

The die-off of coral is much more serious than I knew about.

Most alarming is learning how the oceans play their part in the problem of CO2 rise.  I had no idea that the waters of the world absorb the gas, which sounds like a good thing, right?  But once carbon dioxide is dissolved in water it reacts with it, lowering the pH levels and making the water more acidic which has dire consequences on marine life, from the bottom of the food chain all the way to the top and to humans on the land.

I am so thankful I found the book.  It reinforced my desire to reduce my impact on the world.

Every little thing we do as individuals may seem inconsequential but others see what we do.  Somebody may see you picking up a bit of litter and it may inspire that person to do the same or to switch from a single-use item to a reusable one.

Like many of these kinds of books, I found it rather one-sided; there was so much gloom and doom that I kept wanting to just throw my hands up.

On the tenth anniversary of publication, Alanna Mitchell wrote a piece for Canadian Geographic updating readers as to how things have changed in that time.  Both the horror and the hope have expanded.  Read it here:

https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/theres-no-coming-back-why-global-ocean-crisis-threatens-us-all

There were two lines in the book that stood out for me:

Near the end, he leaves me with this, "The scale of the solution has to be to the scale of the problem."

And.

“The problem of the atmosphere and the ocean is a problem of human behaviour.” - Monica Sharma, a physician who works for the United Nations.

Alanna Mitchell's website - https://alannamitchell.com/

Alanna Mitchell

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson - Book Report #302

If you look back to my previous reviews of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy I raked him over the coals.

But, as time went on, I kept thinking about those books and what became obvious, is the unbelievable amount of research Robinson put into them.  This is a hallmark of his writing.  He researches his topics to death, to the point of probably being an expert himself.  And this becomes the gift of his novels.  When I reach for something by KSR I am usually interested in the subject, be it climate change or Mars or deep space travel and I know I will get a factual education along with a narrative to hang the details onto.

New York 2140 places a cast of characters in the city after the global oceans have risen by disastrous amounts.  It is a story of survival, adaptation and how the current financial systems and the machinations of globalism, consumerism and capitalism persist.


It was a stunning look at how things could drastically change and some not at all.  It's a well-researched warning as to what could happen if we don't change everything quickly.  Climate change does not necessarily mean the end of humanity, but it could.  Robinson only looked at the effects of sea level rise and not the consequences of pollution, temperature increase and acidification of the waters.

I see it as a call to action to get things right - today.  The decisions we have made to stem the wreckage of the global financial crisis have lasting effects into the future.  In the future of the novel decisions are viewed as short-sighted and lacking.

I loved this story as it helps to crystallize a view of the world as it could be.  Visions of the future are very difficult to imagine and we only try to correct things with images of the present.  This is a trap.

Robinson takes on gigantic topics and did a tremendous job of not spinning this into a trilogy too.  By keeping the subject to one book he has made a strong and potent case for solving our problems now and into a future we can barley grasp.

Well done sir.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson

The audio book was narrated by - Jay Snyder, Robin Miles, Suzanne Toren, Peter Ganim, Ryan Vincent Anderson, Christopher Ryan Grant, Caitlin Kelly, Michael Crouch, Robert Blumenfeld

Kim Stanley Robinson

Unstoppable by Bill Nye - Book Report #280

Harnessing Science to Change The World

This is THE book that I've been searching for.

Climate change is a big, big topic and most of what I've read has been all about the doom.  But surely, as Peter Diamandis often says, "The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities."

I am an optimist by nature and if there is a problem, I like to take the position of; "Okay, what can we do from now on to prevent or fix the problem?"  It does the world no good to constantly claim that the sky is falling.

If there are better ways to do things how can we go about doing them?

Bill Nye holds no punches but also doesn't go about blaming or pointing fingers.  We, as a society, went about our ways in what we believed at the time to be the most effective way to grow, progress and thrive.  And we've done exactly that.  But we were not looking at the whole picture.

As humans, we've always believed that the world was limitless because, when there were much fewer of us the planet could actually sustain us - to a point.  We were doing things from the very start that put us on a path to where we are today.  I'm talking about CO2 here.

The book tackles a multitude of problems and explains how it came about but more importantly how to move forward from here.  Energy production, transportation of goods and people, food production, desalinating seawater and the importance of space as a resource are all explored here.

There is a wonderful portion in the book where Bill, I feel that it's okay to call him Bill, walks the reader through his house to show all of the ways he's making changes to reduce his personal carbon footprint.  Can he do all of this because he has money?  Of course.  But it serves as an inspiration to try to make changes around your own home.  Rain barrels are a fine example of a cheap way to conserve water and not spend a lot of money creating the system.

The book is clear, concise and with a dash of humour along the way.  This is the kind of book you'll refer to and lend to your friends.

Buy it.

Bill Nye's website - https://billnye.com/

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson - Book Report #267

It was fortunate that I listened to the audiobooks of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.  It allowed me to understand his voice.  KSR takes his time to develop characters pretty much to the exclusion of a plot.  But you have to wade through it before he allows you to experience the actual reason you’re reading the book.

This was the case with Forty Signs of Rain.  I had to wade through a lot of diaper changes and descriptions of how the National Science Foundation funds research.

Thankfully, the author sprinkled some climate change information between chapters.

In the end, and I mean the very end, the environmental troubles begin to happen and this is where Mr. Robinson shines.  Wading through all the exposition brings the enormity of the problem to light.  As a species, we’ve never had to deal with our impact on the world but we are now at the end of this time of innocence.

Fiction can and must play a role in helping us imagine a new future.  This is where KSR’s towering intellect gives us a well thought out, realistic scenario to contemplate.  He takes his role as a person who can imagine possible human futures seriously.  If you read any of the non-fiction out there on the subject you can come away from it more confused than ever and probably feeling helpless too.

Fiction plays a most important role in that it can make sense of the complex and illustrate the situation along with showing us possible paths through challenging times.  For my part, I try to look at things in terms of “what’s next?”  The non-fiction world is usually pretty thin on solutions or alternatives because it steps into the world of speculation and those authors are uncomfortable with that kind of creative thinking.

This is why it is so very important to read both fiction and non-fiction.  Any time a book can make you stop an think then it made an impact and it was good that you read it.

Highly recommended.  Looking forward to reading book two in the trilogy.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Our Choice by Al Gore - Book Report #218

Finally.  A climate change book with actual hope for the future.

Don't get me wrong, I was still immensely depressed reading the thing.  But with every bad thing Gore talks about he also shows the way out.  The hardest thing to realise is just how entrenched our way of life is.  How our economy is based on extraction, destruction and pollution.

But it can all be fixed.  My god!  The opportunity to reinvent our way of life is right in front of us.  It is all low-hanging fruit.

The book opened my eyes to the difficulties of making change but I can still exert influence in the consumer choices I make every day.  As an example, if people start buying electric cars, manufacturers will begin to build them.   But what of the electricity from the coal-fired power plants?  Well that's another story altogether isn't it?  Those utilities have influence in the government and their profits are based on a pollution model.  That's where putting a price on pollution (a carbon tax) comes into play.  A big reason we pollute is because it is free to do so.

The amount of jobs we could create, building an economy that is in tune with our environment, is staggering to consider.

This was a wonderful book and I am very glad I had the opportunity to engage with it.

Al Gore's website - https://www.algore.com/

Al Gore

Just Cool It! by David Suzuki and Ian Hanington - Book Report #192

I had to slog through the first three chapters before I could enjoy what I was reading.

Suzuki has a long, rich history of making you feel shitty for being human and alive.  In this book he has taken a new direction; instead of beating you over the head explaining how thoroughly we've messed up the planet he now gives suggestions as to how to fix the problem.

Climate change is a big, messy problem but, interestingly, the solutions all exist, it's just a matter of will to fix things.

One observation really stuck out for me.  No matter where you fall in the climate change debate you can't argue with this:  even if we go all-in on expanding renewable energy and find that we were wrong about climate change we would find ourselves with a new alternative energy source AND fossil fuels.  We would have employed countless people, created new technologies, modernized our electrical systems and increased available power.  

There is no down side to this.

Suzuki and his co-author Ian Hanington, tackle solutions that can be applied to four general segments of human existence: Personal, Agricultural, Technological and Institutional.

It's that last category that is preventing us from really digging in and implementing solutions.  There needs to be political will to nurture and direct a new way of living on the planet.

I found the book to be well thought out, easy to read and understand.  It gave me ideas about changes I can make myself and opened my eyes to the infrastructure around me.

If you care about the environment or are simply interested in getting a better understanding about climate change this is a great place to start.

Recommended.

The David Suzuki Foundation website - http://www.davidsuzuki.org/

David Suzuki

Ian Hanington