The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert - Book Report #309

An Unnatural History

Hold on to your optimism because this book will damage much of the hope for the future you may have.

What I enjoyed most was learning of the history of the sciences we take for granted today.  The very concept of extinction got supporters of the idea laughed out of the room.  To many scientists in the 17th century, every known creature was thought to have always been there.

When a mastodon's skeleton was discovered in the United States, it just proved that a living herd had not yet been found in the wild.  Not that it was evidence of a long-lost species.

Peter Diamandis once said, "The day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea."

The book is a long list of crazy ideas that have become accepted fact.

By page 19 it is no surprise to learn that the rapid extinction event amphibians are being accelerated by our own human activity and systems.

My constant complaint in these kinds of books is that they are full of destruction & doom and short of constructive hope & solutions.

That said, it's a terrific read.  The history of scientific discovery is especially telling.  Just think about how the very notion of climate change was universally laughed at only 20 years ago.  Not as much now.

The book does not touch on this but, I feel this is the biggest scientific, economic and social opportunity humanity has ever had.  We have the chance to reinvent everything!  

So far, our world has stumbled into the future, today we can plan it.  Reimagine it.  Improve it.  Best of all, the world is full of those crazy ideas that just might work.  Oh, my!  We could be at the inflection point where humanity realizes it's true potential.

Elizabeth Kolbert's website - http://elizabethkolbert.com/

Elizabeth Kolbert

Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg - Book Review #305

Narrated by Edward Dalmas

To be honest I felt like there was no hope for humanity after hearing this book.

The world is a big giant mess, I already knew this.  It's why I picked it up.

I've said it before, with a lot of these books they are heavy on problems and light on solutions.  Heinberg simply made me feel like everything was hopeless and I just wanted to give up.

But as the eternal optimist, Peter Diamandis, often says - "The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest market opportunities."  Keep that in mind.

A book like Peak Everything will shine the light on the problems.  It will be up to you to decide which ones you'd like to tackle and to go out to find the solutions yourself.

To be fair, Heinberg does have some solutions, but they mostly revolve about returning to an agrarian life.  Who knows, maybe he's right.

Do I recommend it?  Sure.  Why not?  Just be warned that it's a very one-sided read.

Richard Heinberg's website - https://richardheinberg.com/

Richard Heinberg

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

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/

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein - Book Report #214

Here is another terrifying book that may well make you throw up your hands in the hopelessness of it all.  Humanity is polluting itself right out of existence and it seems there is no way to stop ourselves.

But Klein pulls back, just in time, at the very end of the book, to show us that there is a way out, that things can be done and there is a strong grass-roots movement underfoot that can lead us out of our mess.

Klein is a heavy-handed author but she does do her job by injecting some balance into her book.  Nothing frustrates me more than an author that will only write about the problems without offering solutions as inspiration to make things better.  Klein at least makes an attempt to show us alternatives.

One thing she touched on that caught my attention is the notion that there is a way of life that does not involve capitalism.  Post-capitalism, because it's such a new idea that capitalism's replacement has no name and barley a framework.  But if you can imagine a society without money, then you can see where this kind of structure could lead us out of our current mindset of resource based extraction economies.

It was one of those moments where an author gave me an entire new avenue of thinking that I find intriguing.

I do recommend the book but, be warned, it can be a bit of a slog.

Naomi Klein's website - http://www.naomiklein.org/main

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