The Climate Book - Greta Thunburg, editor (2022)

Greta is perhaps the most impactful person in the world in the fight to control climate change. Her short and in-cite-ful/insightful essays are the synapses that hold the rest of this 464-page book together as other experts cover the challenges we face. In several-page sections, the writers take on climate-related issues, from energy sources to food/soil issues to the role of forests and tundra and oceans to political will to consumerism and much more. Throughout, there is a theme of urgency, a lament for the inaction of the powers-that-be, and ideas for how to turn us in another direction in the decade or two we have left to shift our trajectory.

Let’s just say she’s not that optimistic, given who the decision-makers are. Interestingly enough, a fairly constant refrain in these sections is for regular people to buy less and use less. Hope resides in educating ourselves, restoring nature, ending fossil fuel subsidies, turning quickly toward renewable energy, and not allowing shortcuts such as “carbon offsets” and other green washing. One writer says, “Love will lead us to safety,” thinking that a deep care for this earth can inspire us to make better choices.

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This may be the best book available for understanding and being inspired to act on climate change.

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In her own words: "Above all, it will take honesty, integrity and courage."

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Ruin Their Crops on the Ground by Andrea Freeman (2024)

In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” This policy extended to the bison on the Great Plains: when the Europeans arrived, there were 50 million of these creatures, which were central to native culture and diet - by the end of their killing spree, as few as 300 remained. Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.

From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground draws argues that U.S. food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” takes us from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She lays bare the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target marginalized communities, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. Native groups in the USA today have the highest rate of diabetes than any other racial/ethnic community. 

Conqueror's quote: "A dead buffalo is one less living Indian." - General William Sherman

The great displacement: climate change and the next American migration by Jake Biddle, 2023

“By the middle of the century, housing displacement will be the most visible and ubiquitous consequence of climate change.”

   So Bittle begins his argument that people having to “move” will be an increasingly prominent consequence of our warming world. Whether weather events such as floods, wildfires and drought or sea level rise, millions of Americans are already being affected, not to mention people all around the world. While he mostly talks about the USA, he also mentions the flood of climate refugees coming to the US from Central America as their only option to make a living after their farming communities have been devastated by series of floods and droughts and hurricanes.

   Bittle gets very specific in his analysis. He talks about Norfolk, VA, where there has been a one-foot sea level rise since 1950, with another foot on the way by 2045. (This is due to land subsiding from groundwater withdrawal, plus the path of the Gulfstream parks water in front of Norfolk. And there's also the factor that many of the marshes that used to hold excess water have now been drained.) In Houston, he notes that climate empowered flooding has combined with massive human paving and building projects which did not consult with nature as to their consequences. Another factor in any of these scenarios is the fast-rising cost of flood insurance - as much as $10,000 per year - which folks simply cannot afford. 

   Evidently, six feet of sea level rise is in the pipeline, no matter what we do now. The key will be to keep it from getting worse.

   He mentions several remedies – or we might call them emergency measures. First and foremost is to end the hegemony of oil and gas companies and decarbonize the economy. Another is to provide adequate resources for vulnerable communities, and to ramp up post-disaster aid and climate adaptation strategies. And we need to guarantee the rights of those affected by housing loss.

Final word: “At the most fundamental level, displacement begins when climate change makes it either too risky or too expensive for people to stay somewhere.”

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Wasteland: the secret world of waste and the urgent search for a cleaner future by Oliver Franklin-Walls, 2023

Franklin-Walls provides a clear indictment of the scandalous way humans handle their waste. The world as a whole creates over 2 billion tons of household waste every year, and if there are 8 billion of us in the world that comes out to about 1/4 of a ton per person per year – or 500 lbs. In the USA, that number is 1800 lbs. per person per year. 

   Now add 30 times that much industrial waste - mines, factories, e-waste, food tossed or spoiled, nuclear waste. I'ts not a pretty picture. 

   There are fascinating statistics related to all this: a third of the food produced in the world is wasted; there are 4 trillion cigarette filters tossed onto the ground annually; 480 billion plastic bottles are sold in the world every year with only 5% of that waste being successfully recycled. Of our waste, 37% ends up in landfills; a third in open dump sites. For instance, the world manufactures 62 million tons of clothing every year, creating 8-10 percent of our greenhouse gases and 20 percent of all wastewater - 25 percent of these new duds are never sold, and then are incinerated or shipped abroad in the used clothing market, which is a $4 billion business (and often undermines local tailors in the process). 

   All told, about 20% of household waste is recycled, and the rest either land-filled, incinerated or ends up in streams, the ocean, or anywhere else humans venture. In the USA, we incinerate 34 million tons of waste per year for energy generation, but this only provides .2 percent of our energy. 

   There are human justice issues as well. Around the world, there are 20 million waste collectors and sorters and this is mostly the informal sector comprised of women, the elderly, migrants, and their children. The daily wage of an Indian waste picker: about $2.80. “We dump our waste on the margins and on the marginalized," Franklin-Walls writes. Fyi: a US garbage worker is three times more likely to be killed on the job than a police officer.

   And there are of course many environmental issues. US landfills are our country's third largest source of methane – and this may be an underestimate by a factor of 6. And we know that methane is 23 times more potent per molecule than CO2. Landfills also contain hundreds of toxic chemicals. A third of all food produced in the world is wasted - an area of land/habitat equal to the size of India is "wasted" on growing this wasted food. 

   Benefits of recycling: an aluminum can made of recycled material needs 92% less energy and emits 90% less CO2. (We still throw away 50 billion of them in the US every year.) Recycling glass requires 30% less energy: paper 40% less.

   And then there's plastic, 11 million tons of which ends up in the oceans every year. The true recycling rate of plastic is most likely around 5% - that's 40% lower than the EPA claims. One of the reasons for this discrepancy is that often the recyclers claimed that everything that enters their facility is being recycled - when this is far from the truth. It's in the economic interest of business and the US government to make the public think that recycling works, as then people aren't gonna be so concerned about their consumption of things. And what can't be recycled is land-filled, incinerated or exported to the above-mentioned waste pickers.

   Solutions? Buy less, repair/mend, value material things, hold corporations responsible for upstream (mining, etc.) and downstream (nuclear waste with a half-life of 700 million years) waste, push for laws that ensure Right to Repair, etc. 

Who funded the original Keep America Beautiful campaign? The container industry – when they switched to non-returnable bottles, they wanted to make us the bad guys if we “litter,” rather than putting blame on them for making these disposables in the first place. Current "Ban the Bag" campaigns are organized by the industry to prevent bag-banning.

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Crossings: How road ecology is shaping the future of our planet by Ben Goldfarb (2023)

Goldfarb presents an amazingly comprehensive and disturbing overview of the impact of roads and the cars they carry on local, national and global ecosystems. They affect people by not only leading to the deaths of 3600 humans around the world each day but also in less obvious ways such as leading to the death of languages, as once-isolated people groups are put in touch with others, only to find their own language jeopardized by the need to speak a common language.

   There are around 4 million miles of roads in the USA; on these roads, a million vertebrates on average meet their end every day under a tire or on a windshield. This is perhaps second only to Brazil, where some 400 million creatures are killed annually on roads. He applauds bicycling not only for peacefully coexisting with critters, but also because in seeing roadkill “noticing the dead honors all that animals give us in life.” He also says bicycling and its proximity to vehicles is a little “to feel a lot like prey oneself.”

   Along with quantifying the extent of the damage done by roads, Goldfarb spends quite a bit of time thinking about how to create roads that are friendly to both people and to wildlife. He lifts up examples from various parts of the world where a lot of thought and planning has gone into making roads passable without killing that which is trying to pass them. He pays attention to frequent casualties such as amphibians and reptiles, and also to specialized needs of migratory animals who find a road to be an impenetrable barrier or a death zone.

   All told, this is an enlightening and alarming summary of the collective impact on roads of roads on our own and nature’s wellbeing.

   Quote: “the most straightforward solution to roadkills would be a collective rejection of automobility.” But the world is on course to have 2 billion cars by 2030 – or double the number driven in 2010.

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The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goddell (2023)

In August 2021, a nine-hour search for a missing California couple, their 1-year-old baby and their dog ended in tragedy — but also in mystery. All were discovered on a hiking trail just a few minutes’ drive from the family’s Mariposa home. But the cause of death was elusive: Was it snakebite? Some sort of toxic algae from a nearby stream? Two months later, the culprit was finally determined: excessive heat. 

    With this story as an introduction, Goddell issues a stark warming about our rapidly warming world. He goes on to predict that rising temperatures will drive a great migration of humans, animals, plants, jobs, wealth and diseases, and will “expose deep fissures of inequality and injustice,” as poverty equals greater vulnerability to a hotter world.

   After 3 million years of a relatively stable climate, we are entering an unprecedented and unfamiliar world of a 6 degree Fahrenheit rise in average global temperature by 2100. He warns that a 3.6 degree increase from 1780 is a critical threshold for everything from ice sheets to agriculture – we’re already at 2.2 degrees.

   He clearly lays out the fiery features of the much hotter world toward which we are headed – or have already arrived: by 2070, the world’s people living in areas of extreme heat (average temperature above 85 degrees) will number 2 billion, up from 30 million today; since 2000, a drop of one-fifth in global agricultural production due to heat and drought; malaria-carrying mosquitos expanding their range by 2.5 miles per year; trees in the USA migrating northward at 2 miles per decade.

Notable quote: “Extreme heat may be a human creation, but it is godlike in its power and prophecy. Because all living things share one simple fate – if the temperature they are used to – their Goldilocks zone – rise too far, too fast, they die.”

Food, Inc 2: Back for Seconds by Carl Weber 2023

Weber does a great job of helping us know what we're eating. His graduated scale of healthy foods ranging from best to worst begins with unprocessed or minimally processed food, followed by processed foods with a short list variety of components, such as oils, butter, honey and salt. Then come processed foods with more of the above, such as fruit in syrup, artisanal cheeses, and foods with several other ingredients. Then the real villains of the story – ultra processed foods, including colas, package sweets, store-bought bread, anything that's instant/nuggets/mixes – with flavors, colors and emulsifiers. He says the purpose of this is to disguise combinations of chemically transformed profitable ingredients with a long shelf life – which masquerade as real food. The prevalence of ultra processed food varies widely around the world, from around 16% in Colombia to nearly 60% in the USA.

   He also talks about farms and farmers, noting that there are 60 million small farmers around the world who produce 80% of the world's food, on average utilizing less than 45 acres of land. At the far end of that spectrum are agribusinesses, four of which control most of the beef processing in the United States. Farmers who are beholden to that system get 7.8 cents of every $1.00 spent on food.

   Weber brings in climate change at various levels. At one point he notes that as the Gulf of Maine is warming by almost .1 degree Fahrenheit per year the lobsters are getting the message and moving north. Oh Canada. Overall eco-cost of our diets: the world consumes $9 trillion of food annually, with an external impact of $20 trillion, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, loss of biodiversity and health care costs.

   He mentions that livestock is the most dominant animal on earth, altogether weighing twice as much as all humans and other large creatures.

   At the far end of this unhealthy equation, Weber writes that 90% of U.S. healthcare costs are related to unhealthy diets, costing our society $3 trillion a year. Diabetes alone is worth over $325 billion in healthcare expenditures annually. Obesity comes in at about half that much.

   In a quite interesting side note, he talks about the various approaches to reducing our meat-centered diets. He calls meat a quote battle of beliefs, and breaks down the various approaches into four categories. The Improvers want to generate more meat with less carbon dioxide and greater efficiency. The Reducers want us all to get used to having less animal protein in our diet, including vegans and vegetarians. The Regenerators are calling on us to raise animals in an ancient way with more grass fed and regenerative farming. And then there are the Disruptors, who want to create meat without meat – lab grown substitutes. These various systems of belief and practice impact every bite we take, he concludes.

   Culinary customs and culture: “Societies erode when traditional foods generally cease to be consumed as meals.” In other word, the grab and go eating culture that pervades much of western and increasingly all societies, has a destructive impact not just on our health but also on our sense of family and community.

Farming for the Long Haul by Michael Foley, 2019

As we face an uncertain food future, Foley wants to take us back to a whole other way of producing food. He writes “Successful farming societies have never been driven by the profit motive, but rather have been governed by principles of resilience in the effort to survive and to do well under uncertain conditions.” He notes the key principles of farming in this new way. 1. Dedication to the farmer's own subsistence 2. Sophisticated approaches to managing natural resources 3. Dependence on a vibrant local community as the first line of defense against calamity.

   He sees farming as a vocation not as an occupation. “We nourish, we don't make.” Here he seems to be talking about both the farming process and the end product of food production. In general, he believes that small is beautiful, as opposed to the dominant trend in industrial agriculture of going big or getting out. He also shows that in general smaller farms almost always have greater yield per area of space farmed, and he provides lots of examples of smaller enterprises thriving.

   As he looks ahead, he's particularly worried about how we will survive as a civilization as the climate goes South and as the global economy is subject to so many forces beyond local people's control. “We will only survive the vagaries of the market if we prepare prudently for ourselves and share with others.”

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Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives by Siddarth Kara (2023)

While the year 1492 has sad significance for native people of the Americas, 1482 was the beginning of the end for the people in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, as that’s when Portuguese sailor Diego Cao met the people of Congo at the mouth of the Congo River. Over the next 400 years, over 3 million people would depart from there as slaves in the bellies of slaving ships. The illicit extraction of people and products would continue through the barbarous reign of King Leopold of Belgium (ivory and rubber), to the overthrow of reformist President Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and the UN in 1960 (over access to minerals), to the current rush to capitalize on cobalt along with copper, gold, zinc and lithium in this mineral-rich, human-rights-poor part of the world. 
   Kara does a great job detailing the intricacies of the cobalt trade, as this element is an essential component in our electronics. He finds that providing it for the world market entails child labor, exploitation of women, massive environmental destruction, displacement of local communities, and obfuscation – muddying the supply chain sufficiently that the trail of blood and tears can barely be traced from our mobile devices to the artisanal miners of Congo (“artisanal” meaning the independent but exploited manual miners responsible for a big percentage of the cobalt that ends up in the global supply chain). But trace it he does. 

Conclusion: “As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death and incalculable environmental harm.”

Merry Morpho - a butterfly's effect by Dustin Wilgers, illustrated by Claudia Varjotie (2023)

(reviewed by Patty Hall)

I received and read my copy today. It brought back so many memories of the joy I found during my trip this year to Ecuador with NCP. The book captures that feeling that many of us have, that knowledge that everything is connected. As an adult, I just read "Emergency: A Pastoral Novel," which is about the interconnectedness of all life. It was fabulous, but I wanted something to read to my grandchildren which would help me explain how much my trip to Ecuador with NCP impacted me. This little book does that. I get to see them this weekend and I can't wait to read it to them and then show them my photos of Ecuador. One line in the book really resonated with me: "Across the earth, past the monkey's loud voice, sits a boy in a school with an everyday choice." We all have a conscience. We all have a choice. We just need to use it. The book is beautifully illustrated. I encourage everyone to grab a copy!

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The hidden life of trees: what they feel and how they communicate by Peter Wohlleben (2015).

We don't get past the preface before learning that when a giraffe starts eating an Acacia tree on the Savannah in Africa, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals a threat to the other trees downwind that the giraffe are coming - and they start releasing a toxic chemical into their sap that can sicken or even kill the long-necked ones. We also learn that trees can identify a leaf-eating insect by its saliva and respond accordingly by releasing pheromones to attract predators to eat that predator.

   Noting that every tree is valuable and is part of the health of others, we learn that trees extend their branches until they reach their neighbor, but go no wider because air and light are limited commodities in the forest. Trees on plantations, however, live like loners and suffer from their isolation.

   The author also talks quite a bit about the fungal networks that connect an entire forest: one teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of filament, via which they share resources and live symbiotically. Cultivated plants, on the other hand, have lost their ability to communicate. Thus isolated, they are then easy target for pests. Think about our own gardens :)

   He addresses one of my favorite topics and one of the most frightening enemies of trees – bark beetles. They are multiplying extensively throughout the Northern hemisphere – from CA to AK – due to warmer winters, while also spreading to places they couldn't live previously. Trees typically have chemicals in their sap that can ward off bark beetles, but due to drought and heat this resistance is lowered. Bark beetles can sense if a tree is weak and invite their other friends to join them by emitting a scent that's like a dinner bell.

   Trees as our friends: they clean the air (leaves and needles removing 20,000 tons of pollutants per year per square mile); release oxygen (29 tons per day per square mile – enough for 10,000 people); and sequester carbon (up to 22 tons per tree in their trunks, branches, roots).

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Affluence Without Abundance: the disappearing world of the bushmen by James Suzman (2017)

What would you call a group of people who work 15-20 hours a week, live in a respectful relationship with the land and animals around them, have everything they need to be happy and healthy, share religiously with their neighbors, and jealousy guard against anyone having more than everyone else? 
   Advanced or primitive? We in the “advanced world” have opted for the latter in our characterization of the bushmen of the Ju/’hoansi (“real people”) of Namibia, one of the last remaining and fast disappearing hunter/gatherer societies on earth, with 8-10,000 remaining today. 
   Conveniently, this has allowed us (white Europeans and even other migratory Africans) to move into and take over their 10,000-year-old homeland in southern Africa, ready to displace, “tame” and enslave these wild people. And even enact mass killings, the Germans carrying out what Suzman calls the 20th century’s first genocide, against cattle people of this same area. 
    Suzman provides a fascinating comparison between the world of the bushmen and “our” world with a scathing critique of capitalism, including our work ethic (gives us “value”) and our addiction to accumulation. He lays much of the causation at the feet of humans in other parts of the world moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture. This made “hard work into a virtue and transformed time into a commodity, objects into assets, and systems of exchange into commerce.” 
    And by the way, this also led to God being “kicked upstairs” as the one to be cajoled into providing rains and other favorable conditions for farming (whereas the bushmen were much more adaptable to their surroundings, not needing heavenly help). 

Enough: “They did not hold themselves hostage to unattainable aspirations, and thus were the original affluent society” – but with no need for abundance. 

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Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet by John Reid and Thomas Lovejoy (2022)

The world’s five mega-forests are key to the ecological integrity of our planet, and particularly our ability to reign in climate change, but they are disappearing before our eyes thanks to our ploughs, roads, mining operations and cattle pastures – and now, climate change. 
   From New Guinea to the Amazon, the Boreal to the Taiga and to the Congo basin, these keystone ecosystems harbor massive amounts of biodiversity and carbon, enormous freshwater resources (the Amazon River = the Nile, Mississippi and Yangtze combined), thousands of native communities and over 1000 languages, and unexploited natural elements that humans have a hard time keeping their hands off of.  
   The authors make the case that protecting and restoring these large intact forests is the best, cheapest, and most beneficial way (for all the side-effects of protecting forests) to slow down and reverse climate change. 
    Agreeing with NCP, the authors see the key to saving these forests to be supporting native communities, as they are on the frontlines of standing up to the extractive industries. A close second of stopping road construction in these places, as 95 percent of Amazon deforestation has taken place within three miles of a road or navigable river. Also with NCP, they call for retiring such terms as “natural resources” in favor of language that signifies the relationship we have with forests, rather than seeing them as just another source of “stuff.” 

Raintree: “The loss of one Amazonian tree with a 66-foot canopy robs the vapor content of the surrounding air of 130-290 gallons per day.”

Beaver Land by Leila Philip (2022)

Beaver fun facts: 
-    A million years ago, beavers the size of grizzly bears roamed the land.
-    A beaver can fell a 5-inch willow in six minutes.
-    The War of 1812 was fought in great part over control of the trade in beaver pelts.
-    Medieval Catholics could eat beaver like fish on holy days when other meat was not allowed.
-    The beaver’s tail is a means of communication, their rudder and paddle, support for standing upright, body fat for surviving winter, considered a delicacy by Lewis and Clark, and can sense a change in water pressure that signifies a leak in their dam.
-    Before Europeans arrived, there were some 400 million beavers in North America. That plummeted in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as demand for beaver fur soared. At one point, 100 pounds of pelts sold for $12,000 in today’s dollars. Presently, there are around 2 million on our continent, and that number is growing as their positive role in the ecosystem is being recognized. 
   Philip shows beaver to be “eco-system engineers” and keystone species, and notes that only beaver and humans dramatically alter their landscape. They also are important for climate resilience, storing water for slow release during dry times and helping stem the impacts of flooding events. They even put the brakes on forest fires, as their corners of the forest are wetter and contain more greenery than surrounding areas. She also goes to great lengths to give the “other side of the story,” interviewing and even accompanying trappers as they practice their trade.

Who woulda thought: The largest beaver dam in the world – in Alberta, Canada – is nearly 800 feet in breadth, twice that of the Hoover Dam.

Regenesis: feeding the world without destroying the planet by George Monbiot (2022)

“Our health depends, in ways that are obvious and ways that are not, on the health of the soil.” Monbiot provides a fascinating and enlightening look at the world’s food system, starting as we must with the soil itself and moving on to discuss everything from climate change to industrial farming to the impact of our meat-centered diets.

   Soil is the foundation of life on Earth but Monbiot reminds us how strikingly little we know about it. From microbes to earthworms to the interplay of plants with the underground world, he helps us see what’s at stake in protecting and nourishing these usually unseen and unknown elements of planetary life. (Earth worms help reduce soil erosion and runoff in general, and their presence means plants and animals sharing their same patch of soil are up to 20 percent bigger. On the other hand, chemicalized mechanized food production not only kills worms, but also reduces the nutritional value of crops, meaning we need to grow more to get the same amount of benefit.)

    The book then moves on to climate change impacts of food production, malnutrition rates (often driven by foods diverted to biofuels and/or speculators), and our dietary and political choices. Shame on us: the 100 million acres of crops grown to produce biofuels could feed half the world’s hungry people.

Fair warning: he is not kind to our meat-centered diets due to impacts of such things as antibiotics on our food supply, greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and especially the amount of space that livestock demands of the earth around us (for themselves and to grow their food), which of course steals land that otherwise might be habitat for all manner of living creatures. E.g., 100 grams of soy protein requires 2 square meters of land to produce, while this same amount of protein from eggs needs 6, chicken 7, pork 10, milk 27, beef 163, lamb 185. Carbon: eating 10 pounds of beef equals the carbon impact of a NY-London roundtrip flight.

And get this: “There might be no more damaging farm product than organic, pasture fed beef,” as this can release more nitrogen pollution into the environment around it due to dependence on animal manure as a fertilizer. Same with “free range chicken,” as that manure often washes into streams. These chickens also expend more energy, so they need more feed, which is often produced at the expense of rainforest in South America. Oh my.

He praises more diverse systems which then have more resilience in the face of threats of one kind or another. He is excited about growing protein by using bacteria, by innovative small-scale farming and by groups like the Land Institute, a friend of NCP. “We need to keep preparing the ground for the moment when conditions are right for dramatically changing the way we produce our food,” comparing this to seismic shifts such as the invention of the printing press.

Dietary choices: If everyone went vegetarian, this would reduce the land needed for agriculture by 76 percent. 

The insect crisis: the fall of the tiny empires that run the world by Oliver Milman (2022)

“The first inkling of the cataclysm was the deathly stillness, the first howl of horror…came from birds.”

Milman does us a great service by shining the light on the tiny creatures with whom we share the world and upon whom our world in many ways depends. For instance, one-third of global food crops depend on pollinators, from bees to butterflies to moths to beetles; 90% of wild flowering plants depend on them as well. Insects multiply our food, are food themselves, get rid of our waste, eliminate pests, and nourish the soil.

And they are diverse: Who knew there were 160,000 species of flies and 350,000 of beetles, and only one fifth of the world’s insects have been named. Adding injury to insult, an estimated 5-10% of insects have gone extinct since the industrial revolution, and currently in many parts of the world, insect populations are declining by 2-3% per year. We can imagine the culprits: habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, climate change. Seen a bumblebee lately? The number of these hovering wonders are down by 90 percent, and their range has declined by 80%. In Ohio, to get specific, butterfly populations are down by 33% over the past 20 years, the same as grasshoppers in Kansas. In Minnesota, mayfly populations have declined by half due to water pollution. All told, one-third of aquatic insects are threatened with extinction.

Who knew II: “Bumblebees can be taught to play soccer, will give up sleep take care for their hives’ young, and can remember good and bad experiences – a form of consciousness.”

“Insects can recover, they just need the breathing space to do so.” In our own backyards, this means less mowed lawn, fewer nighttime lights, less use of chemical pesticides of any kind. More broadly, we need bans on particularly deadly neonicotinoid pesticides, addressing climate change, and preserving wild spaces (a key to this is reducing land needed for agriculture, and in particular meat production).

Timing is everything: spring is coming 20 days earlier in the USA. Bees emerge due to warming temperature, the flowers they feed on bloom according to the length of day. That’s a problem. (Btw, it takes the nectar of 2 million flowers to produce a pound of honey.)

For profit: a history of corporations by William Magnuson (2022)

The author traces the history of corporate influence on and/or control over the economies of nations or other entities beginning with the ancient Romans. There, corporations funded and implemented wars. They also moved into the conquered areas to collect taxes on behalf of the empire and to carry out projects such as constructing mines, roads and theaters. As such they often took on a bad reputation as those who were willing to exploit their access and power solely to enrich themselves. (These are the “publicans” Jesus often roundly condemned.) Indeed, Magnuson says that corporations are more much more interested in short term dividends than in long term business success.

He follows this historical saga to its next incarnation in the form of the Medici bank of Italy in the Middle Ages and then later on to the East India Company, which was an extension of the British Empire’s reach as a colonial power. This corporation traded in tea, slaves, saltpeter, and various fabrics. It was also instrumental in the emergence of the London Stock Exchange, as it invited shareholders to buy into its trading exploits. In a sense it was a “company state,” founded on military and economic power. It made shareholders fabulously wealthy, often at the expense of people in the far reaches of the empire who were forced into trade with them. And corporate money was often a corrupter of the political process.

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Corporate power also manifests itself via monopolies (railroads in the USA - one baron noted that the defeat of General Custer would lead to "the annihilation of the Indian and in the end greatly benefit us"), dehumanizing automation (assembly lines), corrupting political influence, and multinationals (think Exxon) - and promotion of the consumer culture. Indeed, Henry Ford instituted the five-day work week to ensure that his workers had time to shop and spend. 

Quotable quote: “The story of capitalism is the story of corporations.”

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The Treeline: the last forest and the future of life on earth by Ben Rawlence (2022)

"The migration of the treeline is no longer a matter of inches/centuries; instead it is hundreds of feet every year. The trees are on the move. They shouldn't be. And this sinister fact has enormous consequences for all life on earth."

Rawlence offers a superb overview of the nature of boreal forests, their interplay with the permafrost, and the significance of the dramatic changes for land, creatures, people and climate as a warming worlds sends them marching northward.

He says that more than the Amazon rainforest, the boreal forest is truly the lungs of the world. It only covers 1/5 of the globe, but contains 1/3 of the trees - the second largest Biome after the oceans. Yet "The earth is out of balance, and the tree line zone is a territory in the grip of large geological change, confounding and challenging our ideas our ideas of past present and future." 

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He takes the reader to boreal forests-on-the-march from Norway (impacting the reindeer herds) to Russia (rising rivers affecting migrating fish) to Greenland, which is losing 71 cubic miles of ice per year and some places haven't had snow for three years to Alaska, where "tundra will soon be an historical term." Our 2022 Learning Tour to Arctic Village, Alaska confirms everything he said and more. "We have to change what we are doing and soon - and soon!" exclaimed our host Charlie Swaney, a seasoned outdoorsman who sees the disruption happening before his eyes.

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Indictment of scientific method: "Western science always assumes we have more time."

Affirmation of native knowledge: "Indigenous use of forests is often the most reliable form of conservation."

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The Day the World Stopped Shopping by J. B. Mackinnon (2021)

"We must stop shopping, yet we can't stop shopping." Mackinnon makes a compelling case that the prime driver of humanity's devastating impact on our planet is the simple compulsion to consume, to buy, to build. Noting that human 

"stuff" in the many forms it takes now outweighs all other living things on Earth, he laments the way we have become defined by what we have rather than who we are.

He also offers plenty of ideas about to live in a way that provides for our needs without gratifying our greed - and throwing the planet under the bus in the process. And it may be more achievable that we think - 1970 was the last year that humans lived in a way that didn't over-use the planet. Some of us were around back then - life was okay. (Of course, much of the world was impoverished in 1970, so we might need to shift back a decade earlier in the Rich World to enable a rise in consumption by the Poor World.)

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He challenges the possibility of "green growth," laments the impact of our consumption on nature (when vegetated areas are displaced by a mall or road, the animals don't just "move" - they die), lifts up the philosophy of hunter/gatherers (who spend an average of 30 hours a week on food gathering and chores) and extols voluntary simplicity as the path ahead.  

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"When the pandemic shuttered the consumer economy, and we told ourselves nothing would ever be the same again, history was quietly laughing."

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The Last Winter by Porter Fox (2021) 

Written by someone intimately familiar with snow and ice, having been a skier his entire life, Fox takes us to Greenland, the Rockies, the Himalaya, the Arctic and other key arenas where winter is literally melting before our eyes – with frightening consequences for the present and for the future. Not only are ski resorts having to reimagine themselves as something other, but entire nations that are dependent on high mountain snowpack being a reliable water supply for their life-giving rivers are having to think hard about how they will do without these primal – but suddenly fragile – ribbons of wetness that course through our civilizational veins. And did we mention cataclysmic sea level rise?  

Solution: act big and soon to rein in climate change; wake up those around you to the urgency

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“On average, winter has shrunk by a month…”

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The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) 

Indigenous wisdom takes center stage as the authors refute thinking that humans either fell from a pristine state or were never close to pristine, calling both an excuse to give up on fundamentally reordering society away from meanness and materialism and toward a more communitarian, relation-centered way of life. Native Americans and their values are held up as a searing critique of European invaders, revealing them to be self-centered, power-hungry and materialistic – and showing there are other ways to organize life.

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Solution: we must reinvent the way we are with each other and with nature

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“Our species’ future depends on our capacity to create something different.”

Life Changing: how humans are altering life on earth by Helen Pilcher (2020)

I love a catchy title. And this one makes her point very nicely – beginning with the domestication of animals (the first wolf was draw by the campfire seeking a free meal some 36,000 years ago), humans have changed the lives of other organisms large and small in a myriad of ways. We’ve killed them, transported them, forced them into genetic mutations (brown moths became black within decades thanks to soot from coal fires in England, as this gave them better camouflage), filled them with plastic, over-harvested them (giraffe populations are down by 40 percent in the past 30 years). And even when we try to be nice, we fail: read what “catch and release” does to that trout you caught.

Of course, we have also over-heated and over-polluted them. Half of Florida’s reefs are gone, thanks to warming oceans; there are 400 Dead Zones in the bays and estuaries, due to nutrient run-off.

And we manipulate them to suit our tastes, so to speak. The world consumes 65 billion chickens per year – that works out to almost 10 per person. And I guess it’s a good thing they are raised to be killed at six weeks of age: if they lived much longer, they would internally collapse under their own plump genetically-modified weight.

The critters do fight back. Female elephants in Zambia’s Luangwa National Park (we visited it on our Learning Tour) born without tusks increased from 10% to 40% from 1969 to 1989 as evolution’s way of fending off poachers. Atlantic cod mature twice as fast now due to overfishing.

And humans are helping clean up this mess of our own making, doing things like helping propagate heat-resistant coral to fill in for all the colorful reefs that didn’t make it.

Says it all: “The magnitude of human influence is now such that whatever we do, we change something and nudge evolution along an altered course…pushing the evolution of living creatures into overdrive.”

Fathoms: the World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs (2020)

Who knew that whaling was the first global economic enterprise, as well as the springboard for the beginnings of consumer culture? Or that parts of the whale were used in everything from lubricants to high fashion to food for people and pets? Or that these largest of animals are canaries in the mine for environmental impacts from plastic pollution to climate change to toxins? Or that their poop and their carcasses are integral to the oceanic food chain?

Or that whales are in many ways responsible for the modern environmental movement, as their charisma as a species became a rallying cry for not only stopping their slaughter, but also for recognizing other creatures as worthy of our attention and protection?

The earliest record of whaling dates to 8000 years ago on the Korean peninsula, but whaling really only became threatening to the survival of these behemoths with the advent of fuel-driven ships and explosive weapons. In the 19th century alone, Giggs tells us that 236,000 whales were slaughtered by a burgeoning whaling industry. In terms of the contribution to climate change, killing this many whales was the equivalent of burning 70 million acres of temperate forest. (Guess why?)

Giggs invites us to see whales as sentient beings, capable of culture, communication, adaptation to the changing world around them. Her book is a call to care about whales and by extension all creatures beyond our immediate experience – or are they? She will help you see the many ways the world/our world is ‘in the whale,’ and how whales help us discover our better selves.

Notable quote: “A whale is a wonder not because it is the world’s largest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity.”

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An Immense World by Ed Yong (2022)

Why do snakes have forked tongues? What allows elephants to locate – and dig for – underground water – or landmines? How far does a rat have to be away from a soaring eagle to not got spotted – and eaten? Why do condors, whose vision is extremely sharp, often crash into wind turbines?

    Yong reveals how much we don’t know about how animals experience their world using senses in ways we can hardly imagine – which is why we haven’t learned a lot of this: we tend to anthropomorphize these fellow travelers, limiting our ability to conceptualize and then explore how they “see” (and smell, feel, taste, hear, sense) the world around them.

   Wish you didn’t know? Pit vipers (copperheads, rattlers, etc.) can recognize and respond to a .0001 C change in temperature from where they lie motionless ready for an ambush – enabling them to recognize and strike a rodent 3 feet away; ticks can detect heat at a distance of 13 feet.

The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard Alley (2000)

Let’s explain the title right away: it refers to core drilling down through the two-mile deep Greenland ice sheet to discover the climatic history (and other cool stuff) of this massive ice island. By unlocking the secrets held in the ice cores dating back thousands of years, the researchers can give us clues as to what happened when and what may have caused it – and what this bodes for us and our future.

    The main findings of Alley and the other scientists working alongside him include:

• Earth’s climate has regularly vacillated, often cooling very slowly (think 10’s of thousands of years) while warming very quickly (think decades)

• Many factors determine the direction of the climate, but several keys ones are the periodic tweaks of the earth’s tilt in relation to the sun, the influx of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean (affecting the Gulf Stream), the albedo effect (reflectivity of the earth’s surface), the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to a much lesser extent, volcanic activity.

• There are many uncertainties in this business of predicting the future of the climate, but one thing is clear: “…warmth and elevated carbon dioxide levels have gone together for billions of years, and it is highly likely that this relationship will continue into the future.”

   “Who knew” department: ice core samples show evidence of lead from ancient Roman smelting operations; while (if geologic trends hold) we are currently on a 90,000 year slow slide toward another Ice Age, our carbon output is 100x more potent and will send us in the other direction; the amount of sunlight hitting and warming earth is equivalent to three 100-watt bulbs per square yard, and earth reflects about 30 percent of sunlight back into space; water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, but CO2 is involved here too – as it warms the planet, the atmosphere holds more moisture.

On our legacy: “The few centuries of fossil fuel burning thus will produce a few millennia or more of elevated carbon dioxide concentrations.”

Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg (2018)

Klinenberg provides a fascinating and well-researched argument that how we literally construct/arrange our public spaces either leads to more violence, poverty, and fragility of communities OR can instead create stronger community bonds, economic resilience, and less crime and other anti-social behaviors. He uses the experience of neighborhoods around the country to give practical examples of how libraries, parks, vacant properties, housing projects and other “infrastructure” either strengthen or undermine the sense of community, as well as economic well-being.

‘If we build it’ quote: “It’s long been understood that social cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in shared projects, not merely from a principal commitment to abstract values and beliefs.”

Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman (1990)
The writer, not a native himself, has received high praise from the Dine (Navajo) of the Southwest US for the light he has shed on their lives and culture through his mystery novels featuring their people.

In this installment of his many-book series, Hillerman’s vehicle is a murder mystery, set on tribal land in the Four Corners area. He uses this plotline to go on enlightening detours into the richness of Dineh culture, from clans to ceremonies to coyote – the mythical creature always on the lookout for ways to bring chaos into the lives of the unexpecting.

This reviewer is not a big fan of novels, but this fiction is filled with “fact”ion – real windows into the details, duties and everyday drama of the Dine people. And Butch Cassidy makes a cameo appearance!

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Fire: A Brief History by Stephen Pyne (2019)

Who would have thought a book about fire could take on such a lyrical quality, but Pyne pulls it off.

Notable quotes: “Fire is a selective force and an ecological factor that guides evolution, organizes biomes, and bonds the physical world to the biological.” “By cooking landscapes we went to the top of the food chain. By cooking the planet, we have become a geologic force.” “Equipped with fire, people colonized the Earth.” “Long an informing metaphor, philosophical fire became cliché, fit only for humanist scholars and the garish covers of romance novels.”

This book traces the history of First Fire (lightning, volcanoes, etc.), Second Fire (human use of fire to clear land, drive animals, go to battle, and essentially conquer the world), and Third Fire (internal combustion, nuclear weapons, etc.) and calls for a more rational approach to fire, rather than the modern reflexive reaction to contain and suppress it.

He says we need a narrative that tends more toward Primeval fire (fire as our companion, stewarding it within the biota) than Promethean fire (fire as technology to express power).

A critique is that he seems to nearly worship aboriginal use of fire, as if this was something benign and not itself a massive intrusion into and manipulation of nature. I guess if humans are “just another part of nature” and allowed to use fire as a tool – as baboons might use a twig to catch termites – then this is understandable. But humans seem not so innocent to this reader.

“Good fire made us, bad fire may end us, while gathered around a flame we tell our story of what is happening.”

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Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, by Leah Penniman (2018)(reviewed by Tom Benevento) 

This book does an excellent job at expanding our understanding of inequity and racism in our food system. It gives a clear path to creating just food systems that increase farmland stewardship by and for people of color, and how to train for the next generation of activist farmers wanting to transform the food system. It is also a practical guide for many aspects of small-scale farming.

"Owning our own land, growing our own food, educating our own youth, participating in our own healthcare and justice systems is the source of real power and dignity"

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Planet Palm by Jocelyn Zuckerman (2021)

What's the product that is in half the stuff at the grocery store, has turned respected farmers into slave laborers around the world, was first traded by the Egyptians in 3000 B.C., was a key part of colonial subjugation of West Africa, growing it on plantations occupies as much land as the nation of New Zealand, clearing 1 hectare (2.47 acres) of peat in Indonesia to grow it releases 55 million tons of CO2 per year - and is currently a $65 billion global business?

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That would be oil palm, which shows up as an ingredient in our cosmetics, ice cream and peanut butter under 200 different names. Read all about its production - and the subjugation of planet and people this has entailed. 

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Takes our breath away: in 2015 there were 100,000 premature deaths in Indonesia as a result of smoke from fires set to clear land for palm oil production. 

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Under a White Sky: the nature of the future by Elizabeth Kolbert (2021)

While Kolbert's earlier book The Sixth Extinction gave humankind credit for instigating the planet's sixth great wave of extinctions of other living creatures, this one shows the mess we make as we try to undo some of the environmental mess we are making. 

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In the desert near Death Valley, we're having to go to great lengths to preserve the Desert Pupfish after draining (or subjecting to radiation from nuclear testing) the aquifers that feed the few ponds where it has lived for millions of years; we've reversed (and electrified) the flow of rivers in Chicago to keep invasive carp out of Lake Michigan; we've reengineered the Mississippi to try to stabilize vast swaths of the delta which were destabilized by earlier reengineering; we're trying to breed climate-tolerant coral so that the 135,000 square mile Great Barrier Reef can survive the warmer waters brought on by climate change; and we're looking seriously at seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide - or diamond dust (not kidding) - to reflect enough of the sun's energy to cool a rapidly warming earth. What could go wrong...?

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"What good are pupfish?" he demanded of Phil Phister, the conservationist trying to save the small blue fish at great effort and cost. "What good are you?" Phister replied.

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Mother of God by Paul Rosolie (2014)

Rosolie left home as a teen to find meaning in the Madre de dios region (Mother of God) of the Amazon rainforest in Peru - and not only found that, but also massive anacondas, elusive jaguars, an affectionate young anteater, malevolent poachers, and deep friendships with native people. Written in a first-person here's-what-I-did-today style, it's a bit unpolished - but this also lends authenticity. A good read for folks wanting a feel for what it's like to have an up-close-and-personal experience of the rainforest. 

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Telling quote: “But as the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett warned, ‘the few remaining unknown places of the world exact a price for their secrets.’”

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The New Climate Wars by Michael Mann (2021)

What do climate change enablers and cigarette advertisers have in common? They both want to sow doubt – thus postponing action until they can reap their profits. For the cigarette makers, this meant hiding evidence; for the fossil fuel industry this takes many forms – from calling climate change a fait accompli (“it’s gonna happen, we just need to live with it”) to claiming all solutions are untenable (“doing anything meaningful will wreck the economy”) to shifting all responsibility to individuals (“you people just recycle more and drive a little less”) to appeals to the “free market” (which of course conveniently doesn’t build in the cost of climate change) to outright denial.

Mann makes a compelling case that addressing climate change will need both personal actions and corporate ethics (yes, I know this seems an oxymoron) if we want to achieve massive decarbonization of the global economy. Effective action will 1) disregard doomsayers 2) empower youth 3) educate those in the middle 4) change systems. He also (appropriately) puts the onus on the world’s rich, as the richest 10 percent of the world creates 50 percent of the greenhouse gases.

Fuel for thought: Rather than not taking a particular flight, we need to “talk about the structures that give rise to the need or desire to take those trips.”

Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2019)

This wife/husband economics team takes on a slew of economic issues, dispelling myths and exposing facts as they go. Such as:

- Studies show that migrants pose little threat to native workers regarding job loss

- Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by migrants or their children

- Our own prejudices about ourselves affects our performance

- Every 10 percent of additional income generates 9 percent more CO2

- Today India averages 5 days a year over 95 degrees; by 2100 there will be 75 such days

- Every 1 degree C warmer = 1.4% drop in GDP in the Poor World

- One-third of US children born into poverty will remain there, compared to 11 percent in the EU

- Per capita US carbon emissions are 22.5 tons per year if measured by where products are consumed, not manufactured

- For many items, the cost of production is no more that 10-15% of the retail cost

Combatting climate change? “Better technologies may not do the trick. People’s consumption will need to fall.”

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Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard (2020)

Simard grew up in a logging family that practiced selective logging in an earlier time. She developed a deep love for and connection to the forest, and eventually worked for logging companies. However, things had changed - selective logging had given way to industrial logging, which meant monocultures and clear-cuts in the name of efficiency and its boss, profit. 

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As a biologist, Simard discovered that trees are much more than commodities - they are instead a community and share resources with each other and warn one another of impending threats via their roots and the fungi that mesh with them, and do much better as a diverse ecosystem than as vast stands of single-species harvestable farms. 

Her research was ground-breaking, so to speak, and got her in trouble with the largely male- and corporate-dominated logging industry, even though it would also mean more profit for them, as heathier forests, where large trees are left standing to look out for their younger progeny - even of different species - are more productive all around. 

Go figure: it turns out that native communities - which we have also tried to "clear-cut" and mono-culturize - already knew about trees' symbiosis and worked to live in harmony with it.  

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America: the Farewell tour by Chris Hedges (2018)

After the Athenian democracy fell to Macedonia, it was 2000 years until another democratic government - the USA. Hedges believes this grand experiment is in fast decline as well, but this time from forces within itself. He sees this having begun in earnest in the 1970's, when politicians began to shift from emphasizing the "common good" to focusing on race, crime, and law and order. Of course it is not coincidental that this followed hard on the civil rights movement of the '60's and the entry of African Americans into society as bona fide citizens - a primal threat to those who had had full power.

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The principle threats to our democracy are unbridled capitalism, which "consumes the structures that sustain it, driving people into debt as social services are diminished"; the Permanent Lie that discredits institutions such as the press, science and public schools; reverting to the Totalitarian need for a simple folk tale to frame life, rather than the messy nuances of thoughtful discussion; and nationalism, which rallies people and diverts their attention away from the ascendancy of the rich over the poor (who are also lured by a focus on moral issues promoted by pandering politicians who could care less but who will do anything for their votes).

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A big part of his book is devoted to conversations with working class people who have seen their communities and workplaces slowly disintegrating in the face of globalization, government neglect and corporate greed.

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"Trump is the face of our collective ideology. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality - a sputtering, narcissistic, imbecilic megalomaniac."