Posts tagged with BOOK REPORT

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Book Report: ‘A Great Aridness’

By Andrew C. Revkin
A Great Aridness “A Great Aridness”

Ari Phillips, who’s pursuing a master’s degree in global policy studies and journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, sent this fine Dot Earth Book Report after reading “A Great Aridness” in preparation for a two-month reporting trip this summer exploring energy use and climate change in the Southwest. You can read more about his project here and follow him on Twitter @re_ari.

Here’s his exploration of this book on drought, climate change and the western side of the Sun Belt:

In the introduction to William deBuys’ recent book “A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest,” Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist who co-directs the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, says: “Climate change will produce winners and losers, and those in the Southwest will be losers. There’s no doubt.”

Broadly defined, the Southwest includes eight states and nearly a quarter of the landmass of the United States – that’s a lot of land, inhabited by a lot of losers. Which is a big part of the problem: the Southwest is growing at a rate that is faster than it can hope to sustain.

Take the Colorado River for example — the Southwest’s only significant source of water. The river’s flow is already over-allocated and slight disruptions can endanger power generation and water supply in the entire region. A recent study called “The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis” found that climate change could add $1 trillion to the costs of water scarcity in the Southwest over the next century.

A 2008 Guggenheim fellowship allowed deBuys, the author of six previous books, to take to the road and talk to the people most familiar with the Southwest about the likely impacts of climate change.

What deBuys finds reinforces what he already knows: that the Southwest, and other subtropical regions including southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, face imminent danger from droughts, fires, heat waves and other social stresses. The operative term here is “imminent,” which is what sets those in the Southwest apart as losers – it’s harder for them to continue living in denial of the impacts of climate change.

One of the most powerful sections of the book, which is very well written and informative, comes during deBuys’ exploration of the Sun Corridor, a megaregion in southern Arizona that includes Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Nogales. Currently equivalent to Indiana in size and population, it is on track to add another Indiana’s worth of residents by 2040.

It is to this area that the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the largest and most expensive aqueduct system in the country, takes water from the Colorado River and diverts it along 336 miles of channels. DeBuys finds that things will be fine for the 3.5 million people who currently depend on this water for daily use as long as (1) predictions of climate change models prove groundless, (2) the kind of droughts documented by tree rings and other records of past climate disruptions don’t occur, and (3) the cities of central Arizona don’t grow so much that they consume their agricultural buffer, their main protection against uncertain years ahead.

Debuys’ main takeaway from his extensive interviews and travels amounts to simple arithmetic involving the above points: (1) climate change makes (2) droughts and (3) growth even more challenging for the Southwest, which is (and always has been) vulnerable to rapid population expansion and resource depletion. The archeological record of the Anasazi and the region’s other ancient civilizations makes this enduring vulnerability clear. For a vivid example, read deBuys’ thoughtful historical account of one drought-induced exodus at Sand Canyon Pueblo in the thirteenth century.

In an article in The Green Fire Times about his book, deBuys states, “Climate change only makes more urgent the big task that has always been before us: to learn how to live in the marvelous arid lands of this continent without further spoiling them. It is an old challenge. We have already had a lot of practice, and we should be better at it. We can be.”

(For a character-driven portrayal of the Southwest’s ongoing water troubles, watch Robert Redford’s new documentary “Watershed,” which tells the story of water use in the Southwest by focusing on the role of the Colorado River.)

For another look at this book, along with Andrew Ross’s portrait of Phoenix, Ariz., “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” please read Cornelia Dean’s paired New York Times reviews.

I recommend that you follow Phillips on Twitter if you’re interested in these issues. Here’s a great example of his output:

A Student’s Conversation With Michael Mann on Climate Science and Climate Wars

By Andrew C. Revkin

Casey Doyle, a student at Warren Wilson College who writes for the Swannanoa Journal, the publication of the school’s Environmental Leadership Center, had the opportunity to speak with the climate scientist Michael Mann when he visited the campus to speak about his book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.”

Here’s their exchange, which counts as a Dot Earth “Book Report” (you are welcome to contribute one as well, when you find some book, new or old, particularly relevant to the discussions on this blog): Read more…

Book Report: Who Speaks for the Climate?

By Andrew C. Revkin

Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University, has for years been been a valuable guide for me to the large, and largely under-appreciated, body of behavioral research illuminating why it’s so hard to gain traction on the super wicked problem of human-driven climate change.

Below Brulle offers a Dot Earth “Book Report”* on “Who Speaks for Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change,” by Maxwell T. Boykoff of the University of Colorado.

Here’s a summary of the book’s core themes that Boykoff gave at the Oxford Martin School of Oxford University last summer:

Here’s Robert Brulle’s summary of the book:

Read more…

Book Report: Oil’s Long Goodbye

By Andrew C. Revkin
The Quest

Michael Levi, who analyzes energy, security and climate issues for the Council on Foreign Relations, is among the first of my contacts on fossil fuel trends to plow through all 804 pages of “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.” This is the new book on humanity’s energy sources and choices by Daniel Yergin, who gained fame and influence for his Pulitzer-winning 1991 account of the history of oil, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” (1991).  (“The Quest”  was praised by Dwight Garner in The Times earlier this week).

oil well in texasMichael Stravato for The New York Times An oil drilling site near Big Wells, Tex. More Photos »

I asked Levi if he could offer a “Book Report” to start a conversation here on Yergin’s arguments, which have made the energy analyst a popular target of people foreseeing turmoil from “peak oil.” (Here’s a reasoned criticism from John C. K. Daly at OilPrice.com*, and an unreasonable assault on Yergin from Christopher Mims.) Certainly the recent burst of new exploration and development of oil fields, both offshore and inland — largely driven by higher oil prices — challenges those seeing (or seeking) an early end to the oil age. As it happens, Levi posted a piece on “Peak Oil and Faith-Based Energy Debates” just yesterday.

Here’s his view of “The Quest”: Read more…

Can a ‘Gaia Killer’ Become a Planet Healer?

By Andrew C. Revkin

The Book Review has just posted my appraisal of “Here on Earth,” an exploration of the evolving human relationship with the planet, by the Australian biologist and environmentalist Tim Flannery. (The video above is one from a set of video snippets in which he describes his book.)

Tim Flannery  Tim Flannery

I was alternately engaged and exasperated by the book, which Flannery casts as a “twin biography of our species and our planet.” I enjoyed his sprawling, celebratory portrait of the spread of life on Earth and his account of the history of natural history, from Darwin and Wallace onward. But when Flannery turns to the modern industrializing world, his eagerness to build the case for H. sapiens as a “Gaia killer” seems to get the better of his background as a scientist.

Whether the result of sloppiness or conscious or subconscious selectivity, the midsection of the book contains repeated patches of interwoven misstatement, fact and hyperbole seemingly aimed at indicting all things manufactured.

Perhaps the most glaring glitch comes when Flannery writes about a species of mid-ocean crustacean found in the Mediterranean following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with an extraordinary level of radioactive polonium-210 in some organs. Read more…

A Teacher’s Primer on Climate Action

By Andrew C. Revkin

Off and on I’ve invited Dot Earth readers to open discussions on books exploring core issues discussed on this blog, and here’s the latest, from Anna Haynes, a blogger and longtime Dot Earth comment contributor. (If there’s a book out there you’d like to discuss, post a comment here or send your “pitch” to dotearth@nytimes.com.) Below, please read Anna’s thoughts on a book by Greg Craven, best known for his series of popular videos deconstructing the climate challenge.

I expect regular Dot Earth readers know about Greg Craven and his viral global warming YouTube videos. A high school science teacher (chemistry and physics) and father of two from Oregon, he addresses the climate controversy from the perspective of the ordinary person who’d like to do what’s right, but is baffled and turned off by the is-so, is-not climate cacophony.

Craven and his online posse turned these videos into a book, “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate,” which is among the most important and unique books about climate change out there. Three things about the book set it apart from the crowd and, I think, make it far more useful to most of us.

Craven makes a point of not telling you what to think; instead, the book is about giving you the tools to think for yourself — to evaluate what you hear, to assess the credibility of various sources, to avoid falling prey to common errors of thought. In short, it gives you the tools to make the best use of the information at hand, given limited time for study, in order to decide for yourself whether we should act.

He looks at the issue from the angle we all should: not “is it true” or “is it x-percent certain” but weighing “what are the rough probabilities, what are the rough risks, what outcomes can we afford,” just as you do in taking out an insurance policy against any calamity. Read more…

Book Report: ‘Blessed Unrest’

By Andrew C. Revkin

Here’s a brief pause for reflection on broader themes before the two- week Copenhagen conference takes over on Dot Earth. Laurie Dougherty, who previously offered a reasoned and impassioned defense of activism as a vital force for progress in the next few decades on humanity’s planet, weighs in now with one of the (far too) irregular Dot Earth reader commentaries on books. In this case, it’s “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World,” by Paul Hawken (Penguin Books, paperback 2008.)

Here’s her interpretation of the book. What’s yours?

“Blessed Unrest” originated in a motley assortment of business cards collected by Paul Hawken during hundreds of speaking engagements over the course of 15 years. As a businessman, environmentalist, author and founder and executive director of the Natural Capital Institute, Hawken is a widely respected spokesperson for socially and environmentally responsible business. After his speeches, small groups would gather to ask questions, share their own insights and experiences – and exchange business cards. In the course of many years and many miles and many, many business cards, Hawken realized that truly there was a movement of unrecognized proportions functioning under the radar screen of general consciousness, unacknowledged by the mainstream media except in isolated reporting on this or that group, this or that issue; a movement just beginning to become conscious of itself, to link up kindred efforts through networking and ever-shifting alliances.

At the Natural Capital Institute Hawken brought together a team of researchers to create a digital database of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and CBOs (community-based organizations) in an attempt to scope out the nature and extent of this civil society movement. Now online with search capabilities on a wide array of categories and keywords, built-in networking and user-enabled interaction similar to Wikipedia, the database WiserEarth contains at this time over 110,000 organizations and thousands of participating individuals. Hawken considers WiserEarth to be the tip of a much greater iceberg.
Read more…

Book Report: ‘On Parrots and People’

By Andrew C. Revkin
Parrot Book(Credit: Viking Press)

As I mentioned on Monday, I’m surrounded by heaps of promising books that are closely related to core themes of Dot Earth – population and consumption patterns, environmental science and ethics, our nonhuman neighbors on this small planet, and more. But I rarely have time to read them, given the never-ending need to track and respond to news as well as develop more thorough print pieces. So I recently decided to start Dot Earth conversations about books by having specialists in various fields, other writers and Dot Earth contributors read new or pending releases and offer some reactions here. These are not formal reviews, but starting points for discussions.

The first book is “Of Parrots and People” (Viking Press), by the journalist and parrot specialist Mira Tweti. I asked David Rothenberg, a neighbor and longtime student of human-animal relations, among many other things, to have a go. He has written many books, including one on why birds sing and his latest on whale communication.

Parrots are clearly extraordinary animals. One remarkable case in point was Alex, an African gray that gained fame for displaying reasoning skills and using a 100-word vocabulary. Alex’s death was covered in what amounted to a moving parrot obituary in The New York Times last year, by my colleague Ben Carey. Is it ethical to keep such an animal in captivity?

If you’ve read this book, can recommend others about bird-human relations, have a parrot or know one, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the benefits humans derive from such pets, and the costs. Below you can read David’s reaction to “Of Parrots and People”: Read more…