GLOBAL WARMING
The Carbon Footprint of Everything Mike Berners-lee, Greystone (APR 19) Hardcover $18.95 (312pp), 978-1-77164-576-8, ECOLOGY & ENVIRONMENT
Since this practical guide to the carbon footprint of everyday goods, foods, and activities was first published in 2010, global warming has only accelerated. Extensive updates reflecting ongoing science and climate change urgency make this revised edition a must for anyone interested in individual or collective action to reduce carbon emissions.
Mike Berners-lee’s research into the full carbon impact of the production, use, and disposal of just under 100 common items discloses important and useful information. Organized from the most carbon-friendly forms of consumption (as of bananas and watching television) to the most egregious (including warfare and car crashes), there are many surprises. For instance, electric bikes are more carbon-friendly than conventional bicycles, given how much carbon-based fuel is required to power our inefficient, carbon-based legs. Details about diapers, plastic bags, and dishwashing also unearth counterintuitive results, even as consumers are cautioned to consider their other adverse environmental impacts.
Helpful graphics, references, and food and shopping list appendices back up this approachable, engaging survey of our unsustainable global actions. The book is designed for dipping into and flipping through, with frequent dashes of humor lightening its weighty topic. Its concluding chapters share constructive strategies for magnifying individual lifestyle changes, like supporting groups that work on negative carbon emissions projects, or working for systemic changes in corporate and government sectors.
Some popular subjects come under Berners-lee’s incisive scrutiny. Holiday flights, cheese, bottled water (“an avoidable disaster that keeps on growing”), and even our children and pets have significant carbon impacts. His personal reflections about these topics are engaging and give pause about what we consume and do—and what trade-offs we are willing to make at home and work.
No matter how environmentally conscious one may already be, this enlightening book will force reconsiderations of how to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.
Water Always Wins
Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge Erica Gies, University of Chicago Press (JUN 17) Hardcover $26 (344pp) 978-0-226-71960-3, SCIENCE
Erica Gies’s book documents how conventional water control efforts damage ecosystems and the water cycle, and how they are overwhelmed by natural disasters driven by climate change. Still, whether in Midwestern floodplains, Vietnam’s mangrove swamps, or among Iraq’s marsh dwellers: Water Always Wins.
Gies looks to ancient and Indigenous technologies that utilize water’s natural ebbs and flows to mitigate the extremes of floods and droughts. She hunts down paleo gravel river beds that store water underground with a California hydrogeologist, tours China’s sponge cities with their landscape architect, and visits Kenya’s “water tower” mountains, which birth water supplies to valleys below.
There’s a memorable discussion about restoring beaver populations in England and the Pacific Northwest that relates the creatures’ impressive prowess at healing salmon runs and wetland ecologies. Also compelling is the book’s focus on water insecurity in a coastal city in India: Gies notes that Tamil people traditionally used a network of linked communal ponds and tanks for their measured water collection and usage, but that, after colonization, the system crumbled, leading to a lower water table, seawater intrusion, and the limitation of local access to tap water to just a few hours a day.
Gies is passionate about protecting water rights for marginalized populations, and so her book examines legal, economic, and political strategies to that effect. It acknowledges that people must change the prevailing “culture of concrete” mindset used in “hyper-engineering” tools like megadams and higher seawalls, instead of nature-based water management systems. The book’s portrayals of those involved in such innovative projects that work with, rather than against, water’s slow, relentless power are vibrant.
Water Always Wins is an inspiring, insightful book about the myriad ways that “water detectives” are helping water to heal the planet.
A Short, Hopeful Guide to Climate Change Oisín Mcgann, Little Island Books (APR 26) Softcover $13.99 (224pp), 978-1-912417-74-2 YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION
Brimming with positive ideas for environmental action and communicating a wealth of accessible scientific information, this climate change primer delivers. Zippy illustrations and a humorous, conversational tone make it a smashing introduction to climate change for all.
Oisín Mcgann is optimistic that there is still time to address the climate emergency. Though humans are “weird” and “motivated more by emotion than by logic,” they are also inventive and creative, having coalesced international efforts to overcome problems that seemed insoluble before, like nuclear weapons proliferation, holes in the ozone layer, and smallpox. He recognizes that young people may have eco-anxiety and feel overwhelmed by the enormity and urgency of the climate crisis; thus, he delivers reassuring advice about being able to channel such feelings into action and solidarity with like-minded people and organizations.
Mcgann does an expert job of breaking down the complex historical and scientific developments that led to this “unprecedented situation.” His lighthearted illustrations are welcome breaks from the more serious text, as are the book’s many sidebars with quotes, factoids, and motivational ideas for further research, as well as for individual and collective action. Its suggestions include simple steps, like cutting down on eating meat and buying fewer new clothes.
The book summarizes big ideas about geopolitics, energy issues, and climate justice, but also focuses on distinct climate problems in Ireland, where Mcgann is from, including the effects of burning peat bogs and the potential for harnessing tidal energy. Its descriptions of what it is like to be a climate change refugee are thoughtful and effective, and even the most serious topics are presented in upbeat, positive terms.
A Short, Hopeful Guide to Climate Change is a fresh, dynamic overview of a serious and complicated issue. It includes plenty of inspirational, empowering ideas for young environmentalists.
★ The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon
Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest
Fábio Zuker, Ezra Fitz (Translator), Milkweed Editions (MAY 10) Softcover $18 (240pp), 978-1-57131-181-8 ESSAYS
From varied corners of the shrinking Amazon, Fábio Zuker’s essays report on perils to humans and wildlife, surveying Brazilian history, geography, and culture and documenting a raft of environmental problems that have been exacerbated by climate change.
The struggles of marginalized populations are evinced through the concerned perspectives of farmers, fishers, shopkeepers, and activists—those who are most adversely affected by, but least empowered by, land development. Local narratives are framed by discussions of larger environmental justice issues and the clash between exploiting and nurturing the natural world. Stories of rural Venezuelan refugees who were displaced by environmental degradation are echoed by Brazilian villagers swelling the ranks of the urban poor. Zuker also focuses on the plight of quilombos, Afro-brazilian communities fighting land grabs by rice and soy factory farms and the pollution of traditional farming and fishing areas.
The essays highlight the balanced interconnections of healthy environments and those that have been unraveled by a rain forest ecosystem under siege. Gold mining, road building, wildfires, and extreme shifts in rainfall bring plagues of soil erosion, water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. Wonderful respite from this weighty reportage comes from Indigenous artist Gustavo Caboco’s dynamic illustrations.
Several pieces examine public health issues for vulnerable Indigenous villagers, tying them to struggles to manage ancestral land. The Bolsanaro administration has pushed to develop these sensitive ecosystems, which are an essential source of traditional food and medicine. An intriguing look at the medical practices of the Upper Rio Negro kumua, or shamans, notes how Indigenous and conventional medicine differ, and how local health suffers with assaults on culture and land.
This unique view of Brazil’s precious, precarious rain forest shimmers with passion and an intimate understanding of “the friction between two worlds, between two ways of relating to the land.”
Fixing the Climate
Strategies for an Uncertain World
David G. Victor & Charles F. Sabel Princeton University Press (JUL 5) Softcover $24.95 (256pp), 978-0-691-22455-8 POLITICAL SCIENCE
In Fixing the Climate, David G. Victor and Charles F. Sabel note that international climate change accords have not initiated the sweeping changes and deep decarbonization needed to avert environmental catastrophe. Thus, a different administrative and problem-solving framework is needed.
As an example, the book outlines the successful 1987 Montreal Protocol, which tackled the deterioration of the ozone layer. The Protocol’s experimentalist governance among nations and industries involved flexible but strict standards for ozone-causing chemicals. The status quo of ozone depletion was soon not an economically wise option: laggards were left without markets for their products and faced more regulation.
By contrast, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and subsequent accords relied on different institutional machinery, wherein diplomatic negotiation and global consensus rules. Victor and Sabel note that without the problem-solving contributions of academic and industry experts, and without incentives and penalty defaults, industrial sectors had no economic reason to invest in technological alternatives. This has only deepened climate change divisions between advanced and developing nations.
The book examines several American case studies of experimentalist governance, utilizing scientific and industry peer review and regulatory flexibility in limiting automobile and sulfur emissions and spurring innovation with electric vehicles. It later investigates Ireland’s management of agricultural pollution, California’s innovations in decarbonizing the electric grid, and efforts to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. These examples highlight that deep decarbonization must be adapted to local conditions and be able to be flexibly managed.
While its subject matter is dense, Fixing the Climate shares an important perspective on means of shifting international climate change efforts into high gear.