"What if global warming isn't only a crisis, what if it's the best chance we're ever going to get to build a better world? 'We could reinvent a different future."
BOOK TRAILER:
A conversation with Naomi Klein:
...To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.
That philosophy — neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”
So much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check... (continues, nyt)
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Review, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis-
Flannery (An Explorer's Notebook: Essays on Life, History, and Climate, 2014, etc.) argues for renewed optimism in human capabilities to reverse the destabilizing effects of climate change.
For years, the author has been in the forefront of spreading the warning of climate change’s dire consequences to a broad audience. “This book describes in plain terms our climate predicament,” he writes, “but it also brings news of exciting tools in the making that could help us avoid climate disaster.” Flannery sees a decided change in governmental responsibility since the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, which suggested the possibility of international political cooperation, and the marginalization of the deniers, whom he finds “perverse. Even grotesque.” The author makes it abundantly clear where we stand—that we are far from achieving the 2 percent solution to global warming—but that there is also diverse, effective, and innovative activity toward cutting carbon dioxide emissions. This is occurring on the individual front—through digital interconnectedness and direct action such as disinvestment campaigns—and through the adoption of a long-view, “third way” of implementing projects that stimulate natural systems to draw the gas out of the air and oceans at a faster rate than we produce it. Flannery crisply outlines what is now known and conjectured about the human influence on climate change, exploring the long ragweed season, the nutritional degradation of crops, and the acidification of the oceans. There are roadblocks to alternative energy sources—as Ralph Nader noted, “the use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun”—but Flannery also finds that money will drive the wind and solar power sources as they rapidly become more efficient. He also puts fracking under great scrutiny, and he makes an intriguing case for the capture and storage of the byproducts of the damage already done.
A sharp summary of energy potentialities, where the good and the bad reside in human hands, hearts, and minds. Kirkus Reviews
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The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.
White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.
“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.”
In the ’70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging ’80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, seemed like a good candidate for a ’70s time capsule — a dusty curio without much lasting impact.
Yet today, “Ecotopia” is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership... (continues)
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I mentioned that Robinson has concrete ideas for creating a utopia. I don't want to do them an injustice by ripping them out of the context of the narrative. But Robinson's most important idea seems to be that we should limit the size of corporations. He also proposes a number of societal changes, some of them dependent on advances in technology (cheap access to a videophone being one of them). Like any work of fiction, the case is stacked in favour of the author's ideas. Would the absence of multinational companies really make the world economic system a fairer structure than it is now? Maybe. It's an attractive idea, and Robinson balances the various elements with skill. He makes the notions seem possible, while making sure that we see how hard they could be to implement. All of this is worked out nicely in the life of our main character. And the book finally rests on the story of Kevin Claiborne, his friends, his loves, and his struggles. The bittersweet ending will stay with me for a long time as a perfect way of encapsulating the underlying ideas of the book, as well as capping off what is a fine story in its own right. James Schellenberg
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On Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility-
"How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common," asks Stewart Brand, "instead of difficult and rare?" Or, to put it another way, how does one get people to develop a natural perspective of their present moment that extends beyond a few days in either direction? The Clock of the Long Now describes a potential solution from the Long Now Foundation, a digerati brain trust co-chaired by Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The other chair, computer scientist Daniel Hillis, gave the group their initial premise in a 1995 Wired magazine articledreaming of a "Millennium Clock" that would measure time on a 10,000-year scale; musician Brian Eno gave the concept of the "Long Now" its name. Although there is a lot of discussion of the clock itself--Where to build it? How to design it?--Brand's main theme is about accepting responsibility for the long-term consequences of our actions. "We are not the culmination of history," he warns, "and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization's story.... We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together." The Clock of the Long Now is a deceptively short book, written in a friendly, at times conversational, style. It can be read in an afternoon, but just might make you think for a lifetime. Maybe even a few lifetimes. Ron Hogan
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From Al Gore's review of Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History-
Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.
Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world. nyt
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