The Bicycle Diaries

The Bicycle Diaries: My 21,000 Mile Ride for the Climate
© 2014 David Kroodsma
428 pages

The Bicycle Diaries combines travel and climate-change advocacy, both literally as a trip and throughout the book. As Kroodsma makes his way through Mexico, Central America, and the mountainous roads of South America,  he talks to locals, from retired presidents to impoverished farmers, about the ways their landscape is changing and discusses with them the ways climate change will further alter their homes, health, and livelihood.   The book is thus a tour of these regions by bike and a survey of the various ways climate will affect the future, as seemingly every place he visits is imperiled either by development or by climactic alteration.

 Although Peruvian villagers aren’t exactly a primary source of problematic emissions,  developing countries and their poor are the most at risk to future changes,  and Kroodsma wanted to increase awareness on all fronts – communicating what he knew to people young and old as he cycled, learning from his discussions with people about their experiences.  This a tale with great appeal, from the travel descriptions of varied landscapes (the beautiful Andes, salt flats the size of New Jersey, stupefyingly rich forests,  to the candid interactions with people from the poor and marginalized to the wealthy and powerful.   Kroodsma is continually amazed by the hospitality of strangers over the course of the year, and challenged by the fact that many people seem happy with their lives despite having so little.  The spread of the internet into very remote places was also a pleasing surprise, as it meant more opportunities at less expense.   The virtue of bicycles comes up quite often, as you might imagine -- from their travel merits (making it easier for Kroodsma to interact with people),  to their environmental impact, to their role in making cities more livable places.

The Water Will Come

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
© 2017 Jeff Goodell
332 pages

Complex problems of enormous scale rarely have a patent solution. There are, however, rational responses. In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell reviews the way a few cities across the globe are moving to address the growing problem of rising sea levels, from flat denial  to grandiose plans to raise entire city centers. Goodell visits Miami, New York,  Venice, and communities in the Arctic circle, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands.  Although Goodwell is hopeful that action can be taken, he's left with the grim conclusion that many communities may simply be abandoned and their people removed to higher ground.

Goodell reviews both the various ways rising water will threaten communities near seaboards, as well as their responses. Rising waters will lead to widespread property forfeiture, of course, but floods and storm surges will become worse.   Invasive waters are not simply the ocean with a bigger footprint:   waters sweeping through urban areas become toxic soups of offal and waste fluids,  providing a perfect vector for health crises  While it's easy for most people alive today not to worry about 2100, and easier still to shrug and say that those clever people of 2099 will no doubt have extraordinary technology to solve these problems,  rising floods today are an immediate risk.  Hurricane Sandy added particular impetus to New York City's own risk assessment goals: they intend to build floodwalls around some of the most vulnerable areas.    Venice, Italy, has been fighting its own reclamation by the sea for centuries, but tidal flooding has grown worse and the city now finds itself struggling to complete a controversial tidal barrier.   While Miami is wealthy enough that it can conceivably plow money into infrastructure to help it adapt to the future, places like the Marshall Islands can only look abroad for help.  If the Marshalls are reclaimed by the ocean, their population will have to find new homes abroad -- and as the migrant crisis provoked by the ISIS gang-state indicates, that won't be pretty.

Goodell's survey involved interviews with policymakers and scientists alike, and helps readers understand why more actions aren't being taken.  Many Miami developers don't care about sea level changes because they're short-term investors: once they sell the development, they move on.  The future peril of the development is for its owners and subletters to worry about.  There's also the fact that climate response  has to be mediated through society and governments that are not only unwieldy, but beset with other considerations as well. President Obama may have believed strongly in the threat posed by change, but when he's badgered by the author as to why he allowed the Alaskan oil pipeline to continue, the president patiently explained that no president is truly free to do what he wants; he enters office with wheels already in motion, and  he has to not only work through Congress but take into account politics and economics. If Goodell succeeds in promoting the need to plan for rising sea levels, it will owe to the threat itself and not his delivery; he appears to see only this problem, and dismisses any opposition. He refers to multiple people as "[cityname]'s Trump", or "the [country-adjective] Trump",  but that's confusing to say the least. Are they trumplike because they're developers? Populists? Overenthusiastic twitter-ers? 

This is an important matter for concerned citizens to consider, especially in seaboard communities like Miami which are already fighting "sunny day flooding" because increases in sealevels have submerged their seaside drain outlets. 

The Ends of the World

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
© 2017 Peter Brannen
336 pages

Earth has tried to kill us five times before, and now it's at it again. (To be fair, we're kind of egging it on.)   The Ends of the World is a long natural history of life on Earth which examines five mass extinctions, period in which the majority of life was destroyed. Each time it rebounded as the Earth itself continued to grow, supercontinents forming and breaking up, the air and oceans altering in their chemistry. Although direct causes of species-death vary by incident,   and are sometimes so numerous that it's rather like the murder suspects on Agatha  Christie's Orient Express,   climate is a crucial factor in each one. Specifically, author argues that as carbon dioxide goes, so goes the planet.

We live in a moment in time -- a period when the Earth is rather comfortable for our species and those we rely on.  That wasn't the case for most of Earth's history; oxygen took at least a billion years to arrive, and land-based plants themselves are relatively recent arrivals, appearing 700 million years ago at the earliest.  Even once Earth began to look familiar --  familiar continents, trees,  rabbits, etc -- it wasn't settled    There are geological cycles  -- shifts between glacial and tropical epochs, for for instance -- at work.   Other cycles involve carbon as it travels between land, sea, and air, and this is a cycle that can play hell with life if it gets out of kilter and...oh, turns the Earth into a hothouse, or acidifies the ocean and kills everything there.  And then there's vulcanism -- not only do mass eruptions offload unwieldy tons of CO2 at once, but sometimes they cover areas the size of the United States or Russia in  two mile-deep tide of lava.   Even a prepper with a bulging bug-out bag and a remote hideout would be hard pressed to come back from that.

Geological forces are usually slow and ponderous -- glacial.  But slow forces building up can reach a threshold where everything goes sideways all at once, a catastrophic quantum leap. Think of an earthquake, and the slow-but-accumulating stresses that build up between tectonic plates until they finally slip and a city is reduced to rubble in seconds. Brannen believes this happens with atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, too.   Even when the cause of an extinction seems outside, unavoidable, and sudden -- like the asteroid impact that has the primary credit for killing the dinosaurs,  the climate can't be ignored. The chapter on the K-T extinction argues that the asteroid collision wasn't responsible for the mass extinction on its own: while it would have  done an enormous amount of local damage,  its real contribution was to cause so much tectonic distress that mass volcanic eruptions and outgassing crippled the atmosphere.

If you have anticipated that the book ends with a few pointed remarks about global warming and the present state of the carbon cycle, well -- you're on the mark. Brannen dedicates the last section of the book debating the 'sixth extinction', and humanity's role in clearing the earth of megafauna and challenging the old super-volcanoes in terms of how much gas can be pumped into the atmosphere.   The debate covered shies away from putting the human-induced extinctions of many species into the category of these documented five.  The five are judged to have been global events, near-complete ecosystem collapses: the only survivors were in weird niches, ecological islands. (Or perhaps on literal islands.) While humans have deliberately killed many species and accidentally obliterated more, we've also repopulated the Earth with species under our control: cattle, oxen, sheep,  the like.  Ecosystems have been formed and sometimes destroyed, but we're not facing  imminent and global collapse.    Even so ,the  author argues, the role of the carbon cycle in previous mass extinctions should be foremost in our mind, because it's not just a matter of rising seas.  Ocean acidification from CO2 absorption  is the "other" carbon problem, compromising as it does submarine ecosystems like those centered on coral reefs. (This "other" problem comes up a few times in another science/nature book I'm reading, Lost Antarctica.)


Although it's a little odd to describe a book recording the near-total loss of life on Earth not one but five times as 'fun',, Ends of the World kind of is,  a morbid Planet Earth.  I particularly appreciated being able to sit in on debates in the last two chapters, as Brennan interviews various scientists who are contending (politely) with one another for the most accurate and factually-supported theory..  Ends of the World may expose many readers to the carbon cycle, something I've heard little about,  and there's nothing quite like mile-deep sheets of lava rolling over continents to pique the imagination!

Global Weirdness

Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future
© 2013 Climate Central
224 pages
          

Global Weirdness is a climate briefing for the civic body; short, well-organized, and to the point.  Produced by Climate Central,  the book is divided into three parts; the first reviews the science of climate change, considering not just greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor, but contributors from Earth itself.  A second section examines what effects of climate change we are currently witnessing, and the final part makes tentative guesses about what changes we might see in the future.  Weirdness, despite its playful title, is a serious and cautious work.  The authors’ essential point is that we on Earth are in the midst of a climate change, a gradual heating; the trend is long term, and not defied by the vagaries of daily weather.  The trick is that the Earth is a massive place, and its climate enormously complicated; the chaos-wheel set in motion by one factor has consequences we cannot predict. What is clear is that the Earth as a whole is getting warmer, and its weather more unstable;  increased stress is inevitable for both humans and especially the global ecosystem.  More disturbingly, there’s not a great deal we can do about it; even if the global civilization suddenly stopped emitting greenhouse gases on an industrial scale, the planet would still continue to heat for a hundred years thereafter because of delayed actions. There exists presently no silver bullet; none of the alternative energy sources are particularly attractive.   Weirdness is a call to awareness that we are in for a rough century. 

This week at the library: Chimpanzees, El Niño, and simple living

This week at the library I've been working through a lull, having finished my last Stack o' Books and having not yet gotten another one. My plans to fetch said stack were modified after I did a twelve-mile hike through hills on Saturday and consequently spent Sunday in bed watching episodes of The Office on DVD. Turns out I'm not as rough and ready as I thought.  I've been waiting for some books to arrive in the post;  one was ordered weeks ago from Georgia. I could walked over and gotten it by this point! Happily it arrived today. I've been biding my time reading a book on composting.  

In the last couple of weeks I’ve read two science books which won’t quite get full comments. The second was Frans de Waal’s Good-Natured, which concerns empathy in animals and  particularly chimpanzees. Considering how much of the book focuses on the same chimpanzees and topics covered in previous works, it’s somewhat redundant; throughout he argues that animals like elephants and chimpanzees are quite socially intelligent,  and delivers example after example to demonstrate how monkeys and chimpanzees act in anticipation of one another’s emotional states, motivated by personal attachment as well as selfish concern.  It’s eye-opening and wondrous if you’ve not read de Waal before, but…I have, and very recently. 

On a different note I read through Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines, and Emperors, which first attributes the decline of various nation-states to El Niño periods. Considering that in dirt another scientist pinned the decline of some of the same nation-states on their used-up soil,  Flood is something of an example of specialists interpreting everything according to their unique focus. Midway he looks at the stresses climate change has put on historic nations in general, but that is done with more punch in Jared Diamond’s Collapse.  I much prefer the humility of dirt, which offered soil exhaustion as one source of decline, but not The One True Reason.  Fagan remains unique in the field of paleoclimatology, or archaeological meteorology, however.

Presently, I'm reading a delightful book on simple living, and anticipate receiving The Metropolitan Revolution through interlibrary loan shortly enough. Some reviews are in the works for Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England and On Desire, the latter being nearly finished.  Daily Life took some getting into; the first chapter is a formidable treatment of sunken earth homes which even I couldn't take to. Happily after that there's trade, family life, and other such merriment.  Now that I've read about the Anglo-Saxons, I'm free to read The Vikings: can't put the cart before the warhorse!

So, after a busy weekend outdoors and in, the lull is passed and it's on for a few more interesting books. Happy reading, all!

eaarth

earth: making a life on a tough new planet
© 2010 Bill McKibben
253 pages

Oh, we're in trouble.  For two decades, forward-thinking politicians have made noise about climate change. "We've gotta do something to save the world for our grandchildren," they say. But the consequence of our actions as a global society are no longer the future's problem. The future is here. We're living on a new Earth, one considerably more unstable and less congenial to our kind of life than the one which has existed for hundreds of thousands year prior. This new Earth, which McKibben dubs eaarth, won't be kind to us, or anyone else. Life as you know it is over, and the sprawling governments of Earth can't possible adapt quickly enough. The good news is, there there are no solutions, there are ways to minimize the damage. After establishing how utterly up the creek we are, McKibben delivers an impassioned case for the revival of localism and citizen-led change.

Change will come regardless of our attitude, but we're really not ready for the four horsemen of the developing climate catastrophe -- pestilence, drought, flooding, and famine. We're starting to run out of the energy we use to make changes, including the kind of changes responding to this new eaarth requires. This is doubly problematic considering how much we rely on petroleum, now peaking,  to keep our global food network going, trucking food hither and yon and processing it into all manner of fun things with unpronounceable ingredients.  Starvation isn't imminent: it's now. The amount of food per acre is decreasing, while the rate of malnourished is on the rise -- and somewhere in the shadows of history, a vindicated Thomas Malthus laughs bitterly.

Chaos is going to be the new normal; we can't fix it, we can only ride out the wave, but maybe if we start early enough we can find ourselves someplace worthwhile when all is said and done. In the second half of his work, McKibben offers ideas as to how we can keep people feed, maintain a functioning electric grid, and stay online.  McKibben advocates a more fine-grained approach: instead of having great big farms of monocultures, grow different kinds of foods everywhere you can, using ecology to work for your behalf: eliminate waste  by turning it into compost. Stop using gadgets that constantly drain power, and start generating your own by covering the roof with solar panels and turning streams into little hydropower plants. People all over, and especially Americans, have to start doing this because the national government is now completely dysfunctional beyond blowing up kids in Pakistan or spying on its citizenry:  the changes to be made have to be made by us.

eaarth is simultaneously alarming and invigorating.

This week at the library: Little Ice Age, and Bernard Cornwell

Last night I finished Battleflag, third in the Nathaniel Starbuck series. Seeing as I just finished and commented on Copperhead, posting extensive thoughts on Battleflag seemed redundant. Nate is still the son of a Boston abolitionist preacher fighting for the south to rebel against his father and his best friend Adam is following his conscience by a course that sets him against his own father, a southern aristocrat, and they're not even the most interesting characters in the book. What sets Battleflag apart is the sudden  and hilarious transformation of a contemptible slave-holding drunk who has a military office because of political favors into  a sympathetic character. I'd reveal more, but for spoilers. The ending is also brilliant, because it brings Nate into direct collision with his father, who is a major character as well. Daddy Starbuck's appearance makes Nate far more likable, because in spite of the abolitionist vein of his preaching, the Reverend Starbuck  is a decidedly unpleasant man to spend time with. The next, and so far final, book in the series is Antietam.

Before that, though, I read Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. It's an odd blend of history and science, and chronicles a long and weary succession of droughts, famines, plagues, and death. Small wonder the Calvinists subscribed to such a vicious god: if I'd lived through these years I'd start to think someone was out to get me, too.  Fagan doesn't try to make a case for the age being caused by one thing: although there are meteorological cycles to consider, the timespan was punctuated by volcano eruptions which didn't help things. The evidence Fagan uses ranges from the solid (weather records kept by farmers, monks, and the like) to the more dubious (changes in art, and the church's frequency of "Dear God in Heaven PLEASE STOP WITH THE PESTILENCE BIT" prayers), but Fagan clearly made pains to create a big picture understanding: the most notable illustration in the book is a two page map spread of Europe, which portrays the weather patterns for a particular month and includes references or evidence of the weather that at that time -- rain in Portugal, severe snow in Denmark, and so on.  All told, Little Ice Age proved an interesting read, illustrating  how quickly the weather can change and how severely it can effect human lives, something I'd hope we're starting to pick up on after the calamities of recent years.

I also finished James Howard Kunstler's Home from Nowhere, but it will merit its own post.

Note to self, stop buying books. Amazon delivers them more quickly than I can read them. I'm not kidding -- I ordered two books on Monday, figuring they'd be here in a week and a half to two weeks. In the meantime, I'd  chew over a couple of books at the library I've been interested in for a while now. But today, this morning, the books arrived. Now I have four new books waiting to be read in addition to my library books. Hmph. They are, for  the curious:

• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I waited for this book's release all last year. 
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck. This is also a new release, and by one of the authors of Suburban Nation, one of my top ten favorites of last year.
• Earth: An Intimate History, Richard Foley.  My second science read for the year, this time in geology.
• The Age of Steam, Thomas Crump. I bought this one to feed my hunger for trains, and then realized the library had a copy of Christian Wolmar's The Great Railroad Revolution. I don't want to binge, so this is low priority even though it also features a subject I'd like to find a book dedicated to, which is riverboats.

From the library, I have...

• Patterns of Home, a spin-off of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which I intend to read one day if I find a copy that isn't priced so dearly.  The book examines elements of successful home construction, like proportion and sunlight management. 
• Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment , various authors including Robert Bellah. I'd intended for this to be my next serious read, but considering my interest in Antifragile, it may wait. 

The Humans Who Went Extinct

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
© 2010 Clive Finlayson
256 pages

Whatever happened to the Neanderthals? Did Homo sapiens drive our beefy cousins into extinction in the first of many exercises in genocide as we spread across the planet? Poppycock, suggests Clive Finlayson, to whom such a suggestion is the very height of hubris. His The Humans Who Went Extinct paints of a picture of generations of climate change hitting the planet like a rolling barrage, stressing increasingly marginal bands of hominids -- humans and Neanderthals alike. Eventually the Neanderthals succumbed; the difference between the species, Finlayson writes, is that human populations were lucky enough to be in areas where they could adapt to the unpredictable environment. 

I've never had a problem with the Humans Are Homicidal Maniacs theory as applied to Neanderthal death, because we have a proven track record in that regard. Name a living species, and we've probably driven most of their extended family into extinction. Finlayson thinks the idea is rubbish, and while he's at it he also doesn't cotton to the idea of humans being responsible for other mass extinctions, like the mammoths. No, the malefactor was climate change, and climate change alone. Neanderthals weren't the slow, stupid brutes that people like to fancy themselves as having killed off in a feat demonstrating superior ability and intelligence: they were bigger-brained than we were, using tools and creating art just as we did. And their kill sites demonstrate that they were an adaptable and agile species to boot, devouring tricky prey like rabbits and birds.

Finlayson's work is very much inspired by Guns, Germs, and Steel, which he refers to repeatedly: his last substantive chapter leads directly into Diamond's work, which demonstrated the importance of geography in human affairs. In Humans Who Went Extinct, geography and climate are the main actors. He relies both on traditional archaeological evidence and genetic tracking to put forth his case, but the overweening emphasis climate change seemed a bit much for me. I can accept human populations being marginal and strained, but surely we bear some responsibility? In those instances where Sapiens and Neanderthals shared the same area, I find it hard to imagine the two living in peace.  Part of the difficulty for me in accepting Finlayson's arguments wholly is that the evidence is hard to come by, relying in part on inference. The scope of the question also poses a problem for anyone looking for definitive Answer: the drama of extinction played out on a a stage that encompassed most of the "old world", and thousands of years. My biggest beef with Finlayson is  his dismissal of our having any role in killing off any of the ice age fauna, though that's only a sidenote and he may have been referring only to the European species.

The Humans Who Went Extinct gives readers curious about the world early humans lived in something to chew over. Its view of that world as being turbulent and hostile, one that we were lucky to survive in, let alone conquer, is definitely one to consider, as is his depiction of the Neanderthals as people quite like us who had the misfortune of being in the wrong spots of the globe at the wrong time, whose population bottlenecks resulted in extinction.

This Week at the Library (16 November)

The postman was kind to me this week, delivering a batch of reading I'm very much looking forward to. Some of the books I received include works I’ve been intending to read all year long: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles and Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Discovering the World Columbus Created. Adding to that is The Humans Who Went Extinct, which I’ve had on my 'book wishlist' since its inception, and the most recent book in the Star Trek Voyager Relaunch, The Eternal Tide. And who is that on the cover?

Janeway's back and you're gonna be in trouble

Hey-la, hey-la, Janeway's back...

Oh, what fun times we’ll have. Also, to go along with The Humans Who Went Extinct, I’m going to be exploring Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax series, which establishes an alternate universe where Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, are supreme on Earth. I have the first book, Hominids, checked out from the library.  My reading tends to flow in moods, and right now the prevailing wind is one of natural history.

Speaking of which, I finally finished Twilight of the Mammoths, which I began....months ago. I'd wanted to learn more about the megafauna that dominated the Americas before humans arrived. I'm utterly fascinated by the idea of primitive North America as a land of lions and cheetahs, a wilderness teeming more with large life than even Africa. As it turns out, a primary source for learning about ancient mammalian behaviour is...dung. Dung is mentioned more  in Twilight of the Mammoths than it is in Flushed: how the Plumber Saved Civilization. That I mark impressive, but it's versatile stuff, dung. The oh-so-serious dung dissection didn't interact well with my desire to be awed, so my interest trailed off until being reignited by Baxter and Pratchett's The Long Earth, which involves as part of its setting an Earth in which humans never spread to the Americas, and so the native ecology is intact. Twilight exists to argue that human predation ("overkill") was the primary cause of megafauna extinctions in the Americas, as opposed to climate change.  In the decades since Martin released this book, I believe overkill has become the standard explanation, but even so this is a worthwhile book for the curious mind. It puts overkill on solid ground for those new to it, provides a catalog of large animals that were driven into extinction,  and ends with a smaller argument advocating for the restoration of the prehuman ecology, one using still-living animals to replace the many gaps the spread of human civilization created. He suggests, for example, using camels to counter the spread of mesquite in the southwest.