Garbology

Garbology :Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
© 2012 Edward Humes
288 pages

Readers who are passionate about garbage -- a description which includes sanitation workers, victims of SimCity, and ecologists, I assume -- will find no shortage of books on the subject.  Susan Strasser has a history of waste, for instance, and Gone Tomorrow and Garbage Land both follow  refuse through the waste stream.  Garbology has a little history, a little waste-stream-kayaking, and a little of other  trashy topics:  landfill archaeology and oceanic stewardship, for instance.    You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it is less an island of debris and more a vast expanse of water filled with tiny bits of plastic, a chowder of sorts which is an enormous challenge both to clean and to understand the impact of. How does that much plastic particulate affect the human food chain?   Much of the trash comes from the plastic that covers every aspect of our everyday lives: the plastic wrapping around anything we buy from the grocery store, the plastic inside boxes of goods, etc. Accordingly the rise of plastic merits its own chapter, as does the story of one woman who was driven by economy to reduce as much waste  as she could.  Eventual author of The Zero Waste Home, Bea Johnson's interview offers many ideas for replacing expensive consumer products with homemade alternatives, like three-ingredient cleaning supplies that can handle pretty much anything.     There are other stirring tales of ordinary citizens being inspired to take action, like one man who launched a campaign to end ubiquitous one-time use of plastic bags.   For the reader with a vague interest in waste and environmental stewardship, Garbology affords a brief look at many different aspects of the question, though more detailed works are out there. They include the ones I mentioned in the beginning, as well as works like Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.    Although there's not an enormous amount of information on any one particular topic, I liked the scientific aspects and the zero waste author's approach. Humes' fundamental conviction -- that consuming natural resources to produce goods and then immediately shoving them underground, consuming more resources to lock them away,  is staggeringly wasteful and sloppy -- bears repeating.


Related:
Garbage Land:  on the Secret Trail of Trash, Elizabeth Royte
Waste and Want: A Social History of Garbage, Susan Strasser
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle
Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Helen Rogers
Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, Susan Freinkel

You know what's strange? All of these books about garbage are by women. It doesn't strike me as topic that would necessarily have a strong sex bias, but at least now Humes has broken the monopoly.

The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss

The Deep: the Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
253 pages
© 2007 Claire Nouvian

I've been enjoying a gallery book devoted to the extraordinary creatures of the deep sea these past two weeks.  Edited by Claire Nouvian, The Deep collects  some of the best photography produced by the study of the ocean floor in the last decade, along with pieces by marine biologists and geologists commenting on the submarine ecosystem.  The sheer abundance of life on the surface of the Earth boggles the mind, but more than 90% of the planet's estimated biomass is within the oceans.  The Deep is first and foremost a collection of photographs, presented in full-page or two-page spreads.  They are a marvel; while some creatures have vaguely familiar shapes, resembling weird fish or weird octupi, the majority are...sights into themselves.  Some are transparent, others string themselves with organic lights, putting bacteria to work.  They exist in a world without light. While some only live in the deep seasonally, ascending to warmer and brighter waters when there's more food for the taking, others never leave the seafloor. Some feast on the remains of the upper level of the ocean, like the vast carcasses of whales; others life off of chemicals seeping from the sea floor or being expelled.    New species are constantly being discovered here, and many do not even have names; they exist as images that astound the mind with their alienness.  What a treasure Earth is!

The Oceans

The Oceans
© 2000 Ellen J. Prager with Sylvia A. Earle
314 pages

Seventy percent of the Earth's surface is covered in water, constituting a vast and largely unknown world of its own -- vitally important to ours, but scarcely explored and barely understood. Beneath the placid (but sometimes storm-tossed) surface lay valley with depths that have never been plumbed; volcanic mountains; great beasts whose size staggers the imagination, and creatures so bizarre that they could just as easily hail from another world. The Oceans is a brief but substantial introduction to this fascinating and vitally important element of our planet.

Life began in the oceans, albeit in very different waters from the ones we delight in today. Prager opens the book with a history of 'evolution's drama', following the growth and divergence of life through th Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, ending with our own Cenozoic. The oceans have been home to a marvelous variety of life throughout the ages, and the authors devote the rest of the book to understanding the current oceanic environment, examine its chemical, geologic, and biological aspects in turn. Even those of us who don't live near a coast experience the ocean's effects on our lives, through weather; a separate section covers hurricanes, monsoons, El Niño effects, sea level changes, and the increasing impact of global warming. Given how much of our  economies -- indeed, planetary life itself -- depends on the health of the seas, an understanding of them is crucial, especially for those in political and economic leadership. Unfortunately, humans -- not known for being the most farsighted of creatures -- have been steadily destroying that environment for decades. In "A Once-Bountiful Sea",  the authors examine the kinds of damage being done, but offer some encouragement in the fact that some governments are taking the issue seriously, if only out of economic reality and not out of concern for the global environment. The final chapter looks to the future of oceanography, for what we know is dwarfed by what we don't; only 95% of the ocean have been explored. The best is yet to come.

While the subject is fascinating by itself, and utterly relevant, Ellen Prager also proves to be an excellent guide through the oceans, not drowning the reader in details but still delivering depth. She proves talented at explaining fundamental processes in a lucid way -- for instance, showing how waves worth.  She's the author of several other books (Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: the Ocean's Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter;  Furious Earth: the Science and Nature of Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis, among others), and I'll definitely be looking into them in the future.

Related:

• Virtually anything by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. 

Earth Science Made Simple

Earth Science Made Simple
© 2004 Edward F. Albin
224 pages

Earth science! Fun!  I enjoy reading these little guides as introductions to a subject or refreshers on it, and Earth Science Made Simple fits the bill.  Four separate sections cover Geology, Oceanography, Meteorology, and Planetary Science, the last of which applies the principles observed on Earth to understand  the other planets in the solar system.  The book begins with the basics, introducing geology with a primer on atoms and elements. The authors frequently remind readers of material they've surveyed already, when new material is building upon it, mitigating the occasional need to thumb back through the book. The introductions serve the text well, connecting sections together, and the text is replete with illustrations, most of which are helpful. Only one, a list of the planets, seemed more distracting than helpful: while the authors make it clear the planets are not drawn to scale,  they do depict the planets as varying in size (Jupiter being large compared to the rest, Pluto being tiny) -- which will throw readers off when they see Venus (almost as large as Earth) as being drawn slightly smaller than Mercury!

Because this is an introduction to the subject,  more detailed explanations are rare. Were they present, the book would be much larger.  While there are no end-of-chapter quizzes for the reader to test comprehension, the sections open with a glossary of terms that you should be able to identify at section's end, and there are numerous little practical experiments suggested in sidebars that readers can use to see principles at work for themselves -- like witnessing crystal growth after  introducing distilled Epsom salt into a pie pan coated in black construction paper, then leaving it in direct sunlight.  This lives up to the strong expectations I have of the Made Simple series.