Environment Books - Page 12

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

Elizabeth Royte

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water.
Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.
In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?
A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Elizabeth Kolbert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Poetry when we need science 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is another famous book on global warming. It is not as lightweight as Al Gore's book, which is basically a rock video put down on paper. This book is a series of stories and vigenttes. It certainly reads easily. Kolbert is a talented writer, and has produced a very easy to read book.

But this is not really a subject where we need more easy to read books. Kolbert's underlying assumptions are the same as Al Gore's. First, global warming is an absolute fact, it is caused by human CO2 emissions and, if we do not stop it, life as we know it will come to an end. Second, the reason that we do not act to stop this danger is that people are idiots, who can not understand science. So, if we talk real slow, and have lots of pictures, maybe we can teach these idiots to save themselves.

Kolbert does not go to Gore's coffee-table extremes. While she does not have any honest to goodness footnotes, she does actually cite us to eight pages of sources at the end. If Gore's book is basically a comic book, her book is about the level one would expect in a middle-brow monthly magazine. It is serious, but not very.

Here is the problem, Al and Ms. Kolbert. Many of us are not persuaded that the world is coming to an end. Many of us would like to see hard, well-reasoned science on the subject. Many of us would like to see the thoughts of skeptics taken seriously instead of brushed aside or mocked. This book does none of those things. It basically tells a bunch of stories, and makes no effort to make a serious, sustained and logical argument. It is possible that Gore and Kolbert are right, but it is going to take a much more serious scientific argument to persuade me.

I am less persuaded then I might be, because, even with my scanty knowledge on the issue, I can see her consciously tilting the evidence her way. Example. At one point, she talks about Greenland. She gives us a very short history of Greenland, noting that there were Norse settlers there for 400 years, who "scraped" out a living and then just kind of disappeared for reasons that Kolbert does not attempt to explain. These Norse settlements were founded at the height of the Medieval Warming -- when conditions were fairly nice -- and they died out due to the Little Ice Age, when it got so cold they could not survive. Kolbert knows that, because she refers to both the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age at other parts of the book.

BUT she also knows that issues are very controversial. Those who argue for the global warming thesis support their view by arguing that it is much warmer now than it has been for a very long time. Skeptics counter, by pointing to the existence of the Medieval Warming period, among other times. Thus, supporters of the global warming theory have recently taken to either denying that the Medieval Warming period occurred, or seeking to minimize it in some way.

So, by very carefully not mentioning the climatic reasons why the Norse colony on Greenland died out, Kolbert is consciously slanting her evidence to support her theory. Again, this does not prove that she is wrong. It does, however, prove that you can not trust her to present the facts in an unbiased manner.

Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

Derrick Jensen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

a bit silly 2 out of 5 stars.
8 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I have read most of derrick jensen's books, and he makes good arguments but they are handpicked.....he pulls down civilisation with all its ills and injustices, but offers no better solution.....He himself eats salmon but bemoans its demise....he himself likes to gamble....eat meat.....travel by car and plane etc.....yet criticises a society and its people for doing the same thing.....no example is set or put into practice.....it is easy to pull apart something, but alot harder to replace or rebuild.....in the end the feeling is; whats his point and it all seems abit silly to rage against the machine that he himself embraces and benefits from.....a good read but shallow at the same time.....walk the talk jensen and you'll add some meat to the words written....rod simpson...australia

Editorial Review:

"Derrick Jensen is a rare and original voice of sanity in a chaotic world. He has wisdom and wit, grace and style, and is a wonderful guide to a good life beautifully lived."-Howard Zinn

The companion piece to Derrick Jensen's immensely popular and highly acclaimed works A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame stands to become Jensen's most influential book. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.

The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival

Marq de Villiers

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Editorial Review:

What is the fate of the world as we know it?

Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, pandemics, cosmic radiation, gamma bursts from space, colliding comets, and asteroids—these things used to worry us from time to time, but now they have become the background noise of our culture. Are natural calamities indeed more probable, and more frequent, than they were? Are things getting worse? Are the boundaries between natural and human-caused calamities blurring? Are we part of the problem? If so, what can we do about it?

            In The End, award-winning writer Marq de Villiers examines these questions at a time when there is an urgent need to understand the perils that confront us, to act in such a way as best we can for the inevitable disasters when they come.

            We can do nothing about some natural calamities, but about others we can do a great deal. De Villiers helps us understand which is which, and lays out some provocative ideas for mitigating the damage all such calamities can inflict on us and our world.

            The End is a brilliant and challenging look at what lies ahead, and at what we can do to influence our future.

(20081001)

The Firecracker Boys: H-bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement

Dan O'Neill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 225 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Stunning, moving, richly detailed 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I read this book a few summers ago, and I couldn't put it down. O'Neill's exhaustive research--including many personal interviews--helps solidify this book's place in the pantheon of great historical non-fiction of the 20th century. "The Firecracker Boys" picks up after World War II when the United States government, eager to find peaceful uses for nuclear power, proposed building a harbor near the remote Alaskan village of Point Hope using megaton nuclear explosions in a plan called "Project Chariot." The ambitious plan, which supporters felt could redeem nuclear weapons before the very eyes of a generation who saw its horrific power demonstrated on Japan, met fierce resistance among biologists, anthropologists, and most importantly local Alaska Native villagers of the region. These opponents feared radiation, debris fallout, and that the government continued to deny or downplay dangers of Project Chariot. O'Neill charts, in beautiful detail, the high-minded idealism of Project Chariot supporters against the burgeoning grassroots resistance which demanded fair recognition of Project Chariot's irreversible damage.

While Project Chariot first arrived, and met its doom, in a remote quarter of the globe, this story is firmly fixed on the world stage. This is not the anecdotal story of a failed gimmick; rather, this is the genesis of the movement towards limiting nuclear power, recognizing environmental impact, and treating Alaska Natives as more than haphazard bystanders to industrial progress. People, personalities, subplots, and larger impacts for the whole of humanity enliven this story and give Project Chariot a rich context. I whole-heartedly recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

In 1958, Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, unveiled his plan to detonate six nuclear bombs off the Alaskan coast to create a new harbor. However, the plan was blocked by a handful of Eskimos and biologists who succeeded in preventing massive nuclear devastation potentially far greater than that of the Chernobyl blast. The Firecracker Boys is a story of the U.S. government's arrogance and deception, and the brave people who fought against it--launching America's environmental movement. As one of Alaska's most prominent authors, Dan O'Neill brings to these pages his love of Alaska's landscape, his skill as a nature and science writer, and his determination to expose one of the most shocking chapters of the Nuclear Age.

Adventures in Tornado Alley: The Storm Chasers

Mike Hollingshead, Eric Nguyen

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From surreal skyscapes to wholesale destruction: the most dramatic scenes from the natural world.

The destructive power of nature has always been a source of fear and fascination, and never more so than now, when climate change and extreme weather conditions are constantly in the news. Across the central United States, the infamous storms of Tornado Alley are fueled by the collision of cold fronts from Canada and warm fronts from the Gulf of Mexico. People have been chasing these storms for decades in pursuit of thrilling experiences, but now a new generation of storm chasers is combining scientific knowledge with powerful images.

This book follows Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen on seventeen chases through Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, illustrating the unfolding events with sequential shots and a running commentary by the chasers themselves. These spectacular storm portfolios are expanded with special features on weather phenomena like hail and mammatus clouds plus insights into forecasting and research. 340 color illustrations.

The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A thoughtful open letter to all of humanity, highly recommended to readers of all faiths and backgrounds 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Buddhist monk, scholar, and human rights activist Thich Nhat Hanh presents The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, a thoughtful, almost pocket-sized guide to the spiritual dimension of environmentalism, as seen from a Buddhist perspective. Hanh argues that the impermanence of all things should not be used as an excuse to turn one's back on the world, instead emphasizing that being fully engaged with the world is critical to individual and collective survival. "The wisdom offered by the Buddha is that we accept impermanence - our own death and the inevitable death of our civilization. And afer having accepted that, we will have peace and strength and an awakening that will bring us together. No more hate, no more discrimination. Then we'll have the opportunity to make use of the technology that is available to us in order to save our beloved planet." A thoughtful open letter to all of humanity, highly recommended to readers of all faiths and backgrounds.

Editorial Review:

In this provocative book, noted Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh offers a dramatic vision of the future of a planet overheated by rapidly disappearing fossil fuels, degraded by massive overconsumption, and besieged by unsupportable population growth. Hanh finds answers to these critical problems in the Buddhist teaching of the impermanence of all things. He demonstrates how this teaching can offer inner peace and help us use our collective wisdom and technology to restore the Earth's balance. Mixing inspiring insights with practical strategies, Hanh cites projects his own monastic community has undertaken that can serve as models for any community. Both his “ No Car Day,” observed once a week, and the “Earth Peace Treaty Commitment Sheet” can impact our ecological footprint on the Earth. Above all, he shows how acceptance of problems is that first critical step toward a deeper understanding of the best way to care for our Earth.

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Carl Sagan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Dragons of Sagan 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is an instructive and entertaining book, but there is an underlying philosophical message that the reader needs to be aware of.

"The Dragons of Eden" is based on a theory that divides the human brain into three concentric layers that have evolved over millions of years, with each successive layer corresponding to a level in our evolutionary history. This may be a useful model, but it also lends itself to being misused as the basis for a narrow view that looks down upon the role of the older parts of the brain and exaggerates the status of the neocortex. Such a misuse is exactly what Sagan is guilty of. Instead of emphasizing the interplay between the three areas of the brain, which allows us to balance reason with emotion and instinct, he takes the model and twists it to suit his overly rational view of human nature.

His is a negative, Freudian view of the unconscious. But whereas Freud stressed the misunderstood importance of these functions, Sagan merely stresses their primitive aspect. For example, he feels that dreams and sleep are a holdover from our evolutionary past. They are a period when the reptilian brain comes alive, takes over, and turns what is by day a well-ordered and rationally supervised operation into a nighttime playground of bizarre symbolism, illogical foolishness, and disguised sexuality. It bothers him that he has such weak linguistic skills in his dreams and that he can't even perform simple arithmetical calculations. He openly confesses his admiration for those unusual individuals who seem to need only two or three hours of sleep a night. In fact, one suspects that Sagan would ideally have humans living totally in the waking world of the neocortex, although it is very unappealing to contemplate a machine-like mind that never turns off and lets the unpredictable and creative unconscious take over, giving it free rein to roam, do the impossible, and experience exhilarating or frightening things.

Sagan idealizes the cerebral cortex as a logical, computer-like operation, and he seems to have an aversion toward the primitive depths of the mind. Who knows what beasts may lurk there? And yet his book itself is proof of how we use rational arguments to justify underlying attitudes and impulses. The impression one gets is that a conflict between cool intellect and emotional passion or obsession is present in Sagan's own complex personality. This was sublimated into a drive to become a proselytizer for science, to the point where popularizing almost turns into evangelicizing, or something even worse. Not content with merely spreading the news of the good works of science, Sagan seems overly preoccupied with stamping out the heresy of "pseudo-science"-- a category that naturally includes such things as astrology.

This self-righteous posture might have been appropriate a century or two ago, as a reaction to the repression that the young field of science had to endure and overcome, but that is well behind us now. The fact is that our romance with science has ended and the marriage has begun. The crusade is long over and the infidels have been converted, but Sagan on his Quixotic quest seems oblivious to this, and so what is left for a knight to do but fight imaginary enemies or dragons. But before we add the name of Sagan to Sigurd and Siegfried, perhaps we should remember than no matter how many times the dragon was slain in the past, it always seemed to emerge somewhere else in another form, as various legends contributed to the gradual evolution of its features and character.

And just as every Eden or idyllic kingdom requires its dragon, so does the rational mind need its irrational unconscious. The more safe, sane, and sterile we make our world, the more we create the need for that which is dangerous, disruptive, and beyond our control. The dragon may be fictitious,but what it symbolizes is something real, something that is a part of human nature. Better to be accepted as such, then denied and made into something external that is fiercely suppressed until the day when, grown immense and unrecognizable, it suddenly rears its head, like the huge mushroom cloud rising above a leveled city.

Entropy and Alchemy: The Problem of Individuality in an Age of Society

Editorial Review:

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday...It's a delight."
THE NEW YORK TIMES

How The Rich Are Destroying the Earth (Foreword by Greg Palast)

Hervé Kempf

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A best seller in France, and already translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Korean, Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth now appears in its first English edition. Bringing to bear more than twenty years of experience as an environmental journalist, Kempf describes the invincibility that many of the world’s wealthy feel in the face of global warming, and how their unchecked privilege is thwarting action on the single most vexing problem facing our world.

In this important primer on the link between global ecology and the global economy, Kempf makes the following observations: First, that the planet’s ecological situation is growing ever worse, despite the efforts of millions of engaged citizens around the world. And second, despite environmentalists’ emphasis that "we’re all in the same boat," the world’s economic elites—who continue to benefit by plundering the environment—have access to "lifeboats" that insulate them from the resulting catastrophes.

Societies have not been able to effectively combat the expanding ecological crisis because it is intimately linked to the social crisis in which the ruling form of capitalism has been organized to impede democratic initiatives. This link explains the failure to make progress against the greatest emergency of our time, because in this relationship the oligarchy plays an essential and destructive role. For this reason, solving the ecological crisis depends on disrupting the power of the world’s elite.

We cannot understand the entwined ecological and social crises, Kempf argues, if we don’t see them as the two sides of the same disaster—a disaster that comes from a system piloted by a dominant social strata that has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology. But Kempf also calls for measured optimism: "Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are emerging and—faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote—the desire to remake the world is being reborn."

Galapagos: A Natural History

Michael H. Jackson

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Undoubtedly the best overview of "Darwin's Islands". 5 out of 5 stars.
116 of 117 people found this review helpful.

I am a biologist that has been working in the Galapagos as a Naturalist leading tours there for the last 6 years. Michael Jackson's book is the "Bible" for the beginning naturalist and certainly more than adequate for the casual "ecotourist". Jackson covers all major aspects of the history, geology, ecology, and biology of the islands. In the "biology" section, he gives a clear, concise, but thorough group-by-group treatment of all major taxa including plants, reptiles, land and sea birds, mammals, and a brief section covering marine life. While there are other guidebooks available, none come close to the accuracy, clarity of presentation, and logical format of this book. Of particular usefulness are the many photos, tables, and graphs which provide a visual representation of many of the topics discussed and a synthesis of large amounts of data.

Editorial Review:

Twenty thousand copies of the first edition of this book were sold. An attractive and comprehensive guidebook, this work has been completely revised and updated by the author. The reader will find an easy-to-use text which details the natural history of the plants and animals found in the Galapagos Islands. Management and conservation of the Galapagos National Park is discussed, and visitor information and notes about the various tourist sites are given. An index and checklist of plants and animals with page references and a glossary of technical terms are provided. New photographs have been added.