Category — books

In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert connects the dots on global warming and outlines the latest thoughts on the current state of Earth.

It’s a frighteningly good read.

The breadth of Kolbert’s work plainly points to the rapid approach of the end of human civilization thanks to unchecked pollution.

Climatologists speak of “DAI” or Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference, that is “climate change dramatic enough to destroy entire ecosystems, for instance, or cause mass extinction or disrupt the world’s food supply.”

Evidence is mounting that climate change may have destroyed early civilizations thanks to drought and reliance on too few crops.

Reading Kolbert, it’s easy to see that DAI is underway in some, and possibly many ways. But what can be done?

On a personal level, what steps can I or any other individual take to help more than I hurt? My existence is littered with half-hearted attempts to follow through on my latest passion: Exercise, blogs with a purpose, playing an instrument, watching less TV.

Shall I add “giving a shit about the environment” to my list of personal failures? I might be doing that right now, as I type this out on one of two personal computers currently running in my air conditioned, poorly insulated house.

Or can people of conscience do more than exchange pathetic incandescent lights with compact fluorescent bulbs? Can driving less and using less begin to slow the deadly effects of climate change that are underway?

As is the case with civilization, only group action will matter enough to save humans. As Kolbert ends her work:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Sadly, our government is unable to take responsibility for finding a solution. We need a more educated voter — one who will read the writing on the wall and only accept sustainable governance.

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about a bridge that I have for sale.

OK, kids, time to get scared
“The planet is already nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last 420,000 years.” And since humans are about 250,000 years old … it’s about to be hotter than we’ve ever experienced as a species.

The last time it was this hot, “crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today.”

Temperatures globally will rise 4.9 to 7.7 degrees Fahrenheit sometime this century. During the height of the last period of glaciers, “average global temperatures were only about ten degrees colder than they are today.” We’re pushing the Earth’s temperature swing harder and harder — who knows when our children will be thrown off.

A carbon tax of $100 per ton might raise an American’s electric bill by $180 per year — or $15 per month, 50 cents per day. I can hear Sally Struthers already: “Save a dying planet for only 50 cents a day.”

It may also be interesting to note that this book’s publisher, at least according to its PR people, is concerned about environmental impacts. Concerned enough to spend a little more on emission controls for a factory in Brazil.

Do the math
EPA’s Personal Greenhouse Gas Calculator.

My family is above average — pumping out 75,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. The norm? 60,000 pounds.

My trips to the library begin with a scan of my Amazon.com wish list and/or my del.icio.us bookmarks as I attempt to find at least one book on my “to do” list that is available NOW at the library.

List in hand, I begin a strange trip at the library — zeroing in on books I want and typically satisficing with books the library has. Rarely does the online listing of what’s available correspond to what books are actually findable — Dewey Decimal be damned.

It’s with this oddly organized, rather vague goal that I found myself with the trio of books just completed.

1. Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
2. Meet You in Hell, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford
3. The Botany of Desire, A Plant’s-eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

The trip began with a desire to read Michael Pollan’s latest, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a hunger that went unfilled as the book was checked out.

As with many other visits to the library, I was easily satisfied with an earlier work, Botany of Desire.

Leaving the library with only one book should be a red flag for the Feds to use the Patriot Act against me — it’s a rare feat for me to check out just one title, a feat that probably means mischief is afoot.

So, I also grabbed Demon-Haunted World, because now two of my friends have read it and I was starting to feel left out, and Meet You in Hell, it being one of the catchier titles in the “What’s new” economic section.

As already reviewed on this site, I read Sagan first. As I was reading Demon, I was sure it was the best book of the bunch.

Meet You in Hell came next. Again, as I dog-eared its pages, it struck me as a quicker, fresher work than Demon.

Finally, Botany had its chance to catch my eye. And, as I raced through 180 pages before putting the book down, I decided this must be the pick of the litter.

Well, which is the cream?

Meet You in Hell

Meet You in Hell is described by Dennis Lehane as “a muscular, enthralling read.” I should leave my pithy review at that, but here are some noteworthy thoughts from its pages:

Steel magnate Carnegie employed a Captain Jones “a down-to-earth sort” who followed Carnegie’s example of rigorously measuring everything that could be measured in a factory. One insight his measurements led to at The Edgar Thomson works — the eight-hour workday.

Men could maintain almost any pace for eight hours, Jones reasoned, and after sixteen hours of rest they would return refreshed, ready for more of anything. The company would thereby gain a greatly increased output while expending the very same amount on wages. Jones’s elegant notion was not only wildly popular with the men, it proved to be as effective in practice as it seemed on paper, and the eight-hour workday was born to steel.

Again and again, Standiford notes Carnegie’s interest on what it cost to produce goods.

Carnegie would repeat the mantra time and again: profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie’s view, any savings achieved in the cost of goods were permanent. Carnegie rarely balked when his managers suggested improvements to the physical plants of his operations, not if the goal was greater efficiency in production

This overriding interest in controlling costs, coupled with Carnegie’s belief that:

survival of the fittest was not only the operating principle upon which the world order depended, but that Darwinism justified every action he would take in his own business life. The measuring stick was calibrated in dollars, and every tick that Carnegie marked off was a sign of progress toward the greater good.

led to the labor clash at the heart of Meet You in Hell, the deadly strike in 1892 at the Homestead works.

Driven by economic Darwinism, Carnegie’s partner Henry Clay Frick used Pinkerton guards in an attempt to literally crush the strike.

The Botany of Desire

A different type of labor is dissected in Botany of Desire, the work of humans as we coevolve four plants: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes.

Pollan’s striking thesis: Plants choose us just as we choose plants.

The ancient relationship between bees and flowers is a classic example of what is known as “coevolution.” In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interest but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. consciousness needn’t enter into it on either side, and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.

With a colorful tone not unlike Eric Schlosser, Pollan deliciously traces the transformation of the wild Kazakhstan apple from the work of legendary John Chapman — Johnny Appleseed — to the PR campaign at the turn of the 20th Century that turned the apple into a fruit eaten, instead of pressed and imbibed as a hard cider.

The apple evolved uniquely in America. Chapman’s seedings were a true melting pot for apple genetics, creating unique varieties that, alas, are not available for today’s mechanized kitchen. Pollan gets back to this point at the end of this work, after stopping off with the coevolution of the tulip and marijuana.

On Marijuana: In 1988 it was discovered that the brain has a network of THC receptors. Humans create a form of cannabis, anandamide, or inner bliss. Why does marijuana produce THC? Could it be that this plant, coevolving with humans for more than 10,000 years, struck on one powerful reason for humans to spread it around the world, its psychoactive properties?

But now, let’s come down from our high and examine the foolish bargain struck by modern agriculture. By choosing to stick with a few apples, and one type of desirable potato, Pollan shows how unknowing our current monoculture farming is. Modern potatoes require an enormous amount of pesticide “input.” Monsanto sees a way around coating farms with blankets of toxic insecticides, et al: Genetically infuse the potato with Bacillus thuringiensis, or “Bt.”

Monsanto has created a potato that is resistant to the Colorado potato beetle. For now. Even the company admits, that within 30 years, the beetle will be resistant to Bt, and begin munching wholesale on potato farms anew.

Pollan’s argument that humans and plants coevolved comes to a head in looking at the potato because by ignoring diversity, by genetically altering the spud and fixing our hopes to one type of tater, we’re losing sight of the grand evolutionary game of chance that has propelled both plant life and the human society.

tie it all together, Dan

In a seemingly random fashion, I’ve come upon three strong books that deal with evolution from three perspectives.

Throwing caution to the wind, I’ll link these works in a paragraph:

The rational, market-driven success of Carnegie and Frick propelled America to a industrial, technical, science-based society that grew complacent, allowing Sagan to wisely note the disconnect between people and science that threatens to pull our culture further away from finding truth. Our dismissal of nature in what we eat is symptomatic of this disconnect — our evolutionary palate is being simplified in a dangerous way as we rely on too few types of food.

Let me know your thoughts on these works, or what I should attack next.

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan preaches to the choir about the decline of science in mid-1990s America.

Among many targets, Sagan rightly questions the utter lack of attention science is given in mass media, offering a host of story ideas that would never be seen in today’s mainstream media — like “Solved Mysteries,” exposes of mind readers and hourlong, evidence-based debates on life after death, abortion or animal rights.

Some quotes that seem especially prescient, some 11 years after the book was penned:

Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology or popular prejudice would hog-tie scientific progress seems unthinkable. For 200 years, Americans have prided themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudoscience has flourished in the United States — on race, for example. Under the guise of “creationism,” a serious effort continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory — the most powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology — from being taught in the schools.

After reading this passage, creationtours.com came to mind as one quick example of the uncritical thought that passes for sanity in today’s America.

Two quotes set off his argument for public-supported basic research:

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
Ronald Reagan, campaign speech 1980

There is nothing which can better deserve our patrongage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
George Washington, address to Congress, January 8, 1790

One reason I like this book — it makes me want to read more from and about Thomas Paine, Morris Cohen, Enlil, Moses Maimonides and James “The Amazing” Randi.

On balance, a good read that won’t be touched by anyone going on a creation tour.

Oil, Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans is a Cliff’s Notes to the tremendous importance of oil and the oil industry in creating and maintaining American life and supremacy.

This fast-paced opens with a tongue-in-cheek attempt by Yeomans to avoid oil for one day. It is, to say the least, an impossible task. Oil is modern life.

A chapter on Energy Wars is a Google Maps of current U.S. military deployment — placing the Bush Administration’s redeployment of U.S. troops to areas near Sao Tome, Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan clearly against these nations’ future oil prospects.

The book gives solutions to our “oil addiction” short shrift, with a “blueprint for a new energy future” taking all of three pages, yet overall it’s a solid look at the history and near-term future for our most important natural resource.

One solution mentioned, championed recently by Thomas Friedman, is the institution of a much higher national gas tax. While a political non-starter, Oil also detailed the UAW’s role in helping the auto industry defeat Senator Richard Bryan’s 1990 attempt to raise every vehicles fuel efficiency by 40%.

It’s frightening that the good Ole U.S.A. is so set in its ways that it cannot experiment in a meaningful way with ending its relationship with Oil.

Based on a quote used in a P.J. O’Rourke book from an obscure Scottish economist, William J. Bernstein goes to great lengths to show that prosperity is the result of four factors:

1. property rights
2. scientific method
3. capital
4. technology (communication + transportation)

Bernstein shows that efficient and secure property rights ensure that land will move from being concentrated among a few owners to being held by those who can use it far more efficiently – usually a much larger number of land owners.

But does this same belief in the power of property rights and the tendency for property to flow to where it is most useful fly when applied to intellectual property?

I’m not wholly convinced that intellectual property will naturally flow into the hands of those who will make the most efficient use of it. It seems our laws governing patents mimic too closly the flawed property mechanisms of the Spanish – allowing a few companies to inefficiently hold onto knowledge that might otherwise enrich society.

I’m thinking of medical advances here, but this certainly applies to any patentable technology. Without addressing it, Bernsteins book seems to question the logic of the United States’ continual extension of a patent’s timeframe.

If you’re not going to take the time to read this phenomenal book, you can read more of Bernstein’s work on the horribly designed efficientfrontier.com. However, I cannot recommend this book enough. Great stuff.

It took me way too long to get turned onto the work of Peter F. Drucker. An amazing read on leadership today … one that’s no-doubt familiar to the economist but not as readily known as should be.

Some noteworthy quotes

Management … will increasingly have to be based on the assumption that neither technology nor end-use is a foundation for management policy. They are limitations. The foundations have to be customer values and customer decisions on the distribution of their disposable income

In a declining industry one has to manage, above all, for steady, systematic, purposeful “cost reduction” and for steady improvement in “quality” and “service,” that is, for strengthening the company’s position within the industry, rather than for growth in volume … products in a declining industry tend to become “commodities”

And my favorite quote, which I’ve used before: Again and again in business history, an unknown company has come from nowhere and in a few short years has overtaken the established leaders without apparently even breathing hard. The explanation always given is superior strategy, superior technology, superior marketing, or lean manufacturing. but in every single case, the newcomer also enjoys a tremendous cost advantage, usually about 30 percent. The reason is always the same: the new company knows and manages the costs of the entire economic chain rather than its costs alone