Voices
The best books for environmentalists: 2015 edition
Featuring Hamburgers, Fog, Geoengineering and Superforecasting
Environmentalism suffers from some tired old narratives. What’s the antidote? Fresh perspectives, taboo topics, new alliances, and cross-fertilization — because intellectual and conceptual diversity are just as essential as biodiversity. So here’s a year-end reading list of 2015 books (plus one from last year) that will challenge you to take a fresh look at some of the ideas we who care about the environment so often take for granted. But this is not brain medicine that causes you to go “blech” — each of these offerings is also fun. That’s because saving the world isn’t just serious business — it should also be a joy, like the season.
Top 12 Environmental Books of 2015
By Peter Kareiva and Bob Lalasz
- Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. By Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner.
- The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. By Oliver Morton.
- Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things. By M.R. O’Connor.
- The Evolution of Everything. By Matt Ridley.
- Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business. By Porter Erisman.
- Hamburgers in Paradise. By Louise Fresco.
- The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior. By Shlomo Benartzi with Jonah Lehrer.
- London Fog. The Biography. By Christine Corton.
- H is for Hawk. By Helen MacDonald.
- The End of Doom. By Ronald Bailey.
- The Fly Trap. By Fredrik Sjöberg.
- Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. By George Marshall.
Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.By Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner.
Read this book before any of the others. In 2005 Philip Tetlock published the results of a 20-year study revealing that so-called experts were, on average, no better than chance at predicting the near-term future (or as some media liked to say, “no better than a dart-throwing chimp.”) The “chimp” punchline belied the richness of Tetlock’s research and the follow-up studies that are the subject of this bracing book.
Despite the dismal performance of expert predictions on average, it turns out that some people are shockingly good at short-term forecasts about things like the economy, stocks, elections, wars and so on. Tetlock and Gardner’s new book reveals the keys to being good at making predictions, as well as evaluating the predictions of others. I am not going to give away the secrets here — read the book. Suffice it to say that environmental discussions are rife with erroneous predictions. In the 1940s, DDT was heralded as the miracle pesticide and the “answer to the insect menace.” In 2002, several North American conservation NGOs took out a full page advertisement in The New York Times that stated if the Snake River dams were not taken out promptly, wild Snake River spring chinook salmon “will be extinct by 2017.” The dams are still there and 2017 is fast approaching.
Predictions today abound regarding climate change, nuclear energy, renewable energy, GMOs, mass extinction and so forth. Tetlock and Gardner do all of us a service by producing a guide to how to think about predictions, and what to be wary of. The one bottom-line message in this fascinating book that I think we all need to embrace: “keep score.” In other words: pay attention to how well different pundits do when it comes to their forecasts, and hold them accountable for announcing a certain extinction, or the absence of any downside to pesticides. Do not forget those mistakes.
There is an amazing character in this book — Bill Flack. He is a humble yet super forecaster. He knows what he does not know and constantly adjusts his confidence level based on success and failures. And he knows about consistent biases. The consistent bias I always correct for is “how long will project X take?.” I typically double the answer I am given. This does not put me in Bill Flack’s league, but it helps me do better than a dart-throwing chimp. – Peter Kareiva
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The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. By Oliver Morton.
Morton begins with the following sober observation: in 1997, only 3 percent of global energy consumption was provided by renewables…and in 2012, renewables still accounted for only 3 percent of energy consumption. The steady, paltry portion of our global energy budget attributable to renewables, combined with the conviction that climate change poses a severe threat, is the launching point of this book. It is easy and reasonable to disagree with Morton’s reluctant embrace of geo-engineering, but one cannot dismiss it out of hand. There is no question that shading the earth with sulfate aerosols would be cheaper than carbon capture. The question, of course, is unintended consequences. You may well disagree with Morton’s willingness to embark on grandiose experiments in earth engineering, but you have to admire his willingness to open a conversation that we have been assiduously avoiding. Environmentalists cannot pretend geo-engineering is a taboo topic to be avoided at all costs. It may well be a last-ditch effort, but it is an effort that some nations may well embark on simply to protect their own self-interest. Disagree with this book — but do not ignore it. Climate change is not a simple problem to be solved — it is a reflection of the heavy footprint of an industrial society, the benefits of which no one is eager to give up. – Peter Kareiva
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Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things. By M.R. O’Connor.
Resurrection Science is among the most important books to come out about the future of conservation since Emma Marris’ Rambunctious Garden. From start to finish, O’Connor gives us arresting, even-handed reportage and storytelling about the amazing science, considerable heroism, moral complications and often utter counter-productivity of trying to save species that are hanging on by a thread — and to bring back from the past some that are already gone (such as the passenger pigeon or — gulp — Neanderthals).
But Resurrection Science isn’t a book of edge cases or Frankensteinian curiosities. The thread running through her dispatches — efforts to save New Mexican desert pupfish through assisted migration, Hawaiian crows by freezing them, or genetic dead-end Florida panthers by importing panthers from Texas — is that evolution is always happening, it’s now accelerating due to human intervention, and that, as one biologist she interviews puts it, “most of what we do in conservation biology is already an evolutionary manipulation.” That means conservation going forward won’t be about preserving what’s left from a “sixth” mass extinction of species so much as it will be about being explicit and thoughtful about its evolutionary interventions. This kind of talk is still anathema to most conservationists. Reading this fantastic piece of science writing might help them come to grips with what needs to come next. – Bob Lalasz
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The Evolution of Everything. By Matt Ridley.
We all know change happens. In fact, change is unrelenting. Matt Ridley’s latest book argues that we tend to overestimate the role of planning, strategy and individual leaders or thinkers on directing that change. Instead, he argues, most visible change emerges through an evolutionary process — the sifting through of hundreds of thousands or millions of undirected events, with some winning ideas or attractive alternatives emerging as the next new thing. I have always had my own version of Ripley’s theory as a response to conspiracy theorists — no institution or group of people I know of are competent enough to pull off the many grand conspiracies that circulate on the web. Ripley’s conclusion is the following: emergent solutions succeed while planned solutions fail. But what does this mean for environmental issues? Ridley would argue that we need to wait for an emergent solution to solve the climate challenge, and steer clear of top-down solutions. I am not so sure he is correct on this matter.
For me, the most interesting chapter in The Evolution of Everything deals with population. Population control has always been a big deal in environmental circles. But it is also a “third rail” that virtually every major environmental NGO avoids. Ripley’s recounting of the many grotesque efforts made on behalf of population control will scare anyone off the concept. In the late 19th century, for instance, the British Viceroy of India remarked that “the Indian population has a tendency to increase more than the food it raises from the soil.” His solution was to herd the hungry into camps where they were fed on starvation rations that led to a 94 percent death rate per month! Ten million died as he prevented relief efforts. A century later, in 1976, 8 million Indians were sterilized. When former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited India in the wake of this effort, he remarked: “At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”
We now know how ineffective these cruel policies are. The effective solution to the population problem is to boost the education level of women and give them access to birth control, and fertility rates will drop. In some ways, most of Ridley’s stories and facts have been told before. But while his central theme that planned solutions fail is not always right, it is right often enough to pause and think before we decide to implement top-down solutions to each and every problem. – Peter KareivaReturn
Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business. By Porter Erisman.
Why recommend a book about Alibaba — the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut?
For sure, it is a good story — a college English teacher, Jack Ma, fails the university entrance exam three times, yet eventually goes on to become the chairman of the Alibaba group, and one of the world’s richest men. But all environmentalists should read this book for two reasons.
First, Jack is a pioneering environmentalist and conservationist — someone who sees no contradiction between economic growth and conservation. In a recent interview, he commented: “The most fun part of business, at least to me, is to contribute to the future. It’s not just about making money — it’s about making healthy money, enabling people to enjoy their lives. I think the important thing is to wake people up and let them know that our environmental issues need to be addressed. Positive thinking is key: The future is always beautiful.”
Jack is not naïve or impractical — he’s a hard-nosed business leader who set out to build one of the world’s most successful companies. But the reason his business story is so relevant to environmentalism is how he did it. Alibaba’s rise was based on a grand ambition and large vision, on optimism, and on fun — yes, fun. It is clear Jack thought the company’s work should be fun. I honestly believe this is exactly the recipe environmentalists need to adopt to achieve our larger goals. There were Alibaba missteps, layoffs and scandals on the way. But when some of Alibaba’s sale force was implicated in criminally defrauding buyers, the CEO and COO of alibiba.com were quickly asked to resign even though they were in no way implicated. Accountability, adaptability and lofty goals combined with business acumen are the hallmark of Alibaba. We in the environmental movement would do well to emulate this.
Second, the way Jack Ma led Alibaba to its heights has additional lessons for the environmental movement. Three things stood out for me in this book about Alibaba’s culture: “make sure you have great ideas,” “today is tough but the day after tomorrow is beautiful,” and “leapfrog.” Sometimes I feel we environmentalists focus too much on tactics and strategy and too little on ideas; we are too easily drawn to negative narratives by dire circumstances; and lastly, we follow the path we are on instead of “leapfrogging.” – Peter KareivaReturn
Hamburgers in Paradise. By Louise Fresco.
If you are a fan of Michael Pollan’s books, or if you think at all about the many implications of your food choices, then you need to read Hamburger’s in Paradise — Louise Fresco knows what she is writing about.
Fresco draws on history, religion and anthropology to suggest that “paradise” is an abundance of food — and there is no better modern symbol of that abundance than the mass-produced cheap hamburger. But like the apple in the Garden of Eden, the hamburger is a temptation that, if given in to, throws us out of paradise with its heavy dose of salt, sugar and fat and pushes us to join the 2.3 billion overweight or obese people on the planet.
Food can be a hard thing to get right — for individuals, for societies and even for environmentalists. For 99 percent of our evolutionary history, we experienced regular food scarcity and had to gorge whenever food was available. The phenomenon of a constant and reliable food supply is a very recent circumstance.
Sacrifices and tradeoffs have been made in producing this bounty of food. Bread was in some sense the original convenience food — it could be dropped from airplanes in liberated Europe after the World War II. In a bread box, it can keep for a week. It is packed with calories and can be served with almost any type of cuisine or other foods. The factory-produced white bread or “wonder bread” that emerged in the 1940s was incredibly cheap and fortified with vitamins and minerals. So, Fresco asks, should we so glibly turn our noses up at this mass-produced white bread that has played such an important role in alleviating hunger in favor of our artisanal whole-grain bread that we are drawn to in our upscale cafes?
Fresco takes on organic food, GMOs, locally grown food and confusing labels. She also bemoans the constantly shifting sands of what is healthy food and what is not. When I grew up, milk was considered something healthy and good to drink. Then it fell out of favor for containing too much fat. And now milk is recommended again as a source of calcium for the elderly and as an alternative to sugary drinks for children. Unlike so many who write about food, Fresco never adopts the “food messiah” pose that has helped other authors to sell a lot of books. We all care about food. Hamburgers in Paradise will not tell you what to eat. And it may frustrate you because it overturns a lot of urban legend and food folktales. But it is a great book to read if you want to start thinking about food in all of its dimensions, as opposed to turning to food for either longevity or a sense of moral superiority. – Peter Kareiva Return
The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior. By Shlomo Benartzi with Jonah Lehrer.
Every environmental advocate urges you to put down your smartphone and get outside — how else, after all, could you nurture an affinity for nature? But from Indiana to Indonesia, our real environment these days is online — and no matter how much forest bathing we do, it isn’t long before we get sucked right back into the blue light of our screen of choice.
That’s where The Smarter Screen comes in. Shlomo Benartzi, a professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, says the designs of websites on those screens is generally terrible and not only could be much better, but much better in ways that could get 1 billion people to “think smarter and choose wiser.” The Smarter Screen is a science-based handbook to behavioral nudges on that scale. It explains why ugly fonts online are usually more effective than beautiful ones; why your website needs to get more color-saturated the younger (or less Baltic) your target demographic; and why Priceline and Kayak can get away with charging hotels a quarter of their day rate just for being the place you booked your room. (Their designs are better.)
Why else should environmentalists read this book, other than loaded with cool and counterintuitive behavioral insights? Because you’re all also in the digital business now, whether you like it or not; most environmental organization websites and apps are atrociously designed; and to win for nature and everyone who depends on it, we have to win in digital. The Smarter Screen is the perfect place to start. – Bob Lalasz Return
London Fog. The Biography. By Christine Corton.
It is good to be reminded of how far we have come in cleaning up the environment, and there is no more vivid book for this than this story of London’s staggering air pollution from 1840 until 1962 — pollution given the euphemistic label “London fog.” What makes this book so unique is its exploration of the way London’s filthy air was treated in novels and politics, and how instead of recognizing the problem for what it was (a deadly, life-choking self-imposed pollutant), Londoners dreamt up a wide variety of schemes and excuses before they finally dealt with it.
One idea was to pipe clean air from the country into London. Meanwhile, others claimed the pollution was a sign of a healthy economy: “The absence of smoke from the factory chimney indicates the quenching of fires on many a domestic hearth, want of employment to many a willing labourer.“
Londoners adapted. Gardeners had to find pollution resistant varieties and give up all hope of growing something as delicate as an orchid. Plane trees became popular in London because their leaves were shiny and easily washed and their bark peels off almost continuously, so that the tree is self-cleaning. It is also fascinating to learn about popular novels and stories that combine the fog with social and political undercurrents. For example, Corton recounts a short story published in 1908 that blames the fog on inferior foreign coal at a time when xenophobic nationalism is on the rise, and in fact, contrary to the fiction — coal imports were negligible.
This book is a wonderful period piece, and a delight for anyone who has enjoyed Dickens or Sherlock Holmes, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The lingering lesson from London Fog is how easily we can adjust and adapt to the most egregious pollution, and make it part of our popular culture and social narratives, sometimes even charmingly so, yet do nothing to correct the problem. London recorded its fog for over 100 years — in cartoons, newspaper articles, movies, novels, and short stories — before passing the Clean Air Act in 1956. – Peter Kareiva Return
H is for Hawk. By Helen MacDonald.
Grief can destroy us; it can also transform, or return us more clearly and cleanly to what we once were, which often seem like the same thing. Helen MacDonald learns that her father — beloved to her — has suddenly died. And one early morning soon thereafter she finds herself driving somewhere, and realizes it’s to a scrubby landscape where she as a child with him first saw and became enraptured with a goshawk — a fiercer, less tractable, far more déclassé cousin to the falcon in raptor training. Soon she finds herself buying one on a dock in Belfast. And then she finds herself immersed in training it, a bloody, exhausting and consuming process that prompts her to identify so completely with the hawk that it verges on psychosis, becoming wilder as the hawk itself is tamed.
And none of that flat description can prepare you for the award-winning triumph that is H is for Hawk, with a breathtaking style that is like riding on thermals and sentences that are among the best I’ve ever read. “Two enormous eyes,” she says upon first seeing Mabel, her new goshawk. “My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.” Everyone loses someone. Few have lost with such magisterial vulnerability — and a penetrating stare on all of us — as MacDonald has here. – Bob Lalasz Return
The End of Doom. By Ronald Bailey.
This book is going to be a lightning rod for criticism from the environmental community. A large fraction of the environmental community now realizes that “doom and gloom” does not sell. Bailey takes this one step further and challenges almost every sacred cow of “worry,” and then consistently concludes that things are never as bad as the environmental community proclaims. I am certain he is right in many cases. Nuclear power is not as risky as it has been painted, and the rate of extinction of species has been overstated.
But just as Malthusian prophets of doom take license with data, so too does Bailey pick and choose his data and stories to support his argument. For instance, he has a section called “Peak Farmland,” in which he leads the reader to believe there is strong science to support the idea that soon the amount of land needed to feed the world will decline. There are no data to support this conclusion.
So why would I recommend a book that frustrates me? It is because Bailey’s list of topics represents a “must do a better job” list for scientists.
For example, scary messages about extreme weather have done little to sway the public. Thus, when Bailey says “climate change is not increasing damage – yet“, he has a point, but he also misses the point. Bailey disingenuously downplays the risk of extreme weather due to climate change with statements such as: the death rate of humans from floods is 98 percent lower now than in the 1920s. These are vivid numbers, but not the right numbers. Of course death rates are down from 1920 — thanks to improved health care, medicine, and emergency services. The real question is how many fewer lives might be lost if we curtail climate change today as opposed to doing nothing about emissions? That is the right comparison — not morbidity in 1920 versus 2015.
The climate discussion, and indeed any environmental discussion, is best framed in terms of the consequences environmental choices can make for your life and the life of your children. Bailey relies too much on how much better life has gotten for humans. Yes, it has. But debates about the environment need to be cast into the future — how will our environmental choices in 2016 improve our lives? Both Malthusians and unshakeable optimists (such as Bailey) tend to think and argue in terms of grand historical trends — not in terms of counterfactuals for your individual life.
Bottom line: Bailey is a good writer. Sometimes you will nod in agreement, and other times he will infuriate you. I tend to like books like this because they prod me to action — science action. – Peter Kareiva Return
The Fly Trap. By Fredrik Sjöberg.
Take it from me, who edits scientists for a living: Most are not good writers. Virtually none write with a light touch. Certainly, none are literary artists. And then there is Fredrik Sjöberg, an entomologist who lives year-round on the Swedish island of Runmarö and has built his scientific reputation through collecting 202 different species of hoverflies — all on that island. To say that The Fly Trap has changed my mind about how well a natural scientist can write — about the process of science, its obsessions, its pathologies, its loneliness, how you deal with obscurity, how careers choose you, not to mention how you handle an insect net the size of a small tent — is like saying Stephen Curry is changing the way basketball is being played. (A lot.) This is a beautifully oblique book, sunny but always with a touch of impending winter, always circling its quarry like a bee a flower. Not for Sjöberg are questions of whether invasives or novel ecosystems are bad — he finds disturbed landscapes great for collecting insects, and fear of invaders “biological xenophobia.” Instead, his puckish question — why anyone would collect bugs for a living on a remote island while the rest of the world goes by — blows through his prose like a gentle summer night breeze off the ocean. By the end, you know the answer, and might be ready to join him. – Bob Lalasz Return
Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. By George Marshall.
This book has been out for a year, but in honor of the Paris climate talks it is worth buying and reading if you did not get to it last year. In chapter after chapter Marshall recounts the failure of the environmental community to create any real change around the issue of climate change and emissions.
He points out that being a climate activist has been contaminated with social meaning and stereotypes. Second, as a risk, climate change does not arouse anywhere near the level of ire as, say, a cell phone tower in one’s neighborhood — even though the science supporting a risk of climate danger is orders of magnitude more compelling than any science about cell phone towers. Moreover, Marshall argues, we have gotten used to climate change — even extreme weather has become status quo. Climate change is too often seen as a distant threat — not something in our lifetime. In polls taken in Britain and America, two thirds of those polled typically say climate change will not affect them personally. They see it as a problem for future generations.
Marshall scolds the language of all those IPCC reports for being misguided, unclear and ineffective. IPCC could use some help from those who know something about marketing. The IPCC uses the term “very likely” to mean a chance of 90 percent or higher. When asked, the public thinks “very likely” means a much lower chance than 90 percent — sometimes as low as 60 percent. Marshall does a superb job exposing the fact that environmental language and narratives only work among environmentalists — the “preaching to the choir” problem. The Live Earth simultaneous concerts had an audience of perhaps 2 billion people. But what came of it? There was no clear objective or action to be taken, so it created 2 billion bystanders. Numbers alone are not enough.
Then there are all those carbon calculators and lists of “easy steps” you as an individual can take to fight climate change: changing lightbulbs, inflating tires, driving less. But these campaigns pointing out individual action and responsibility were also campaigns of “blame.” Here is the kicker — taking a single action can often become a license for doing something different in the opposite direction. In one experiment, Boston apartment dwellers given notes that asked them to save water to save the environment did indeed use 7 percent less water — but then they cranked up their electricity use by 6 percent!
The book has 38 chapters of what has not worked. In chapter 39, entitled “From the Head to the Heart,” Marshall brings up the concept of religion. In that chapter he describes how religions often succeed at getting their followers to make sacrifices with the force of moral and spiritual persuasion. Why haven’t climate activists reached out to religious groups, Marshall asks?
Isn’t it interesting, then, to see the impact of Pope Francis’s remarks about our ethical and moral duties regarding greenhouse gas emissions? The pope has elevated the climate conversation as no one else could. In that regard, I guess you could say this was a prescient book. As such, it is well worth reading now as we move beyond the Paris talks, and try to make a reality out of national promises and targets. – Peter Kareiva Return
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