A sharp, dispassionate plea to recognize our dependence on nature and mitigate the dire consequences of climate change.
Historical survey of the damage that cities have done to nature and the possibilities for mutually beneficial coexistence.
Early on in his latest book, Wilson, British author of such popular histories as Metropolis and Empire of the Deep, reminds us that without nature, cities are unsustainable. “The veneer of civilization is paper-thin,” he writes. “Scratch at the carapace and you discover a world teeming with wildlife.” Despite this fact, cities are only beginning to learn how to live with the increasing numbers of living things that are attracted to and thrive on the biodiversity to which they give rise. Drawing examples from around the world, Wilson illustrates the interdependencies that cities have with plants, trees, water, food sources, and birds and animals. In each chapter, he discusses the accommodations struck when cities first emerged, the later destruction brought on by industrialization, and current attempts to reconnect around ecological and human resilience. As he points out, technological solutions that attempt to dominate nature—e.g., the concrete channeling of streams and canals—no longer make sense. Also insufficient are parks, tree-lined boulevards, private gardens, and low-density suburbs. Instead, we need green and blue (water) infrastructure and ecological buffer zones that engage with the natural processes essential to a city’s ecosystem. If contemporary cities are not to suffer the fate of the Mayan city of Tikal or the Cambodian city of Angkor Wat, “both devoured by rainforests,” they will have to follow the leads of Amsterdam, Singapore, and Berlin in attempting to live proactively with nature. The title of the book is unfortunate given that public debate in the U.S. regarding cities has used the phrase not to allude to nature but to speak with disdain and alarm about race and crime. Nonetheless, Wilson is a helpful guide to the intersection of nature and city life.
A sharp, dispassionate plea to recognize our dependence on nature and mitigate the dire consequences of climate change.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780385548113
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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