Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.
A walk in the woods with an environmental journalist and natural-history writer reveals that the forested world is in grave danger.
As Oregon-based naturalist Mathews (Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains, 2017, etc.) writes, there are 113 species of pine tree, the most abundant and various of any conifer genus. All are in trouble to one extent or another because of climate change, from saplings to “living pine trees older than the Egyptian pyramids.” The author roams the world and the scientific literature to examine the many threats that pines face and their previous adaptations. The logic of the lodgepole, for instance, is impressive: Its cone carries a resin that melts at 113 degrees Fahrenheit, protecting the seeds inside the cone from fire. “The fire kills the pines but melts their cone-sealing resin,” he writes; “the cone scales open over several days or weeks, shedding seeds upon a wide-open seedbed.” Massive fires being an increasingly common phenomenon, particularly in the West, this adaptation is highly useful. On that note, Mathews observes, many forest scientists believe that there’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the fire regime—i.e., the kinds of dense forests we cultivate demand huge fires. American logging trucks seem somehow incomplete without their loads of giant trees, after all, whereas European foresters favor smaller trees that wouldn’t make for ship masts or I-beams but that do just fine to make studs. In many places, the destruction of fire pales next to that of pine borer beetles, both a harbinger and an effect of climate change. It’s difficult to control both, though, as Mathews writes; the cost of protecting homes in forests by doing such things as burying power lines is often so high that people have little motivation apart from self-preservation to do that necessary work. And, asks the author, “if self-preservation isn’t a motivation, what would be?” His book sounds a timely warning to pay more heed to the health of the woodlands.
Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-135-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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