Sturdy science applied to society’s biggest problems and good food for thought.
Countless pundits warn that civilization is in crisis and then write books that often serve little purpose beyond self-promotion. This one delivers useful, rational advice.
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has joined numerous threats to global stability, including terrorism, pollution, climate change, and the rise of autocrats. According to DeFries, an environmental geographer, Columbia professor, and MacArthur fellow, the news isn’t necessarily catastrophic provided we take lessons from nature, which has been overcoming crises for more than 4 billion years. Following an introduction, the author discusses four of nature’s tools that humans would do well to adopt: circuit breakers, diversity, networking, and bottom-up decision-making. “As the clockwork world of the twentieth century recedes into the rearview mirror,” she writes, “these strategies hold the keys to our prosperity and persistence in our dynamic, interconnected, complex world.” No one tells ants how to build their amazingly complex nests. It’s a bottom-up process during which individuals follow simple signals from the local environment. Veins in the earliest plants supplied leaves directly from a central source. The process of evolution produced leaves with complex, looping, interconnected networks of veins capable of surviving serious damage. The internet takes advantage of this safety feature, electric grids not so much. No Pollyanna, DeFries warns that humans are only reliable problem-solvers when it comes to short-term situations. Long-range scenarios—e.g., dealing with climate change and widespread poverty—always seem stuck in the discussion phase. Rules to solve global problems inevitably involve tactics that work and those that fail, but reality is messier. Thus, top-down command economies—e.g., the old Soviet Union—are disastrously inefficient, but pure bottom-up free markets produce cruelties that require action from the top. “Ironically,” writes DeFries, “the more civilization becomes sophisticated, urbanized, and seemingly removed from nature, the more it becomes interconnected and mired in complexity. Nature’s strategies become even more relevant. They can postpone and cushion the fall in the endless cycle of growth, stagnation, breakdown, and renewal.”
Sturdy science applied to society’s biggest problems and good food for thought.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-231-19942-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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