Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts

Friday, July 2, 2021

Back to Earth by Nicole Stott

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm always rather skeptical of conversion stories - someone did something and it opened their eyes to an issue or gave them a new perspective. There's something fundamentally wrong with a society that thinks someone's miraculous conversion somehow imbues them with an authoritative voice or a spiritual gift or something, whereas someone who has seen and been guided by this same revelatory light all their life, rarely gets any credit or any sort of spotlight on their equally valid and majorly contributing 'non-conversion'.

It's entirely wrong; even ass-backwards, but it's how we work on this planet unfortunately. I know authors typically don't write their own book descriptions, so this isn't on her, but the blurb here says "When Nicole Stott first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are." I'm sorry, but if you have to be shot 250 miles into space at 25,000 mph to realize this, then you've been sleepwalking through life, and you really don't deserve much credit for your epiphany.

I was interested in this book because it seemed to offer a scientific perspective on how we can help Earth, but by a third in I was already disillusioned with it because I'd learned nothing to that end. I'm not saying what I did read wasn't interesting at all; there were parts that were engaging and informative, but none of it had to do with helping fix the problems on Earth.

The story was very autobiographical, with the author calling everyone 'my friend' or 'my dear friend' if she knew them at all, and it carried a sense of desperation to it. It's irrelevant to the reader how close the author is to person A or person B and this constant repetition of that 'friend' mantra had an aura of pathos to it. Not that this is a critical disaster. It just struck me as rather odd in the same way it does when an author writes the more pretentious 'utilizing' instead of simply typing 'using'.

There were parts where the author seemed to start in on a topic and then just abandon it, or go off at a tangent. One example that comes immediately to mind was about painting in space. None of this of course helps save Earth, but I happened to find this particular piece quite fascinating, yet instead of talking about the actual painting she was doing, it seems like she lost interest once the paint was on the brush, and essentially abandoned that story!

In contrast, other tangential stories about life in space or astronaut training seemed like they went on forever or were repeated several times instead of letting the issue go like she did with the art. It made for a messy story overall. These things had nothing whatsoever to do with with applying what had been learned in space to solving Earth's problems, and if all of these extraneous parts had been excised, it would have made for a very thin book indeed. It's like she couldn't make up her mind whether to write an autobiography or an Earth-self-help book, and so we got a disjointed and somewhat repetitive mishmash of both.

The real disaster though, lay in other directions. In the first third of this book, the closest it came to discussing how technology can help Earth, was when discussing the water shortage and how many people are denied a basic human right: access to clean, fresh water. They have filtration units in the space program which take all water - even sweat and urine - and purify it so that it's cleaner than most water you can get on Earth, including that microplastic-infused bottled water that far too many people drink under the delusion that it's healthier than tap water. In some countries I'm sure it is, but that's rarely applicable in the USA. Nowhere in this discussion did the author say how this was applied to helping people on Earth. More on this anon.

The worst part of this section of the story though was that the author mentioned Guy Laliberté. This guy is a Canadian billionaire and gambler who founded Cirque du Soleil, but the latter enterprise, which is multinational (and in which Laliberté has now sold his interests, I understand), was all that got mentioned in the story - that and the fact that Laliberté paid thirty two million dollars to take a space tourist trip. The author talks like this was a deliberate trip to raise awareness of problems on Earth. It was a fail with me, because I never heard of this guy going into space so my awareness was not raised by his $32 million investment. I don't know how many people did hear about it because the author never discusses that.

But here's the thing: this guy paid $32 million!! How many of those problems he claimed he was highlighting could have been solved by putting that $32 million directly into solving them? The author never explored that, and this bothered me. The guy is a billionaire. He could have paid a hundred million to help solve the problems he was raising awareness about and he would never have missed that, yet he's presented in this book as some sort of hero for his work! I don't get that mentality at all.

To me it seems equally likely that he just wanted to take a trip into space and could afford it, which is fine, it's his own money, but then he turns around and tries to 'justify' the extravagance by saying it's an awareness-raising trip. Maybe it was, but who knows? I don't. I just know $32 million went into space and none of that particular amount contributed to bringing "one drop" of clean water to any child. Reading this, I confess I sometimes thought that maybe it's the author's awareness which needs raising?

I was enthralled with the space program when I was a kid, but lately I've wondered more about the PoV of those who ask: why is this money being sent into space when we need help on Earth. I was disappointed in the author's retort to that. It seemed outright facetious to me. She effectively side-stepped the question by redirecting it. She said the money doesn't go into space, it's all spent right here on Earth. That was hilarious, Nicole. Yeah, it's spent on Earth, and a small portion of it goes into setting up experiments in space that can help people on Earth. Thinking people get that. But NASA's space shuttle program cost almost $200 billion in total. Each flight cost $450 million.

So the question, Nicole, is not where the money was spent, but how much value for money we got for that $200 billion. Was it truly worth it? Yeah it was thrilling, but who did it really help? Yeah, there have been concrete returns from the spending, in terms of computer advances and medicine and so on, but where's the evidence that those advances could not have come about by directly investing the $200 billion in technology and medicine?

Did we have to go to space to get these advances? I've never seen a justification for that, and it wasn't discussed in this book. Australia built six seawater desalination plants for ten billion. How many of those would $200 billion buy? Seventy percent of Earth's surface is covered with saltwater and forty percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of it. Desalination uses a huge amount of energy, but water is most scarce where it's hot, and it's hot because the sun is shining. Can you say solar power?! No alternatives were ever discussed.

I like the space program. Always have, but it needs to be justified, not blown-off with facetious comebacks. In the sixties, robotics, AIs, and computers were pathetic compared with what we have today, but now we do have robots very effectively working on Mars. So what exactly is the justification for sending people into space? I've seen some halfhearted justifications, but never anything that truly made me nod my head in agreement.

Now if everyone had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food in their belly, clean water, sanitation, and an education in their brain, then by all means blow $200 billion on sending people into space. Until then, there needs to be serious justification for what we spend set against what we can realistically expect to get back from it in temrs of direct benefits to those who most need them. The author never offers any such cost analysis.

The justification needs to be spectacular. it needs to be something that's essential, that can only be done by humans, and that can only be done in space, otherwise it's simply not justifiable when people are starving and suffering, and homeless, and living in migrant camps and being recruited into under-age armies, and drinking disgusting water, and suffering diseases. Anyone with a functioning mind can see that with ever having to go into space.

It needs to be spectacular because, as the author explains, it costs dramatically more money to send a living thing into space than ever it does a robot. It costs more because humans have to be coddled as the author makes quite clear. They're not evolved to live in space, with little gravity tugging on them, and with the brutal cold, the radiation, and a complete vacuum. That's where a heck of a lot of the money goes: into coddling people who are out of their depth - or height in this case! The question that really needs to be asked is: can automation and even robots do the same work that's being done? This question isn't explored in this book either.

Don't tell me it can't be done. It used to be that to fight an air war you needed trained pilots in expensive aircraft - aircraft also designed to coddle humans. Now we have drones doing a lot of that work. I'm not saying it's great, or even justifiable, but it is being done. So you can't tell me that we couldn't achieve the same thing in space - not when we're already doing it, for example, on Mars right now.

But the thrust of this book is about how we can learn lessons from space that we can employ on Earth and the first of these seems to be that we can purify water, but the fact is that the Bill Gates foundation funds the development of waste processing facilities that can be deployed in countries with little infrastructure, and which will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity. None of this came from space exploration. It came from human ingenuity and a challenge to solve a problem. Bill Gates has never been into space and neither - to my knowledge - have any of the people who developed this system. The investment was spent right here on Earth and is already solving problems.

So that brings us back to what this book has to offer in terms of learning lessons from space? The amusing book description has it that the author knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station, but this is such a simplistic view of things that it's laughable. The people who are selected to go into space have to pass a barrage of tests and psychological considerations. They're not regular people!

They're purposefully selected for tolerance and sociability and education level and so on! To pretend you can extrapolate from this highly-managed microcosm of Earth's population to the world at large is to show a disturbing level of ignorance about how people are in real life, especially people who are stressed, and deprived, and poorly educated, and poor, and tired, and sick, and hungry. You can't take the harmony of that micro environment and expect it to translate to a world where 74 million people willingly and freely voted for an asshole like Donald Trump. It doesn't work.

At one point I read, “I’m pleased that today we recognize the value of international partnership and cooperation and don’t focus so much on competition." Has the author met China? It's home home to almost a third of the human race which is having nothing to do with the ISS, and is going its own sweet way in space and on Earth. At another point I read, that Earth’s oceans will boil in a billion years, but it's not that simple.

Yes, in a Billion years our climate will change due to changes in solar output, but the oceans and not going to instantly boil away at that point! it will be a slow change, but slowly accelerating as the sun increases its brilliance and eventually, its size. But a billion years from now it won't matter because humans will either be extinct through our own willful scientific ignorance (Republicans I;m looking at you), or have moved off Earth onto other planets. So again, this seemed inapplicable.

So, in short, I cannot commend a book that so dissipated its resources, and so consistently failed to meet its own aims.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Early Texas Oil by Walter Rundell Jr

Rating: WARTY!

This was a large format picture book about the development of the oil industry from the first strikes in the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-thirties. Why it stopped there I don't know since it was published by Texas A&M University in 1977. I was sorry that it had disturbingly little to say about the environmental impact of oil. It has lots of photographs, all gray-scale, and quite a bit of text, which drily details the discovery and development.

Very few personal names mentioned here meant anything to me, although some I recognized, such as Howard Hughes's father, and his founding of the Hughes Tool Company which led to the more famous Junior's fortune. Parts of this story were interesting, but after a while it seemed quite repetitive and somewhat tedious as we got to read the same story over and over again, only set in a different exploited oil field spreading in a wide reversed 'C' shape across Texas, from Wink in the west, up to Phillips in the north, curving around through the charmingly-named Oil Springs in the east, and then down along the Gulf Coast to Corpus Christi in the south.

While there are some interesting and revealing photos of those early days, and some useful text here and there about the rough life some of those oil workers were forced to lead, my recommendation is to find what you need online in Wikipedia and other such sources unless you really and truly want a coffee-table book about oil.

I was disappointed that there was virtually nothing about what all this oil was used for prior to the burgeoning onset of massive motor transportation. Clearly it had other and valued uses - as a lubricant, for example, and a source of heating and even lighting perhaps, but there's almost nothing said about that. Overall I don't regret reading it, but I felt rather cheated that there wasn't more meat to it. The cover does make it clear that it's a photographic history, but still!

Friday, April 2, 2021

Girl Warriors by Rachel Sarah

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a book consisting of short bios of 26 young female climate "warriors" and how they came to prominence. No, Greta Thunberg isn't one of them, but she gets a lot of mentions! I think the author wanted to shine the spotlight in other directions for a change and there's nothing wrong with that.

The girls are as follows. They're in the same order as in the book, but I'm not actually sure if there is any order with regard to how these names appear. Each item in the list contains the nationality and very briefly, something they're known for. I don't list their ages because that's not as important as what they've done. One entry consists of two sisters, so there are only 25 listings.

  • Daphne Frias, USA - voice against pollution
  • Saoi O'Connor, Ireland - climate striker
  • Maya Penn, USA - fabric recycling
  • Selina N Leem, USA - rise in sea levels
  • Elsa Mengistu, USA - national director Zero Hour
  • Catarina Lorenzo, Brazil - coral reefs
  • Ridhima Pandey, India - climate change awareness
  • Isha Clarke, USA - green new deal
  • Hannah Testa, USA - plastic pollution
  • Haven Coleman, USA - human-caused changed
  • Lilly Platt, Netherlands - plastic pollution
  • Ayisha Siddiqa, USA - greenhouse gases
  • Melati and Isabel Wijsen, Indonesia - plastic pollution
  • Kallan Benson, USA - climate awareness
  • Shreya Ramachandran, USA - water shortage
  • Jamie Margolin, USA - founder of Zero Hour
  • Imogen Sumbar, Australia - fire risk
  • Bella Lack, UK - climate impact on wildlife
  • Malaika Vaz, India - endangered animals
  • Mabel Athanasiou, USA - waste reduction
  • Elizabeth Wathuti, Kenya - tree planting
  • Sarah Goody, USA - environmental activist
  • Vanessa Nakate, Uganda - drought
  • Haile Thomas, USA - healthy eating
  • Isabella Fallahi, USA - youth voice

One thing that I immediately noticed is how prominent the USA is in that list. It's sad that there couldn't have been greater diversity - not in skin color or ethnicity, but in which nations these people represent. 60% of them are in the USA, and while some of those have ancestry or are immigrants from other countries, it's still sad that a nation with little more than 4% of the world's population gets the lion's share of this story especially when the US contributes a lion's share of pollution.

What - there are no activists in China? There's only one representative from the same Pacific islands that are going to be impacted hugely forms ea-level rise? There are only two in Africa, which as a continent has low emissions, but is suffering a great impact from climate change. The USA, which has actively sought to destroy environmental agreements and legislation over the past four years, swallows the Earth's resources and causes pollution wa-ay out of proportion to its population - or any other portion of the world. Maybe the author thinks the USA needs more activists to offset the selfish damage it's doing?

That important beef aside, the stories are heart-warming and inspiring. That's what's most important, and it's why this book is well worth reading. Strong women, storng views, dedicated work. It's all in here, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

The ABCs of Global Warming by Charles Siegel

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book about the dire effects of climate change - effects we have been seeing for some time and are seeing increasingly - does what it says, offering "What Everyone Should Know About the Science, the Dangers, and the Solutions." It keeps it succinct, laying out the facts, backed by copious (200+) references, explaining simply and quickly what the various problems are, dismissing the objections authoritatively, and laying out the do's and don't's of how to fix the problem, rooted in science, not in "I'm in my own reality" speak that a certain thankfully ex-president of the US chose to speak - no doubt for business reasons rather than for any benefit to our planet.

The book is short, easy to understand, and in my opinion, it ought to be essential reading for every student. I commend it as a worthy read.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Lost Animals by Errol Fuller

Rating: WARTY!

This book has about 170 pages of birds, featuring grebes, parakeets, pigeons, rails, warblers, and woodpeckers, and only some 60 pages of other animals, all of which are mammals and there are only seven of those: thylacine, greater short-tailed bat, Caribbean monk seal, Yangtze River dolphin, quagga, Schomburgk's deer, and the Bubal hartebeest. Naturally there are no plants because the title forbids it, but I have to say I was disappointed to see no fish, amphibians or reptiles included.

While this is educational, I think a much better and broader job could have been done. It's like the author just tossed in whatever random critters he happened across and made no effort to diversify at all. What's least shocking is that all of these extinctions are because of humans: hunting, deforestation, other destruction of habitat, and so on. It's the same old selfish, short-sighted, and clueless story, and things are only getting worse with climate change, so while this book does offer some insight into how badly we're screwing our grandchildren - even our children - out of their heritage, it really could have been a lot better, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read as is.

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Greta Thunberg by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Anke Weckmann


Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've adored Greta Thunberg (the 'h' is silent) ever since I first heard about her, and this book tells a fine and inspiring story of the difference a lone young girl can make if she has a cause and some determination.

At the age of fifteen - just two short years ago - and after learning about the sad state of the environment, Greta began a lone vigil outside the Swedish parliament with a sign, 'Skolstrejk för klimatet' (School strike for climate), and her vigil caught on, becoming a major movement.

She reached a point of notoriety where she was able to cross the Atlantic on wind and solar-powered boats (she refuses to fly because of climate impact) and speak to world leaders about how climate change was going to impact hers and future generations.

This book is a great introduction to what one person can do and to what might happen if we all don't do something. I commend it as a worthy read.


Mountains by Charlotte Guillain, Chris Madden


Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

It's unfortunate to be reviewing this when a soldier is missing, not many miles from here at Fort Hood, who shares a very similar last name to the author. The book though is nothing to do with the military. It takes an interesting idea and runs with it with great success.

The perspective of the environment and wildlife as viewed from the summit and environs of some of the world's most impressive mountain ranges is a good one, and it's pleasing to see that this book doesn't forget, as so many do, that there is, believe it or not, a vast world outside of the borders of the USA.

Illustrated beautifully by Madden, the book begins in the Himalayas, a name taken from the Sanskrit meaning simply, the abode of snow. We learn as we visit each new locale, how it quite literally arose, and what lives there, and how magical the engagingly differing coloration is between the animal life, the plant life, the water sources, and even the very rocks themselves. We also learn what climate change is doing to all this planetary glory.

From there we move to Iceland, land of ice and fire, and thence to the Alps, home of a poisonous salamander! We zoom across to the Andes, which are on the end of the Wristies...just kidding. But we do visit the Andes and say "Hi!" to the vividly pink flamingos and the superior-looking if slightly lazy appearing vizcacha. From there it's on to Japan and the majestic Mount Fuji.

Afterward we visit the Rockies and the amazing assortment of birds as well as the beautiful blue of a glacial lake. If you find this stunning, then prepare to be over-stunned when we end up at the rainbow rocks of northwest China, which is, I have to say, is perhaps the only environment that the artist does not do justice to. Although, to be honest you'd have to be a candy manufacturer to really do justice to the amazing rainbow rocks.

The book was entertaining, educational, beautifully written and illustrated, and a fine introduction to these widely-varying slices of life and environments on Earth. There's also a heart-rending appeal at the end from the author to protect our mountains. While the mountains are solid and seem in no need to protection from anyone, the environments they support are fragile. I hope everyone feels the way the author does, or will soon come to do so. I commend this as a worthy read.


Saturday, April 11, 2020

Plastic Soup by Judith Koppens, Andy Engel, Nynke Mare Talsma


Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I cannot for the life of me understand why any publisher would want to release this in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version was chopped, shredded, julienned, and sliced and diced until the story was out of order and made no sense. Even on a iPad, the images were reliably out of order and sliced in half, and not vertical so they would have at least followed the pagination, but horizontally, so it was impossible to read.

Fortunately I have more than one reader app option, and in both Adobe Digital Editions and Bluefire Reader, the book was beautiful: colorful, the illustrations charming, the text brief but informative, and the story well done. The story, written by Nederlander Judith Koppens, and Andy Engel, and illustrated by Nynke Mare Talsma, whose middle name appropriately means 'sea', is of course, the appalling amount of plastic that's in use today, far too much of which gets into the ocean.

It not only gets there in the form of bags and bottles and other large items, it also gets there - and this understandably isn't covered in this story - in the form of micro plastics, some of which is even now probably in the table salt you have in your kitchen. It's a disgrace, a menace, and a health hazard for every living thing, and everything we can do to educate and warn about this is to be commended, which is why I commend this as a worthy and educational read.


Friday, November 1, 2019

Greta and the Giants by Zoë Tucker, Zoe Persico


Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had some mixed feelings about this book jumping on the Greta Thunberg bandwagon. Greta herself is all about action, not about accolades, Recently she turned down an award of some fifty thousand dollars because that's not what she's about - although I do have to confess I don't get why she didn't accept it and donate the money to some organization that's doing something about the climate! But it was her choice, not mine, and I have to express some concern about those who might want to co-opt her good will and momentum, and try to profit from it.

There's nothing in this book to indicate whether Greta is even aware of it, let alone approves of it, since all we get is: "inspired by Greta Thunberg's stand to save the world." But in the end I decided a book like this will do more good than bad, and since it aims to get a useful message out there, and since 3% of the cover price is going to 350.org, which is an international environmental organization aiming to do something concrete about climate change, I have to hope that this book has the same good and selfless intentions that Greta has.

The story, written by Zoë Tucker is short, and to the point. The book is gorgeously illustrated by Zoe Persico in full glorious color. The giants are of course the fossil fuel industry and poor Greta is trying to save the woodlands and its denizens from the destructive encroachment of the industrial world. It makes for a useful teaching tool for the young.






Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Who Will Roar if I Go? by Paige Jaeger, Carol Hill Quirk


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Illustrated beautifully by artist Carol Hill Quirk, and written poetically by the author with the highly appropriate name of Paige Jaeger (Jaeger in German means 'hunter'! Page Hunter? Great name for a writer! LOL!), this book highlights some of the endangered animals on the planet, and we really need to start paying close attention.

We need to focus not just on the species charmingly depicted in this book, but to entire ecosystems that we are despoiling not only through hunting, poaching, and habitat destruction, but also through climate change, which notwithstanding our idiot president's delusional view of science, IS caused by humans, IS happening right now, and IS dangerously affecting the entire planet.

The lion is considered a 'vulnerable' species, which is only one step up from endangered. The gorilla is critically endangered, which is one step below 'merely' endangered. Well over a thousand rhinos were killed by poachers in 2015. Their population cannot remotely sustain such wanton murder. The western black rhino and the northern white rhino are already extinct along with a sub-species of the Javan rhino. We will never see their like again. The rest of the Javan, and also the Sumatran rhinos are critically endangered, and the Indian rhino is vulnerable.

In the mid-nineteen thirties - Ernest Hemingway's puffed-up 'Great' White Hunter era - there may have been as many five million elephants in Africa. Now there is far less than a million. The tiger is Asian, and it's endangered. There is much less than four thousand of them left in the wild. Most zebra species are endangered. One of them, the quagga, is already extinct.

The quetzal bird is much better off, being 'only' near-threatened, while the Chinese giant salamander is critically endangered because the idiot Chinese hunt it for food and medicine. The North American Karner blue butterfly - which I have to be honest and say the art in this case does not do justice to (sorry, Ms. Quirk!) - is vulnerable, and all eight species of the pangolin - which live across the southern hemisphere and which are utterly adorable - are threatened with extinction. Despite China doing the right thing (but perhaps only because it's a national treasure) the panda is still considered vulnerable.

This gorgeous picture book is the beginning of what I hope will be a successful and informative series because it has a lot of potential not only to do good, but to be inventive in how it informs readers. This first makes a colorful statement and a plaintive call for help.

There's a glossary of long words in the back. I would have liked to have seen a short section giving some details - for the grownups! - in the back along with some ways they could help - for example by means of listing URLs of conservation and wildlife protection organizations, but any enterprising adult ought to be able to find those for herself these days. Other than that I though this was a treasure and I commend it for its message and its presentation.


Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Touch the Earth by Julian Lennon, Bart Davis, Smiljana Coh


Rating: WARTY!

Now it's time to review some children's books written by celebrities and we have a sorry bag, I'm saddened to say.

This one is by that Julian Lennon, son of John. This is a short but colorful book illustrated by Smiljana Coh, and co-written by Bart Davis. That's the first bit that I didn't get. Not to be confused with North Concord/Martinez, which is the closest BART station to Davis, or with the politician, this guy is an author who hasn't, prior to this (and to my knowledge) ever written a children's book. Lennon is a composer of some skill, so why did he need a co-writer/ghost writer, whatever this guy's job was? It made no sense to me. In fact, this entire book made no sense.

The idea of the book is to promote awareness in children of what their parents are unthinkingly doing to the environment, but if their parents don't give a damn about the environment, they're sure as hell not going to buy this book for their kids. If they do care, then they'll be educating their kids accordingly, regardless of what books are out there, and sending their money, if they have any to spare, to organizations that are going to use all of it - not 'a portion' to help the environment, instead of it going to publishers and book creators who root up trees, pulp them, and print books on them that talk about saving the environment!

The book is weird because the text tells the reader to tilt and turn it and to press (printed) "buttons" to do various things which magically - and with zero effort - fix the depredations of unrestrained capitalism, but unless your child can already read, this isn't going to work if you're holding the book to read to your child, because they can't do all these things while you're holding the book! It especially doesn't work if you want to read it to group of kids.

Lennon founded an organization called White Feather and the book advises that "a portion" of the profit will go to benefit it. it doesn't say 'all profits' or anything like that, so what this tells me is that most of what this book earns is going into the pockets of the creators and publisher and only a portion goes to the charity. I don't see any other rational way to interpret that, so what's the point of the book? To me it seems, at best, to be misguided. Why not just send the list price ($12 for the hardback) to the charity or to any charity of your choice and skip the book altogether? I can't in good faith commend this at all.


Saturday, September 10, 2016

Welcome to Shirley by Kelly McMasters


Rating: WARTY!

It's been a while since I've reviewed a non-fiction, so I am due for a few. This is the first of those and it's a negative, I'm sorry to have to report. I came to this book via interviews conducted in a documentary I watched about nuclear pollution. The author was one of those interviewed and it mentioned that she'd authored this book about the nuclear waste leakage from Brookhaven National Laboratory which was apparently causing an unduly-high number of cancers in the town of Shirley.

The incompetence and irresponsibility has cost roughly a half billion dollars to clean up, to say nothing of health concerns. There's no way in hell, given the track record it has demonstrated, that this country is fit to be running nuclear power plants, labs, and and other such facilities with this level of abuse of public health and public trust. The world has a half million tons of toxic nuclear waste and nowhere to put it safely. This needs to stop right now, period. Nuclear power plants need to be permanently decommissioned. It's that simple.

I thought that this would make an interesting read, but it didn't. The entire first half of the book had nothing whatsoever to do with any nuclear waste issues. It was a memoir of the author's childhood and youth, none of which was interesting to me. It wasn't even very factual according to one reviewer who actually lives (or lived) in the town. I became so bored reading it, and seeing it fail - on page after page - to actually get to the topic I thought the book was going to be about, that I simply gave up on it. I cannot recommend this.


Thursday, August 4, 2016

One Green Omelet Please by Sally Huss


Rating: WORTHY!

My first positive review out of my last nine! Eek! Of course it has to be Sally Huss, writer and illustrator of young children's books who never lets me down. Told in rhyme with joyful colored pictures, this tells the story of the family who went out to eat. Jenny orders a green omelette, which frankly sounds disgusting, but it turns out it's not so bad.

The important thing is that Jenny takes a minute to ponder the origin of everything from which the omelette is made. Eggs of course, but also broccoli and spinach, green onions and peas. There's a tomato and some cheese. I'm not sure why Jenny says a prayer of thanks, since it's the farmers who ultimately provide all this stuff, but at least she took the time to be grateful for it all. Another fun and useful book from a writer who seems never to run out of ideas!


Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction by Mary Ellen Hannibal


Rating: WARTY!

I normally rate science books highly, but here is one I'm afraid - and sorry - I cannot get behind, because I was never convinced this was doing what it set out (according to the blurb) to do. I know authors cannot be held responsible for their book blurbs unless they self-publish, so I don't blame the author for this, but for me the promise in the blurb of a "wide-ranging adventure in becoming a citizen scientist" was not met. I wasn't even sure who it applied to: the author? the reader? the people featured in the book? For me it seemed like there was very little about actually becoming a citizen scientist, and certainly not in the manner of offering very much in the way of pathways or advice in pursuing such an ambition.

There were some stories about people who are citizen scientists, and some of these were quite interesting, but they were few and far between, and they were buried under the overwhelming volume of what was, to me, extraneous information about anything and everything that had little or nothing to do with citizen science. This first came to my attention when I noticed how much the author talked about losing her father to cancer. I can sympathize. Both of my parents are dead, and it's an awful thing to lose a loved one, but it really has nothing to do with scientific study, much less citizen science. If it had been mentioned briefly, that would be one thing, but the author kept coming back to it as though it were central to the theme of the book. I kept waiting for a point to be made in keeping with the book's title, and it never came.

All of the first five chapters were of this nature - either starting out off-topic, or starting out on topic and then meandering far from it. For example, the entire 20 pages or so of chapter 4 is about author's father and about Lewis & Clark, and about the California gold rush. There was nary a word about modern citizen science, how to become involved, what they do or why or how they find or make the time for it. I simply didn't get the point of chapter four at all. Chapter five began in the opposite way, by launching a story of cellphone use to track and report illegal logging, which was a great example of citizen science, but there was not a word in there about how this operation was brought together.

The chapter then switched to Google's admirable outreach program, which has led to advances in detecting and neutralizing land mines, and other such important and vital community projects, but just as I was starting to appreciate some citizen science here, the chapter veered off completely into a lecture about people protesting corporate malfeasance in logging and mining, which to me is not actually citizen science. It may employ science, and of course a corporation is now legally a citizen, isn't it? But realistically? No! To me this was the biggest problem - the book was not a guide or an exploration, but a tease. We were offered burlesque-like glimpses of the flesh of the topic, but we never got a full frontal! Each time we thought we would see something wondrous and beautiful, down came one of the seven veils and hid it from us while the spotlight was whisked away to another part of the stage.

Some of the arguments seemed to me to be poorly thought through. For example, one part of the book discussed the disappearance of whales and what a huge hole (both practically and metaphorically to my mind) they leave in the environment. This is a tragedy and the people who have been carrying out the genocide on whales are the ones who really need harpooning in the ass, but the argument about whales being valuable because they sequester carbon - embedding it into their thirty to one hundred tons of flesh and then carrying it to the bed of the ocean when they die - was not a balanced one. Worse, it was a wrong-headed one.

The author seems to have forgotten that whales are air breathers and as such output carbon dioxide throughout their lives - lives which may extend in some species to a hundred years. I read somewhere that whales as a whole, output some 17 million tons of carbon a year. That said, they also help decrease carbon by stirring up iron in the water, which then supports plankton growth. The science is not exact; it's still under study, but it seems to me that the best we can say is that some species of whales could be carbon sinks or at worst, carbon neutral.

The study - as far as I can tell - was not exactly scientific either, in that it failed to take into account whale farts! This might seem frivolous, but whales pass gas and that gas contains carbon dioxide and methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. Some more work needs to be done, but as far as I can see, removing whales from the oceans, as humans have so mercilessly done for centuries, is a capital crime, yet it would seem that it has no overall effect on global warming, as the history of the last forty million years has shown! We need to save the whales not because they are carbon sequesters, but because they are sentient, feeling beings, period.

Digging deep into history might be interesting for some readers, but it offers not a whit of help for anyone who was interested in learning what opportunities there are for citizen scientists and how potential volunteers might avail themselves of these. This is far more of a memoir and a history book than ever it is a useful guide to citizen science, and I felt saddened by that. It seemed like a great opportunity was squandered here, and what was here was certainly not something I would want to read some four hundred pages of! I can't in good faith give a positive recommendation for this book, although I thank the publisher for the opportunity to read it, and wish the author all the best in her future endeavors.


Saturday, January 9, 2016

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World by Daniel Callahan


Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"humanity can solve the carbon and carbon problem" ??!
"but is now is now more" makes no sense.
"develop a successor to the Kyoto Prptocol is planned for Paris in December 2015" misspelling of protocol and poor grammar.
"such as improving automobile engine efficiency to reduce mileage per gallon" improve mileage per gallon, surely?!
"Too many cooks," the old saying has it, "spoils the broth." person mismatch.
"Of that amount $275 llion was spent on the top 1% of patients" million is missing a few letters.
"Michael Grubb has laid out the pathway that successful funding of technological research must follow to move from the beginning, research, to the end, successful implementation and dissemination." This made no sense to me.
"Most of that increase will come from the developing countries, which will account for 90% of the increase, with the Organisation for Economic Co -operation and Development countries (essentially developed countries) contributing only 17%." 107%?
" The IEA has projected a one-third increase in global energy demand between 2011- 2035, with a small decline in the share of fossil fuel from 83% to 76%. Renewables and nuclear energy will meet about 40% of basic demand during that same period." Again maybe I am misunderstanding this, but 76% *or 83%) plus 40% add up to more than 100, unless 'global energy demand' is somehow different from 'basic demand'. If it is, it should be made more clear.
Minor quibble: "between 2011- 2035" To me the hyphen equates to the word 'to' so this reads like 'between 2011 to 2035', whereas it should read 'between 2011 and 2035'. If I were going to use the hyphen, I'd write it as 'from 2011- 2035', but maybe others read it differently.

Note up front that this was an advance review copy and I appreciate the opportunity to read it. What I have identified as problems or potential problems with it may well have been taken care of by the time of publication! That said, this book, properly titled The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity by Daniel Callahan was a disappointment to me. I usually try to give environmentally themed books a positive review if I can because I think they're tremendously important, but i cannot honestly do that here.

The author has done an impressive amount of work, but what's presented does not appear to be intended as a popular handbook on solutions to important problems facing us in the near future. It's much more of a survey of five major problems which the author sees - problems which will impinge upon us all - and what options have been put forward in attempts at or as suggestions for the mitigation of these problems. As such, it can make for very dense and dry reading. I can't recommend undertaking it unless you're a true devotee of environmental literature, because for me, even that wasn't quite enough.

It was interesting in many ways, but I would not recommend it for casual reading. In addition to this, there were multiple issues with it which drew it out of my favor (for what that's worth!). There were areas that read - to me - like pure gobbledygook. For example, I had no idea what this meant: "Most proposals for mitigation and adaptation change require forging or greatly enhancing government- private sector alliances, a receptive government with public support, industry incentives to take chances with uncertain long-term profit, and multidisciplinary and integrated systems, among others." I'm sure I could have parsed it out and derived the intended meaning if I spent some time on it, but I wasn't willing to spend my time doing the very work I felt the author should have done.

First I want to look at the things which were interesting - or disturbing, depending upon your perspective. They were actually both: interesting for now, and very disturbing for the not-too-distant future. There were many of these. They were not always presented in the most coherent manner, though, which rather robbed them of their power and deluged the reader in statistics rather than an engaging relation of clear facts and opinions. It's hard to get a good feel for a situation when the reader has so many numbers, percentages and assorted facts spit out in short order with little by way of explanation or context.

While the book did a pretty decent job of presenting many disturbing facts, the apparent lack of good solutions was also upsetting; however, some solutions were completely overlooked. For example, we're informed that "Some 80% of all infectious disease in poor countries can be traced to dirty water" and some pertinent issues are discussed, yet one promising solution, from Dean Kamen (the inventor of AutoSyringe, the Segway, and the iBOT Mobility System) went unmentioned. Similarly, and still on the topic of water, I felt that sea-water filtration as a solution to fresh water shortage, was given way too short shrift, being largely dismissed as expensive. Well energy is expensive, but the places where water is often in very short supply are the same ones where solar power can provide abundant low cost energy, and we did get told how cheap that had become. That doesn't solve all the issues with sea water use, but I would have liked to have seen this explored more, given how much water this planet does have available even if it is mixed thoroughly with salt.

I confess that it was with a certain amount of smugness that I read about bottled water, which I do not drink. I learned that "Bottled water is an exceedingly profitable item, vigorously advertised, stoutly defended by its manufacturers, and seeming adored by the public. In 2009 Americans spent $10.6 billion to consume 8.4 million gallons of it. It is a strikingly popular item in upscale restaurants, where it is served at 80% markups." I also read that "A 2006 study found that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to produce the plastic bottles, while the cost of tap water production is around a thousandth as much" and "Americans drink around 29 gallons of bottled water a year per capita." That's a lot of expensive water being consumed by the very people who have least need of it. One thing which was not explored was the potential health risk in the possibility of leeching of chemicals from plastic water bottles into the water which these people are consuming in such massive quantities.

Aging was another area of interest. While those of us in spoiled-rotten western cultures have access to decent food (though we may not choose to avail ourselves of it), clean water, good healthcare, non of us can escape aging! "In 1975 there were six children for every older person, but by 2035 there will only two." This is another area of concern: how we will take care of our growing aging population when they are going to outnumber the very people who can physically and financially care for them. I would have liked this to have been explored in greater depth.

Climate change was disturbingly summed-up in this section which quoted James Hansen:

with current policies in place we are locked into a rise of between 2 ° C and 5.3 ° C, " adding in an interview that 4 ° C "would be enough to melt all the ice . . . we are now three years away from that point-of-no return.
For me, part of the problem with this book was the extensive quotation of the work of others. It felt more like reading a compilation than an original book and very little of what was quoted made much impact upon me, the above being one of the few exceptions.

In addition to those problems, there were assorted issues with grammar and with percentages not adding up. While those are on the author and publisher, another issue, the formatting of the book as read in the Kindle app on my phone which left a lot to be desired, is purely a fault of the app rather than with the book itself. Authors can take steps to mitigate the damage the Kindle conversion process subjects your work to, but this restricts creativity rather a lot. One thing which could have been fixed, I think, would have been to have had the references (with which the text was replete) clickable. It was annoying to read something, see a reference number, and not be able to click to it and click back. In a print book, it's easy to stick your finger between pages and look up a reference, returning to where you left off. It's not possible to do that in a kindle app unless the references are clickable and the book provides a return click to get you back to where you started. Perhaps this will be available in the final published copy, but without having a copy available to me that is close to what's intended to be published (which this book was hopefully!), I can't give an adequate review of those things.

Overall, and while I like, as I said, to review environmental books positively if I can, I wasn't able to do that with this one because it left too much undone and did not leave me feeling better educated afterwards than I had been before. Yes, it was an ARC, but in this electronic age, I felt it could have been in a lot better shape, including a final run-through with a spell-checker. I can't see this appealing to a wide readership, not without being better presented. With all these things in mind I cannot in good faith recommend this book, and I'm sorry for that.


Friday, September 4, 2015

Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka


Rating: WARTY!

The library had this book on a display about water use and smart farming. It sounded interesting, but turned out to be not so much once I started reading it. It was first published in 1996, and unfortunately is filled with "Gaia" talk along the lines of the whole planet being one living, breathing entity and it's blabbering about spirit and stuff, which is odd given that the authors appears to be an atheist. Some of what Fukuoka says makes sense, but none of what he says is ground-breaking or hitherto unknown. The author's main thesis seems to be that plants which have grown wild and become used to local conditions will do better than artificially engineered or bred plants. Well duhh!

The books seems full of contradiction, too. He talks on the one hand of naturally revitalizing areas which human depredation have rendered waste land, yet he derides attempts to irrigate those same areas and grow plants. Either growing stuff there will contribute to increased rainfall, as he advocates, or it will achieve nothing, as he also claims in deriding these projects! He doesn't seem to grasp that increased rainfall won't automatically precipitate just because you plant seeds and get a few plants growing. There are climactic, geographical, and topological reasons for rainfall or the lack of it. No one ruined the land to create the Sahara. That happened perfectly naturally.

In other instances he repeatedly says there are no bad insects - such as on page 43, where the page title is "In Nature There are No Beneficial or Harmful Insects" which is such patent bullshit that it would definitely fertilize crops organically. Later, he talks of protecting plants from insects and disease - such as on p93 (protect the seeds from animals and insects), p109 (susceptible to insects and disease), and p156 (more resistant to insects and disease). If there are no bad insects and no disease, why must we protect plants?! This scatter-brained approach to writing undermines everything he says.

Another contradiction lay in his relation of a story about an orchard on his family's farm. On the one hand, later in the book, he talks about letting nature work in our favor instead of fighting it, but at the start of chapter one, he tells us of this orchard which as a young man, he left to its own devices purely from his own laziness (i.e. letting nature rule instead of tending the trees). The result was that 200 trees died. What he did was natural farming - not doing anything to the trees and letting nature take its course, yet immediately after telling us this story of the dead trees, he then claims what he did wasn't natural farming! He makes no sense. He doesn't even revisit this to explain to us what he ought to have done - how the death of his two hundred apple trees could have been avoided.

The book is all over the place and full of unsupported anecdote. Repeated tales of the nature, "I did X and got a wonderful result Y" do not explain anything, or support his thesis - whatever that was supposed to be (he never really makes it clear other than to say nature knows best which is patently obvious). There are a lot of people who urge us to go back to nature, back to organic, back to the land, but not a one of them addresses the massive increase in farming yields brought about by modern farming methods or how we're to feed seven billion people by living as hunter gatherers.

Admittedly a lot of the bounty produced by modern farming techniques unfortunately goes to waste or to feed animals instead of feeding starving people, but you can't argue with the yield which is far higher than nature's original versions of the fruits and grains ever was. The truth is that there is nothing that we farm which is 'natural' - defined as 'exists in this form in nature'. Everything out there is a result of genetic manipulation - except that the purists are too dishonest to call it that. The food we enjoy was originally not manipulated in a lab in the manner in which modern agribusiness pursues those same aims, but it certainly was genetically manipulated for quantity and size over many years by farmers.

Fukuoka is absolutely right in his assertion that no gods or Buddhas will save us. The plain fact is that no gods have ever saved us or ever will; it's in our hands, and we've screwed it up, but vague appeals to some non-existent, nebulous 'golden past' will not save us either. Neither will claims that there are no parasites and harmful insects. Yes, there are! Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw - and in virus and parasite. That doesn't mean we've been smart in attacking these problems, but sticking our fingers in your ears and chanting "Gaia will save us! Gaia will save us" doesn't work either. If it did, humanity would not have been almost wiped out a few thousand years ago - and Homo sapiens wouldn't be the only human species remaining on the planet. Everything save for about one percent of all living things has been wiped out, and none save the most recent of those were wiped out because ancient Middle-East farmers genetically manipulated crops or laid waste to land, or because Cro-Magnon people used chemical farming methods.

Fukuoka is woefully ignorant about evolution, and anyone who ignores or misunderstands those particular facts of life is doomed. Yes creationists, I'm looking at you. There was no oxygen on Earth when life first began. No free oxygen, that is - it was bound up in minerals and compounds. Contrary to Fukuoka's evident belief, it was life which produced the very oxygen which in the end killed life. Only those organisms which had mutations which could handle this highly poisonous and dangerously corrosive gas - a waste product back then - survived to go on to evolve into what we see today. The old life - the anaerobic life as we now know it - exists only in obscure, out-of-the-way locations these days, buried in mud, hidden away from the deadly oxygen which would lay waste to it. Yes, modern life lived on the excrement of anaerobic life!

Fukuoka also appears rather clueless about the nature of time and of the value of taxonomy, and he seems ignorant of the fact that E=MC² was in the scientific air long before Einstein derived it. Scientists like Henri Poincaré and Fritz Hasenöhrl had been all over it, but had never put it all together in the way Einstein did.

At one point in this book (p86) there's a footnote which declares that Fukuoka is not saying his orchard was grown on a desert, yet less than a dozen pages later (p97), he says in the text "You may think it reckless for me to say that we can revegetate the desert. Although I have confirmed the theory in my own mind and in my orchard..." Clearly he is thinking of his orchard as a desert. And good luck with confirming a theory in your own mind very scientific! LOL! The problem is that he never actually defines desert so we don't know if he views a desert in the way in which deserts are commonly defined (through rainfall or lack thereof), or if he merely means impoverished land or land to which waste has been laid in one way or another. He appears never to have heard of the dangers of invasive species either in his advocating taking seeds from Thailand to plant in India to revegetate the deserts there. India has no native vegetation that would serve this purpose?

So no, I have no faith in what this author claims except in the very vaguest of terms: yes, variety is better than monoculture, and yes, we can't keep poisoning our planet in the name of agriculture, but experiments confirmed the mind are not the same as real practical verified results, and he offers no references for any of the claims he makes, so for me the take home was nothing I didn't already know. I refuse to recommend this book.


Thursday, April 30, 2015

Marsh Mud and Mummichogs by Evelyn B Sherr


Title: Marsh Mud and Mummichogs
Author: Evelyn B Sherr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Rating: WORTHY!

Evelyn Sherr has a BS in Biology and a PhD in Zoology. She's Professor Emeritus in the Oregon State University's Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry department. Judged from her writing in this book, she also has a sly sense of humor and her knowledge of salt marsh life is quite 'littorally' amazing. There is one thing on which I have her beat, though: I know that snakes are venomous, not poisonous! Although I guess some snakes might be poisonous if not cooked properly before eating...!

The book is pretty dense and strong on science, but it's not dry and unreadable. Obviously it isn't for everyone, but it is for anyone who has an interest in wildlife, especially if you live in Georgia, or plan on visiting and don't want to end up bitten or stung (or even eaten) by something nasty when all you wanted to do was enjoy the coastline.

So I know what you're wondering: what the heck is a mummichog? Well I didn't know either, and I'm not going to tell you because I have to admit the obscurity of the title was part of the attraction, as I'm sure the author planned. All I'm going to say is that it has nothing to do with killer fish.

The book is well organized and supported with a host of really nice quality gray-scale photographs. I found myself wishing for more, even so. So many animals and plants are mentioned that it would have been nice to see a few more of them. There were too many to show images of them all, but fortunately, if you're reading this on something like an iPad, you can have your browser open, and do an image search to keep up. I was doing this almost spastically. It's one of the major advantages that ebooks have over print books.

And this author really does cover everything. Here's a list of the chapter headers so you can gauge how thorough she is for yourself:

  1. Marine habitats of the Georgia Coast
  2. What You Don't See: Microscopic Life
  3. Marsh Grass, Live Oaks, Sea Oats
  4. Creatures of the Black Goo
  5. Mud Dwellers of Marshes and Creeks
  6. Creepy Crawlies: Insects and Spiders
  7. Marsh Life: Scales
  8. Marsh Life: Feathers and Fur
  9. What Lies Beneath; Zooplankton
  10. Attachment to Place: Settlers
  11. Sound Swimmers: Nekton
  12. On, and Under, the Beach: Living in the Sand
  13. Loggerheads
  14. Shore Birds
  15. seasons in the Sun
  16. The Once and Future Coast

There is also: three appendices, a bibliography, and an index. And there's a preface which I didn't read. I never read forewords, introductions, prefaces, prologues and whatever. Just a personal quirk.

I love the chapter titles that played on movie titles such as 'Creatures of the Black Goo', and 'What Lies Beneath', and the play on words in 'Sound Swimmers'. In the 'Feathers and Fur' chapter I learned of the rice rat - something I had never heard of before. That sounds so cute - and looks just as cute. Any budding animator needs to Disney-fy that before Disney does!

The chapters, as the list above indicates, covered everything from microscopic life to the megafauna of the area, which includes whales and squid. It covered pretty much every class of life there is, from invertebrates to vertebrates, and pretty much every group those two orders include, and it did not shy away from plant life either, which was really nice.

I don't normally pay attention to covers because the author typically has little or nothing to do with them unless they self publish, but in this case, and regardless of who chose the cover, I have to say it was part of the attraction for me. It reminded me of the time I visited a salt marsh (in Texas, not in Georgia, and I walked with my dogs along a raised boardwalk just like this one, hoping the gators wouldn't launch themselves up onto it and try to take one of the dogs! I have to say that Texas gators are pretty decent folk. I saw them in the marsh, their eyes just above the water, but they didn't try anything funny, which just goes to show why you never see a gator doing stand-up comedy. It was a bit scary, but great fun and quite bracing.

So before I wax lyrical with an ocean of comments, let me beach this review by simply saying that I loved this book, loved the way it was written, the sweet sense of humor and the extensive detail of everything to be found in nature on the Georgia coast. I recommend this.


Tuesday, February 10, 2015

What Stands in a Storm by Kim Cross


Title: What Stands in a Storm
Author: Kim Cross
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
Page 109 "...right bicep..." should be "...right biceps..."

Most of what I review is fiction, however rooted in reality it night be, but occasionally I review non-fiction where I think it’s important, and those reviews tend mostly towards books about the environment. This one falls into that category and it’s the first one of which I haven't felt merited a passing grade.

Wikipedia has a brief introduction to this storm, but author Kim Cross (not to be confused with author Kimberley Cross Teter) makes it personal and goes much deeper so you get a real feel for what it might have been like to be there as this storm was brewing. There is a problem with this approach, however, in that a certain amount of fiction, however unintended, necessarily creeps into a story written this way. In my opinion, this fictional element detracted from the humanization of the story.

For example, a lot of conversations are reported where those conversations were not recorded as they happened, and are clearly made-up. By made-up, I mean reconstructed, not made-up to distort or misrepresent. They're constructed to convey what people were saying and feeling, and even though they're based on personal recollections, no one can recall verbatim what was precisely said and exactly felt at times like those. It’s interesting and important to know how people felt looking back, of course, but it’s also rather misleading to present recollection as though it was 'happening live".

Where we don’t have actual texts or recordings, these recollections are necessarily based upon what people reported after the fact, but they nevertheless are to one extent or another a fictional representation of events and conversations which are in this case and in my opinion, biased towards the emotional. For me, I felt that the story was emotional enough without this "augmentation", and while a tedious recital of plain facts would have done an equal disservice, I'm by no means convinced that this was the smartest approach to reporting these particular stories.

I know that the author comes from a journalistic background and journalists are all-but-brainwashed into going after the human angle, but in this day and age, people are more mature in their view of stories (although nonetheless gullible, unfortunately) and don’t necessarily respond in the same way to a traditional journalistic approach. The author does tell us that the quotations were taken from recordings in some cases and eye-witnesses in others, but eye-witness testimony is the most unreliable of all evidence.

I don’t doubt that the author conveyed her interviews accurately, and I don’t doubt that people told it they way they remembered it without consciously changing anything, but memory is an extraordinarily malleable entity. I don't believe that these people accurately recalled precise reactions and verbatim conversations from times when they were highly (and understandably) emotional and to represent it here as though they did seems unfortunately misleading at best.

It's not that they were lying or attempting to mislead or obfuscate, but the fact is that no-one save an eidetic can accurately report word-for-word conversations, especially not from traumatic events like these. I felt that the reporting here ought to have striven for less "verbatim" and more general representation of how people behaved, what they thought, and how they felt and reacted. For me that would have made a more authentic story and it would have been better for it.

The story is split into three parts: the storm, the aftermath, and picking up the pieces. We follow not only the people it affected, but also the weather forecasters who were trying to predict what it would do, and when and where, and the rescuers who had to find the victims after the storm passed. There had already been an outbreak earlier that same month - indeed, April 2011 currently holds the record for most prolific tornado month with a total of 757 reported overall. In the outbreak of 25 -27 April, 348 people died, 316 of these on April 27th, which spawned four EF5 tornadoes. The writer tells us that "Only one EF5 is reported in the United States in a typical year. In 2011 there were six. Four of these struck on April 27th." It’s pretty scary stuff even when stated baldly like that.

This was an horrific event by any measure. Or series of events more accurately. The storm-front spewed-out tornado after tornado, some of those splitting themselves. At least one of those which didn’t split grew to be a mile wide. When people thought it had passed, it meant only that they were in the eye (and remember this is a tornado, not a hurricane!), and the winds would come again, this time in the opposite direction, finishing off damage which the first massive wall of wind had begun.

A power transmission tower was literally bent in half, a school bus was stripped to its chassis. Not only were homes removed, but the concrete slabs beneath them were lifted. Motor vehicles took to the air. Entire apartment complexes were raised. It was lifting asphalt off the roads. It was lifting bulldozers and dump trucks. It lifted an SUV into a water tower. Community after community was savaged. In addition to the irreplaceable lives lost, property damage totaled eleven billion dollars.

The story mentions many forecasters and storm-chasers, but the weather forecasters it focuses most strongly on are James Spann and Jason Simpson, and there's some back story on Spann, which I skipped since it wasn't interesting to me. It may be more interesting to people who watch these guys on TV (apparently they have quite a following). I was much more interested in exactly what happened that day, and that's pretty gripping. Frankly I’d have preferred it if that story had not been broken-up with flashbacks. I’d also have preferred it if we had learned much more about it. To me this was one of several lost opportunities in this book.

The book focused tightly on people and personal experiences, and I can see why a journalist would take that approach, but in doing so, a much bigger and ultimately more important picture was missed in my opinion. The bigger picture concerns climate change, and personal safety in the event of a natural disaster. There was also a bigger picture in other dimensions, too. In focusing on people, nature was missed. We learn nothing of animals - wildlife, domesticated animals, and pets - it’s like they didn’t exist in this book. We learn something of damage to trees, but only in passing, and nothing of how nature suffered and eventually recovered afterwards. I was sad that all of this was lost in a welter of personal stories, important as those are.

Even on that personal level we missed a golden teaching opportunity to wise-up readers on how to avoid the mistakes and about poor decisions which people can make during catastrophes like this one. I can see how this would conflict with telling a tale of loss and tragedy: no one wants to say "your child/sibling/parent/relative died because they made bad decisions." Of course not, but people even in their best light do not act rationally when understandably overwhelming disasters envelop them.

Ultimately it’s more important and practical to try to prevent deaths than it is to dwell on the past, tragic as it was, and painful and meaningful as those losses were. A chapter on what might have been done to prevent, to ameliorate, to avoid, wouldn't have been out of place in this book. The author does touch on these things in a rather half-hearted and widely-scattered manner, but a solid statement in a chapter of its own would have been more useful and practical. How did those who survived actually survive? Why didn't those who died actually survive? People always ask "Why me?" after events like this, but this book not only fails to offer answers, it doesn't even attempt them. I think that was a sad omission and a disservice to those who died and those who survived them.

I think the role of religion was overplayed here too. Yes, churches do contribute in important ways at times like these, but that's the church. No god did anything to save lives here, and while a small issue was made out of a stained glass window which withstood the storm, four churches were completely demolished in one community (as well as others elsewhere, no doubt), yet this was rather glossed over because that one window was what stands in a storm! I found that distasteful.

Climate change, aka 'global warming' doesn’t necessarily account for every super-storm which breaks out, but what we can count on is that climate change will without a doubt exacerbate such storms; winters will become more harsh, summers will become more baking, and hurricanes and tornadoes will become more prevalent and stronger. This is why this is important, because instead of being a rarity, the events of late April 2011 could become the norm. I felt that a valuable educational opportunity was squandered when this book didn’t even mention climate, climate change, or global warming - not even once.

Be forewarned that a lot of this story is going to be really hard to read. It doesn't matter that this isn’t a news item on TV, that's it’s 'past history' - it was only three years ago and there are people out there still living with this as fresh and raw on their minds and hearts as if it happened this morning. The description of the tornado assault in part one is very well done, but I wished that there was more of it and more explanation for what it did and how it did it so people can understand it better and be better prepared for the future.

It’s the rescue stories afterwards - specifically the rescues that were already too late before the rescue teams even set out - that grab you, though. It’s the babies in the rubble and the loved ones lost, where not even experience can prepare you for the next one you find. And the next one. If we don’t want ever more of this in the future we need to start fighting now: fighting against climate change and fighting for safer buildings and a better educated public. I just wish the author had come down stronger on that.

As it is, I can't recommend this book. I think it got off to a strong start, but it faded quickly and became lost, for me, in parts two and three. The winds may blow differently for you.


Saturday, December 13, 2014

Mason Meets a Mason Bee by Dawn Pape


Title: Mason Meets a Mason Bee
Author: Dawn Pape
Publisher: Good Green Life Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This is a wonderful young children's story about the fact the bees are slowly becoming extinct, and when they do - if we do not prevent it - we're going to be in a much sorrier state than ever we will be through climate change. Climate change will screw up this planet, I promise you, but losing bees will hit us with a gut punch from which we will have a seriously hard time recovering.

Dawn Pape, a self-described "lawn-chair gardener" has a degree in Environmental Studies and a Master's in Environmental Education, and this story features her own son meeting a bee and learning all about what bees do and why it's important. It's told in a sing-song rhyme and illustrated with photographs, some of which are augmented to make the bee look a little more human, with startled eyes and smiles!

At first, Mason is scared of the bee, but slowly he comes to realize that it's not interested in him. It's just "wants to do its job" - gathering nectar and pollen for its own purposes, but incidentally pollinating the plants as it does so. This is a symbiotic relationship that's been going on for a hundred million years - that is until humans came along at the very end of that huge time period and started screwing things up.

Contrary to what you may have heard on Doctor Who(!), bees aren't aliens! There are some twenty thousand species of them, all evolved on Earth and they range in size from a variety of "sting-less" bee measuring only two millimeters (believe it or not - Trigonisco duckel!) to the Mason bee, featured in this story, which can grow to almost 40 millimeters.

The death of a beehive is referred to these days as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - that is as long as it meets certain criteria. Forms of it have been noted for a hundred and fifty years on a small scale, but over the last forty years, the problem seems to have become far more serious than an occasional outbreak, with wild bee populations going into decline, and "domesticated" colonies being hit noticeably. By 2007, "...large commercial migratory beekeepers in several states had reported heavy losses associated with CCD. Their reports of losses varied widely, ranging from 30% to 90% of their bee colonies" (wikipedia).

There is a variety of causes for CCD "...such as pesticides, mites, fungus, beekeeping practices (such as the use of antibiotics or long-distance transportation of beehives), malnutrition, other pathogens, and immunodeficiencies. The current scientific consensus is that no single factor is causing CCD" (wikipedia). The author of this story book seems to place the blame on neonicotinoids a component of pesticides, and there seems to be a scientific consensus supporting her conclusion: "A 2013 peer-reviewed literature review concluded neonicotinoids in the amounts typically used harm bees and safer alternatives are urgently needed."

So there it is. It's an important topic, and it's one of a type which you do not usually see tackled in children's literature. That's why this book is important, and can be a useful part of any young child's environmental education. I recommend it as part of a complete environmental education that every child should have.


Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Price of Thirst by Karen Piper


Title: The Price of Thirst
Author: Karen Piper
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This book is "The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists...", and if it's all true, it's truly scary.

Since author Karen Piper is professor of post-colonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri, I'm going to come down on the side of veracity, backed up by the extensive end-notes in this book. Karen Piper has received a Carnegie Mellon Fellowship, a Huntington Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Award, the Sierra Nature Writing Award, and a Sitka Center residency. I'm guessing she knows what she's talking about!

For a planet which is 70% larded with it, you wouldn't think water shortage would be an issue, would you - but it's more than just water - it's clean, potable (and portable!) water that's the issue, and that's where the contention and cost come in. Talking of contention, it's long been mine that energy and water will be serious flash-points in the near future and that's why my blog, which is mostly about fiction writing, takes time now and then to review non-fiction books that I consider important. This book is one of them.

This was an advance review copy, which means one doesn't expect to be perfect, but I have to report some serious formatting issues here and there. I don't know what the original typescript looked like, but it didn't seem to have transitioned well for my Kindle. Unfortunately, there are no location or page numbers in this edition so I can't quote them, but Kindle search will find them.

One problem I found was "This dust has been shown to cancer cause cancer..." (too much cancer!) and a little bit later, "...his own p e ople" (spacing within the word 'people'). There were some other instances of this nature )oddball line breaks and so on) which I hope will be eradicated before the final version goes to the press (as it were). Other than that, it's very well-written, and the photographs accompanying the text looked good in the Kindle version, but the serious problem here is not the errors: it's that cancer. This is one side-effect of water shortage which you do not typically expect.

The cancer issue was raised as part of a report about the San Joaquin valley, which is drying up because the local water has been pumped out and nothing has been done to replenish it. This is an increasing and common problem with water tables. When places like Tulare Lake and Owens Lake are pumped dry, it exposes things like heavy metals which were - not so much safely, but at least held - in the lake bed, and they began blowing all over, particularly into people's lungs. Another issue with parched land is dust storms which can not only completely block visibility, hampering transport and causing accidents, but which can also unleash disease vectors, such as "Valley fever" which has quadrupled in the area over the last decade.

That's not even the scariest part of this book, believe it or not. The scariest part for me came in the beginning - not the introduction (I don't do introductions or prologues), but the beginning of the book proper, where we learn that uncomfortable and disturbing facts of water privatization. In 2001, five water corporations controlled three-quarters of the world's privatized water - but how much is that really? Well, a decade from now, a fifth of the world's population will be dependent upon corporate water and in the US, it will be more like double that. That frightens me.

The book comes with extensive end notes, and a conclusion which offers numerous solutions to help alleviate water problems. One of these which is not so obvious is one which I embraced a long time ago: become vegetarian. Eighty percent of the world's water is expended upon agriculture, and as the author quotes Sunder Lal Bahuguna saying,

If you use one acre of land to grow meat...then you will get only 100 kg of beef in a year. If you grow cereals, you'll get 1 to 1.5 tonnes. Apples you get 7 tonnes. Walnuts 10-15 tonnes.

The bottom line is that we're wasting water by feeding grain to animals so we can, in turn, eat meat - and we're robbing people of water in doing it. Here are some articles (URLs were good at the time of posting this blog) featuring or by this book's author to give you a little taste of what you can expect from the book itself:
Revolution of the Thirsty
No money, no water - not in Africa, but in Detroit!
People without water are more likely to become extremists
Water is the new oil
Explore the frightening landscape where water and thirst are political, and drought is a business opportunity.
Water Privatization Overlooked as Factor in Egypt's Revolt

I highly recommend this book. It may be a bit dry and fact-filled in parts, but overall it tells an engrossing and terrifying story about a problem which is not only not being competently handled, it's being actively mishandled. Any science story about the origin of life specifies right up front that water is critical to life as we know it, and that not only applies to origins, it applies to life ongoing. Water isn't a "resource", it isn't a "commodity". It's isn't a privilege. In my opinion, it's a human right to free, clean, and readily available water. Any other approach is sadism, period.