BOOK REVIEW SUMMARIES

Looking for Peyton Place, Barbara Delinsky

This novel is about small town politics and the illegal disposal of hazardous chemicals in the town’s local paper mill. Annie, the main character, returns to her home town to lead her personal investigation as to what killed her mother and what is slowly killing her sister. As she did her research she found out that on the day that one of the barrels leaked mercury her mother and sister were in the building above were the barrel was buried.

Against the Grain, Richard Manning

In Richard Manning’s Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, he identifies the emergence of agriculture as an unfavorable, albeit inevitable product of evolution that developed thousands of years ago, beginning with the disappearance of hunter-gatherers; he continues on to document agriculture’s dire effects on society, leading up to present times.  He argues that the overproduction and over-consumption of wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, and sugar has created a plethora of problems related to economic disparity, pollution, and health.

Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, Erik Marcus

Erik Marcus’ book writes in his book Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus provides health, animal cruelty and environmental impact reasons to become a vegan. He argues that being a vegan will reduce your risk of heart disease, multiple types of cancer help with weight loss. He also explains how chickens, pigs and cows are mistreated in preparation for and at a slaughterhouse. Last, he links veganism to the world food supply and world hunger.

Red Sky At Morning, James Speth

Red Sky at Morning begins with a brief overview of the environmental issues which we are faced with today and why they are cause for concern.  However, Speth says it is not that the actors in the international community have failed to recognize the gravitas of the impending crisis.  Speth points out that action has been taken on the environmental front over the past thirty years - there have been numerous conventions and agreements at the global level.  However, none of them have been effective, because, in his terms, they have targeted the symptoms and not the disease itself.  We have opted for a “business as usual” approach, rather than facing up to the underlying systemic factors which have steered us toward the crisis ahead and which are preventing us from mounting an effective response.

Broadly speaking, these factors fall into two categories.  The first is our consumerism and our (misplaced) faith in free markets.  The second is the structure of the international system itself - weak institutions, the lack of leadership on the part of the US, and tensions between the Global North and Global South.  Speth concludes by offering a series of proposals which he believes by incorporating into our politics and lifestyles will avert the environmental crisis.  These include correcting for market failures, developing greener technologies, altering our values, pursuing a robust development strategy in the Global South, and strengthening our international institutions.

Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, Vandana Shiva

Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed concludes that the world's food supply is being threatened by industrialized corporations mass producing unsafe, unhealthy and unsanitary food grown and injected by pesticides and fertilizers that are ruining the earth's soil. Food becomes a battle between farmers and corporations, specifically quality versus quantity. Buying locally from farmers and decentralizing the agricultural government to make a cooperative, non-corporate farming method instead of relying on huge corporations can help reduce the effects of agricultural corporations.

Cradle to Cradle, Wil McDonough

In Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough presents an alternative to the current cycle of consumerism which he calls “cradle to grave”.  In today’s technological world, goods are produced only to be consumed and then subsequently discarded to their grave.  Once the transfer of the good from the manufacturer to the consumer takes place, the manufacturer loses the effort and resources that were used to produce that good.  Consumers constantly discard used goods, such as old appliances, rather than seeking to recycle or repair them. The result is a loss of valuable resources, unnecessary production of pollution, and a poor regard for the well-being of the environment.  McDonough proposes to resolve this problem with a “cradle to cradle” cycle in which products are specifically designed to be indefinitely recycled and thus saving valuable resources and environmental costs.

            With McDonough’s “cradle to cradle” cycle or products, goods are specifically designed to be recycled.  Once a good has been used by a consumer, it is returned to the manufacturer for re-production rather than being discarded to a nearby landfill, also known as “the grave”.  McDonough criticizes the “reduce, reuse, recycle” concept as ineffective in its attempt to be environmentally friendly as it only serves to slow down the “cradle to grave” process as products are downcycled.  While reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions may be an eco-efficient goal, McDonough points out that “over time, even tiny amounts of dangerous emissions can have disastrous effects on biological systems”(54).  Simply reducing output, or “being less bad”, is not effective enough to tame the current environmental problems facing the world.  In sum, McDonough advocates creativity, energy, and innovation to create and design new products that can enter a “cradle to cradle” cycle in which waste equals food.

Uncertain Peril, Claire Hope Cummings

This book was about how bad GMO's are for you and how to ensure a healthy future for our seeds. Genetic engineering is not the answer to help support and sustain our food supply. Hope lies with local organic farming to restore our ecology, and to restore how we produce food.

Meltdown, Patrick Michaels

The author’s asserts that scientists, driven by the demand for ever greater funding, will ignore core scientific values to publish articles that may contain bias and faulty information.  Some examples would be the IPCC's lack of peer review, Tuvalu's contradicting data on sea level rise, and claims of changing levels of sea ice.  Solutions would be to remove tenure to promote unbiased opinions and allowing multiple entities to fund global climate research.

Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg

Yes, the temperature is rising at about 4.7 degrees per century and water level is rising up about 1 foot per century, however there are better things we can be spending our money on.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffery Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs has compiled four reasons why the planet is in danger of becoming depleted of its resources and gives brief solutions to each problem in his book.  The first threat is over population, with an estimation of over nine billion people by the year 2050; Sachs purposes voluntary reduction of fertility rates to stabilize the population at eight billion or below by 2050. The second threat is human impact on Earth’s ecosystems and climate that will cause mass species extinctions and increase the difficulty of accessing safe drinking water. The solution is, develop sustainable systems of energy, land, and resources use. The third threat is extreme poverty, defined as earning less than one dollar per day. The solution is to take 2-3 percent of the global annual income to develop sustainable practices that will end extreme poverty. The last threat is the current global process of problem solving that encourages competition among nations rather than cooperation. Sachs purposes a global community that is to be built around science, entrepreneurship, and application of solutions to globally govern these four threats.

Eco-Economy, Lester Brown

Lester Brown outlines several environmental issues such as population growth, the AIDS epidemic, overexploitation of resources, and decreasing food supply.  He argues that the current economic system does not incorporate the environmental costs of production and states that this may undermine the capitalist system and limit further growth.  He advocates using sustainable energy and taking a number of initiatives to limit population growth.   

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Fight Global Warming Now! Bill McKibben

Global warming is no longer a debatable issue, rather it is a cold hard fact that we need to figure out away to manage.  We must take action now, stop global warming before all too late.  Everyone could spread the message of stopping global warming by simply making it credible, making it snappy, making it collaborative, making it meaningful, making it creative, making it wired, making it seductive, and making it last.

Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Herman Daly

Beyond Growth: the Economics of Sustainable Development argues against the traditional economic view that the macroeconomy is capable of infinite growth. It contends that there is a limit to growth and capital stock, and that sustainable development is the solution to keep the world from moving beyond that limit. Contrary to neoclassical economists, Daly asserts that the economy is a subsystem of the environment. Though it was once small in scale relative to the environmental system, it is now large in scale and capable of the
depletion of natural resources. Conversely, most economists see the economy as either being of a very small scale, or as not belonging to a larger system at all. Rather, the macroeconomy is the whole; it “is not seen as a part of anything larger” (p. 27). They therefore contend that growth is of optimum importance, as if natural resources are incapable of being used up. Daly believes that this traditional view needs to be altered towards a more development-oriented, rather than growth-oriented, view. He suggests a number of policy designs and patterns of thought that could replace the ones currently in use. He condemns the use of Gross National Product as a measure of a country’s well-being, arguing that it “may be more of an index of cost than of benefit” (p. 104). In its place, he offers the “three accounts approach,” in which the benefit, cost, and capital accounts of growth are measured separately. He suggests that the
World Bank should stop counting the utilization of natural capital as income, place higher taxes on resource throughput, maximize the activity of natural capital in the short run while investing in it in the long run, and move away from free trade and globalization (pp. 88-93). Lastly, he advocates for population control.
 

The Future of Life, EO Wilson

The main thesis that Wilson (2005) argues is how to preserving the future of life while providing a better quality of existence for the poor.  The author describes the two groups that are in constant opposition over environmental politics, which are the humanitarians and the environmentalists.  Humanitarians believe that we should spend on money on all issues pertaining to people first and believe in the short term.  Environmentalists believe that nature is dying and see things in the long term.  He believes that if the government, private sector and science and technology can work together, we will also have success.  The government needs to create laws that look at the environment as a whole and as a public trust.  The private sector can work with the public trust, which will in turn provide a stronger economy.  By doing this the material quality of life will improve, allowing people to feel that since their immediate financial matters are being met, they can look ahead to their future needs by helping the environment.  Then once extra funding is donated from this sector, science and technology will have the means to improve aspects of our current everyday life that currently harm the environment

The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein