books

Seeking out ‘the new nature writing’

This weekend is looking to be a great one for reading, at least here in the northeastern U.S. where we're expecting lots (more) snow. I'm in the midst of David Gessner's new book, Soaring with Fidel, and it's excellent so far. The author physically follows his favorite bird, the osprey, during its annual migration from the North Atlantic to Cuba and beyond.

It's more than a book about a bird and its range, though. It's mostly about the osprey's human geography: the people Gessner meets along the way who love this particular creature and have fought to steward its recovery from the brink. Humorous and very human storytelling makes it a page-turner, and it's a fine example of what the editors of Orion magazine, with whom I work, call "the new nature writing."

So what's on your reading list these days, gentle Gristmill reader?

A review of Gingrich’s new book on the environment

Newt Gingrich says he feels a special kinship with a young polar bear named Knut, who was rescued from death last year by officials at the Berlin Zoo. Gingrich has visited Knut, and he’s been talking about the bear as he promotes his new book, A Contract With the Earth. But is Gingrich’s cuddly new […]

NYT’s Andy Revkin and E. O. Wilson get suckered by Newt Gingrich’s phony techno-optimism

Newt Gingrich is an anti-environmentalist who spreads disinformation and has done more than any politician in the last two decades to thwart a sensible climate policy that includes a major clean technology component, as I have explained. Absent serious regulations, no technology-only strategy can possibly avoid catastrophic global warming (as we should have learned in the 1990s).

Some well-meaning people, like The New York Times' first-rate climate reporter Andy Revkin and the great conservation biologist, E.O. Wilson, have gotten taken in by Newt's new-clothes rhetoric. Why? They don't know the history of climate technology policy that I and others have written about -- and they don't understand the explicit Luntz/Bush strategy of trying to get political credit on the climate while blocking the crucial regulatory (and technological!) solutions by talking about "technology, technology, blah, blah, blah," as I put it. I am in 100 percent agreement with David's analysis on this.

Gingrich is most certainly not part of a "move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy," as Revkin writes -- especially not an imaginary center that Revkin claims includes Bjørn Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus (for a debunking of these folks, click here and follow the various links). Gingrich and Lomborg are not classic global warming deniers -- since they realize denial is now politically and scientifically untenable -- which is why I label them delayers. (I will come back to S&N's ongoing disinformation campaign in a future post.)

Gingrich and his coauthor are not "realists and visionaries" -- the phrase Wilson uses in a foreword to their book, A Contract with the Earth (you can read the foreword -- and, if you're clever and have a huge amount of time, the whole book -- for free if you click here [reg. may be req'd]). I have emailed Wilson -- whom I don't know -- my earlier Gingrich post. I'll focus on Revkin, since I do know him, and he has a blog where he is fighting back against David (and others) who criticize him.

Anti-environment, anti-technology Gingrich tries to rewrite history

If you look up the word "Orwellian" on Wikipedia -- "An attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past" -- there should be a picture of Newt Gingrich's new book, A Contract with the Earth.

Instead of wasting time reading a whole book of disinformation, you can just read this interview in Salon, "Give Newt a chance" -- it is definitely all the Newt that is fit to print.

To cut to the chase, readers of this blog will not be surprised that a conservative pretending to care about the environment adopts the anti-regulation, pro-technology approach suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush.

You may be surprised that Newt calls himself an environmentalist, given that he co-authored and then worked to enact the anti-environmental Contract with America. Oh, but Newt now claims:

I don't think that the environment was a central focus of the Contract With America. I don't think that it was bad for the environment. I don't know of a single thing in the Contract that was bad for the environment.

I think Salon had to pause in the interview at that point to allow Newt to douse the flames that began engulfing his trousers.

Delusional Beltway optimism about energy

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a seminar hosted by several departments at the University of Texas on the topic of "peak oil." The occasion was the visit of David Sundalow of the Brookings Institution, who is hawking his new book Freedom from Oil. This was mutually convenient for him and the university, which is trying to carve out a position as an optimistic, rolled-up-sleeves, can-do problem-solver in the fields of energy and water.

I have no objection to that approach and am pleased to be somewhat distantly associated with it. That said, I did not leave the event with great enthusiasm for Sundalow's book. It was worthwhile in that it drew for me a sharp distinction between can-do optimism and unrealistic, delusional optimism.

I think a train wreck of development, energy, food, environment, and warfare, all driven by a hugely overpopulated planet, is going to be very hard to avoid. I think we can avoid it, and even when I am pessimistic I whistle a happy tune and act as if we can avoid it -- because without optimism there is no hope. Optimism is a moral imperative. That said, it needs to be reality-based optimism. Sometimes the things we want to work aren't the things that are going to work.

Revisiting Into the Wild

When the news broke 15 years ago about an idealistic young man who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness, I reacted badly.

Plenty of folks, myself included, go alone into the wild and emerge unscathed; in fact, restored to Muirean health and sanity. The national fascination with Chris McCandless' sad end seemed morbid to me -- a morality tale told by the comfortable to justify their easy, unexamined lives.

I still think a sick fascination is part of what made Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild a bestseller. But I confess I have read only the excerpt from it published over a decade ago in Outside magazine, which may not do the book justice. It was somewhat misleadingly subtitled "How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds," and mostly focused on the mistakes he made, his tragic death.

Many people who heard of this story didn't want to take time to follow a reckless youth. I was one of them. But then I saw the movie, and I saw the young actor playing Chris McCandless make him become the man he wanted to be -- "Alexander Supertramp."

He had an extraordinary life; giving away his inheritance, burning his cash, walking off into the desert. He wanted meaning, more than anything. You could question his sanity, but not his sincerity. And nearly everyone he met fell in love with him, one way or another.

On Gingrich’s new conservative environmentalism

A few days ago I got a review copy of Newt Gingrich’s new book, A Contract with the Earth. We’ve got somebody else reviewing it, so I don’t plan to read it. I do, however, want to make two observations, one on policy, one on politics. On policy: Gingrich’s shtick is that leftists took over […]

Photos of species threatened by climate change

The following photos and excerpt — highlighting the threats posed to animals and plants by climate change — are drawn from Gary Braasch’s new book Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, published by the University of California Press, © 2007. Featuring more than 100 photographs, Earth Under Fire shows species, cultures, […]

Sandalow explains the ins and outs of oil dependency

For years, I have been looking for a good, readable book on the oil problem and its solution -- just as I'd been looking for a good book on clean technology. Well, I found the Clean Tech book in August, and now I've found the oil book.

It is Freedom from Oil, by Brookings scholar and White House veteran David Sandalow. It is an unqualified success -- cleverly told as a series of policy memos from the cabinet of a near-future President, who begins the book by telling his staff:

I plan to deliver an address from the Oval Office one month from today. The topic will be oil dependence.

In the breathless narrative that follows, you learn the stripped-down facts about oil dependency, plus the growing strategic and environmental danger posed by oil dependency -- and key solutions like plug-in hybrids and revised CAFE standards (as well as stories of fascinating figures in the oil game). You get a "unique window into the White House at work" from a former assistant secretary of state and senior director on the National Security Council staff.

Sandalow's President ultimately offers an aggressive plan to free the country from oil dependence, which includes: