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BOOK NOTES

December 17, 2008 at 4:37am

The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, by social justice and environmental activist Van Jones, illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based "grey economy" and into the healthy new "green economy."

It is a crisp and inspiring read on how the green energy revolution can solve global warming, reduce energy costs and get people back to work.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061650757?ie=UTF8&tag=environdefens-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0061650757

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BOOK NOTES

December 17, 2008 at 4:09am

EXPOSED

Mark Schapiro's new book Exposed investigates how corporations intent on thwarting stricter environmental and health guidelines here in the U.S. are forced to meet new demands by the European Union to improve their products. The resulting global economic power shift places Brussels, not Washington, in the driver's seat.

Outline of Chapters
http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/articles/exposedselectedsources

provides links to books, scientific papers and articles related to effects of pollution on the human body and covers issues concerning GMO's

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BOOK NOTES

December 17, 2008 at 3:47am

WATER

2 new books have hit the shelves that deal with climate change and the use (and abuse ) of the water supply.

Garden and Climate

by Chip Sullivan (McGraw-Hill, $45.) Reaches back to the ancient gardens of Persia and the Italian Rennaissance to explain how gardners provided early air-conditioning with their grottoes and outdoor rooms of densly planted trees.

To guard against the chill of winter, they planted cypress trees to block the north wind and built walkways along south facing terraces.

With an eye to finite resources like water and oil, the author suggests designs for contempory gardens that conserve energy and water, complete with sketches.

Mr. Sullivan is a landscape architect and artist based at the College of Environmental Design at the University of Calif., Berkeley.
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Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly and the Politics of Thirst

by Diane Raines Ward (Riverhead Books, $25.) takes a broad view of the worlds attempts to control water.

Ms. Ward traversed five continents to to tell this story.

When engineers built the first Aswan Dam in Egypt in 1902, they did not know about the necessity of the yearly floods, which fertilized the delta with silt, flushed pollutants out to sea and kept saltwater from intruding into the Nile and killing fish. She likewise provides a view of the effects from the damming of the Indus River Basin, and using Hoover Dam to create the city of Las Vegas. She paints a worsening picture of natural systems gone awry, and growing populations draining a finite supply of clean water.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2zbWGAAACAAJ&dq=Water+Wars:+Drought,+Flood,+Folly+and+the+Politics+of+Thirst
copy and paste link
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TITLE: Field Notes From a Catastrophe, Man, Nature and Climate Change

by Elizabeth Kolbert

In Epoch of Man, Earth Takes a Beating

The whole world is going too fast," an Inuit hunter from Banks Island in the Northwest Territories in Canada told the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert at a bar during a global-warming symposium. A few years before, he and his neighbors had started seeing robins, birds they had no name for. At first the milder weather that drew the robins north seemed a good thing — "warmer winters, you know," he said — but as other changes occurred that affected their traditional way of life, including hunting, it did not seem so good. "Our children may not have a future," the hunter concluded. "I mean, all young people, put it that way. It's not just happening in the Arctic. It's going to happen all over the world."

For "Field Notes From a Catastrophe," Ms. Kolbert went not exactly all over the world to find out what's happening with global warming but to a great many places in it, and she often heard the same elegiac expressions of foreboding, loss and fear for the next generation. In Shishmaref, Alaska, she met people who were abandoning their tiny island home because, with less sea ice around it as a buffer against storms, their houses and land were being carried away. ("It makes me feel lonely," one woman said of the forced move.) In Iceland, a man monitoring glacial advance and retreat passed on the prediction that by the end of the next century, his country, where glaciers have existed for more than two million years, will be essentially ice-free. On the Greenland ice cap, well away from the coast, researchers gathering meteorological data were surprised to see melt "in areas where liquid water had not been seen for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years."

And so it went in Fairbanks; Yorkshire; Eugene, Ore. "Such is the impact of global warming," Ms. Kolbert points out, that she could have gone to countless other places, "from Siberia to the Austrian Alps to the Great Barrier Reef to the South African fynbos — to document its effects."

Ms. Kolbert, a former reporter for The New York Times, doesn't doubt that human-induced global warming is real and will likely have dire consequences; the title of her book includes the word "catastrophe." The pages are replete with bad news: perennial sea ice, which 25 years ago covered an area of the Arctic the size of the continental United States, has since lost an area "the size of New York, Georgia and Texas combined." Carbon dioxide levels, if emissions go unchecked, could reach three times pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

Based on a series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, the book is organized around notes Ms. Kolbert took on "field trips," not only to places where climate change is affecting the natural world but also to ones — labs, offices, observatories — where humans are trying to understand the phenomenon of human-induced global warming. Hers is the latest in a large crop of books on the subject — she notes that "entire books have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem" — and there are inevitably some places where other authors have trod before.

In language that is clear, if somewhat dry, she examines the major pieces of the story, shedding light on some insider concepts of climatologists, like "dangerous anthropogenic interference," as she goes. The book may make a good handbook; it is both comprehensive and succinct. (If you have ever wondered how a climate model is put together, that's in there, too.)

She visits the Netherlands, where rising sea levels caused by global warming are expected to swallow up large parts of the country. In areas where there are already periodic floods, a construction firm has started building amphibious homes (they resemble toasters, Ms. Kolbert says) as well as "buoyant roads." Another field trip took her to Washington, where she was treated to double-speak by an under secretary charged with explaining the administration's position on climate change. "Astonishingly," she comments in a rare show of heat, "standing in the way" of progress seems to be President Bush's goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on emissions, almost killing the treaty in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes to it.

The United States is the largest emitter of carbon in the world, accounting for a quarter of the world's total, with the average American putting out 12,000 pounds of carbon a year, or about 100 times what the average Bangladeshi does. In two decades, the Chinese will surpass Americans in this disheartening achievement, unless they can somehow be persuaded to build their many projected new coal plants using modern, low-emission — and expensive — technology.

Some of the most downbeat (or realistic) observers are climate scientists. "It may be that we're not going to solve global warming," Marty Hoffert, a physics professor at New York University, told Ms. Kolbert, "the earth is going to become an ecological disaster, and, you know, somebody will visit in a few hundred million years and find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but they just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology."

Mr. Hoffert isn't giving up in despair, though, but turning to high technology for help. He's trying to find carbon-free sources of energy — away from earth. Satellites with photovoltaic arrays could be launched into space, he suggests. Solar collectors could be placed on the moon. Turbines suspended in the jet stream could generate wind power. At least in the long term, "I think we have a shot," he says.

In a final chapter on the "Anthropocene," a newly minted term meaning the geological epoch defined by man, Ms. Kolbert turns from her mostly unbiased field reporting to give her own opinion. She is not optimistic, in large part because it appears that Anthropocene man can't be counted on to do the right thing. "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself," she writes, "but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

Mariana Gosnell is the author of "Ice: The Nature, the History and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance," recently published by Knopf.



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Dec 14, 2008 at 7:03pm

 

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