Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "nonfiction"

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH is a standout choice in understanding why steady state economics is the answer to our current dilemmas. Why? It's the elegant simplicity and regularity of its presentation. First, engaging anecdotes set the stage. 2) Undeniable data and simple graphs make the reason for change clear. 3)This why is then followed by a no-nonsense listing of what needs to be done.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH's crystal clear how and why makes it a book for anyone, and an excellent text for students of any age preparing to design the future. Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill have handed us the prescription we need to cure the ills of our overused planet and to secure a perpetual, humane future for its life. There is no illegible scrawl in the prescription. The directions are precisely laid out--even the troublesome imperatives, like population stability. The authors introduce each chapter with engaging anecdotes, and illustrate data with simple graphs. A striking conclusion expresses the need to recognize which nations need economic development to attain a good life for their people, countries that should maintain their steady state, and those that need to plan and execute substantial degrowth. The benefits of a no-growth economy are beautifully summarized near the end, along with extensive notes on sources of information and a usefully detailed index. It should be required reading, not just for students.

Buried in the authors' reasoning, which tells us why we must take this medicine, are concepts we can all expand on--the need for technical development that is rationally selective, the need for legal ethics that do not allow the obfuscation of truth, and the need to deny business ethics that trample integrity in pursuit of the bottom line.

Dietz and O'Neill's pills may seem difficult to swallow, but they will go down easily, for their necessity is made quite clear. We all want the same thing. We want human genius and the awesome beauty and diversity of life on Earth to survive the long-run--with health, ever-growing enlightenment, and joy in living for all. They outline a good plan for how to achieve that.Rob Dietz

The widely distributed Los Alamos Daily Post is now publishing How The Hen House Turns blog as a weekly column. http://caryneeper.com/blog.htm I'll be staying with the exploration of the steady state there along with the hens' connection to complexity and sustainable issues. You're invited to join the discussion about a bright future that challenges how we do things now.
I'll be backtracking a little for the news column, concentrating on the earlier blogs that focused more on animal care.

Louis Neal Irwin and Dirk Schulze-Makuch do a thorough job of reviewing the environments of the planets and their moons in our solar system. Are any of them friendly enough to harbor life? What kind of life? How many probably house internal oceans under a cap of ice? Those are the most likely candidates for microbes, maybe even swimmers or crawlers on three types of environment--an internal ice ceiling, an ocean floor over a warm core, and the internal ocean itself. The authors consider all the chemical ifs, ands and buts of such environments.

I'm most eager to see what the flybys that will pick up samples from the leaking moon Enceladus in 2030? Actually, it's spurting icy water and organics several hundred kilometers into space from its south pole. It there is an internal ocean there, it could be very interesting--and we won't even have to drill through kilometers of ice.
Meanwhile, come visit my blogs on astronaut.com. Here's the latest-- http://astronaut.com/whos-good-news-l...

Wildlife ecologist and conservation biologist Brian Czech takes us on a readable and essential tour of economics—its history, its foibles, and its coming salvation, what some have called a Full-Earth Economy, one that recognizes the limits to resources in a world with seven billion Homo sapiens.

In a careful analysis of the impact of economic policy on politics and our natural world, Czech offers solutions that seem, not only reasonable, but necessary and inevitable if we are to revert to a pleasant long-term existence in a comfortable world of sharing and conservation.

In a thorough discussion of our current situation, the literature, and various reactions to economic dilemmas, Czech demonstrates that growth now erodes our ecological foundations. He doesn’t miss discussing any of the caveats, like technology as salvation. He demonstrates clearly that technology also has costs, but can be selective, developed only when it adds to the efficiency of end use.

To the charge that steady state economics is stagnation--he points out that stability and minimal throughput set us free as we share and ease back creatively, with time to live more engaged lives. This is a must-read for anyone interested in everything from the future and economics to ecology.Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution

While at the American Library Assoc. conference in Chicago last spring, Shawne Workman, my publisher, and I heard Temple Grandin speak. In clear, straight talk she outlined the theme of her new book with its straight-on directive to parents and teachers--as soon as you get a diagnosis, get busy and help the child become verbal, put in twenty or more hours a week. Then when they are old enough, be sure you teach them simple job skills. Above, all encourage their strengths and quit focusing on their weaknesses. Every brain is unique.

After the speech, people got up, both teachers and autistic students, to say that they had never heard such useful advice. Grandin has clarified autism of every variety so it need no longer be a frightening mystery.

In my vote for BOTY I said, "This book is a game-changer, must-read for everyone to understand the complexity of the human brain and its uniqueness in every individual, for teachers and parents to provide a game plan to realize a child's best potential, for human society to encourage opportunities for individuals that could serve the future most creatively."The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

Nuclear Power: Both Sides:The Arguments For and Against the Most Controversial Technology by Michio Kaku and Jennifer Trainer Thompson (Editor), Norton, 1990.

This is a collection of twenty-one essays, written by authors with differing opinions about the dangerous effects of radiation, waste disposal, reactor safety and nuclear economics. Solar, fusion and breeder reactors are also discussed.

For the Christian Science Monitor, I noted that with few exceptions, facts were presented fairly and opinions made clear without self-serving exaggeration. Chapter are preceded by useful introductions. In view of our current energy concerns, this book may have more than just historical significance.

Michio Kaku, professsor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, is also author of a fascinating book Physics of the Future--How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. I'm referencing this book for my realistic scifi, modeling how we might secure the future. See http://archivesofvarok.com

In the Introduction, Gore summarizes the current trends that provide challenges for how we make choices for the future: the global economy, electronic communications, a new balance of political, economic and military power, unsustainable growth, powerful new science technologies, and the emergence of a new relationship between human civilization and Earth's ecology.

The details he provides in the first 100 pages range from new technology to internet influences and the problems with current economics and Citizens United. Looks like this will be a valuable resource for anyone writing about our prospects for the future.

I'm especially encouraged by his understanding of how complexity impacts these issues and by the extensive Bibliography, Index and Notes he provides.The Future: Six Drivers of Global ChangeAl Gore

Grasshopper Dreaming:Reflections on Killing and Loving by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Boston, Skinner House Books, 2002.
There have been no grasshoppers in our yard since First Turkey did them all in 35 years ago. Maybe that's why this title caught my attention. Then its thoughtful consideration of our lives and their meaning caught my soul.

It’s a rare book, only 138 pages long, that becomes a treasure. I marked thirty-five of those pages because they contained quotable quotes.

Jeffrey Lockwood begins by taking us deep into the Wyoming prairie to watch grasshoppers doing nothing, just being, most of their time. Perhaps we should be called “human doings,” not “human beings,” he suggests. Then he leads us seamlessly into observations about complexity and “...what science cannot fathom, nature still manages to exploit.” Before we realize it, he has led us full circle to ask, “What is a grasshopper good for?’ and concludes with the timeless answer: “...we value our children...because of who they are,” not what they do.

As we learn the details of Lockwood’s work as an etymologist, defending farmland against hordes of grasshoppers, he illustrates his dilemma of what it means to kill. “Taking life, like giving life, can be a sacred act.” Sometimes an essential act, if we are to live.

We watch as Lockwood teaches his children about his job killing grasshoppers, while capturing and releasing insects he finds in his house. In either case, he feels that his obligation is to “...mitigate their potential pain.”

The author notes our need to control as we confront nature’s “absolute indifference” to our existence, encourages us to “...contribute to moving human society through this phase of self-destruction”, and ends with a treasure chest of quotable quotes about the complementary nature of science (how we came to be) and religion (Jeffrey A Lockwoodwhy we came to be).

Social Anxiety Rooted in Inequality?
From Blog 18 by Donald Neeper at http://neeper.net/social-anxiety/
Richard G. WilkinsonA Review of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, updated 2010.

What's going on? There's a feeling that people sense an impending social failure but are unable to identify it. What's causing this stress? As documented in the recent scholarly book, The Spirit Level, we really are much more anxious than we used to be.

Wilkinson and Pickett (W&P) are professors who have studied economics and epidemiology. They quantitatively evaluate many symptoms of social dysfunction, comparing results for 23 developed countries and also comparing data for the 50 states of the U.S. In each case, they correlate the severity of a social problem (e.g. teen births or homicides or obesity) with income inequality. The correlations are independent of the average income or overall wealth of a country. In other words, the greater the disparity in income, the more dysfunction a society has in multiple characteristics, including infant mortality, social mobility, literacy, AIDS, homicide rate, degenerative diseases, teenage births, trust, and status of women.

The authors present extensive arguments to justify inequality as the common factor underlying the other characteristics. For example, public spending on health and education does not correlate with homicide rates, but income inequality does. In a postscript, the authors counter what appears to be politically motivated criticism of the book, including statistical arguments or missing factors such as ethnicity. W&P assert ethnicity is not a factor because the same correlations occur across societies of widely differing cultures. Data from Italy and Finland fall along the same line in the graphs.

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our need to feel valued and capable implies we crave feedback regarding our worth, but social status causes distress because it carries messages of superiority and inferiority. Greater inequality amplifies the importance of social status.

Both the relatively rich and the relatively poor have relatively better health, less violence, and less anxiety in a country (or state) with less inequality. That is, despite our expectations otherwise, all classes are happier in a society with less inequality.

Obesity occupies a special chapter in Spirit Level. In the U.S., about half the population were overweight and 15 percent were obese in the late 1970s. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and about thirty percent are obese as measured by body mass index, which normalizes the effect that a taller person normally weighs more.

Obesity in the U.S. is more than twelve times greater than that in Japan, which is the least unequal society of the 23 so-called rich countries. In Japan, the basic wages are more equal, with smaller differences between the highly paid and the lower salaries.

Wilkinson and Pickett explain that many people have a strong personal belief in equality and fairness, but these values have remained private, hidden, unshared, inactive because people think their fellows disagree. Instead, political differences reflect beliefs about how to solve the problems, while desire for a safer and more friendly society goes across political lines. Politics have been weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society, a vision of how to get from here to there.

The authors, however, clearly identify corporate power as the elephant in the living room—the biggest determinant of political action. In the U.S., the highest-paid people in corporations received almost 40 times as much as the highest-paid people in the non-profit sector, and 200 times more than the highest-paid generals or cabinet secretaries in the Federal Government. Does that illustrate where our social priorities lie, despite our underlying shared personal belief? B&P suggest that worker ownership of corporations would induce both better satisfaction and better production.

Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that many of the growing social problems are maintained by income inequality, whereby the poor cope with their own poverty and also with the consequences of the poverty of their neighbors, while the rich pay to live separately in residential economic segregation. As the authors say, governments can spend either to prevent social problems or else to deal with the consequences. In the U.S. since 1980, public expenditure on prisons has risen six times as fast as public expenditure on education.

A missing argument.
One key observation seems missing from the excellent presentation of data and observations in The Spirit Level. Almost any enduring symptom (good or bad) of a complex system is maintained by a loop of positive feedback, as outlined in Blog 14 and Blog 16 at http://neeper.net. The search for ways to rectify income inequality must first locate the unchecked positive feedback loops that maintain and increase the inequalities. Often, those loops are what we label "growth." As argued in Blog 16, disallowing political action by corporations would be one powerful step toward equal justice because corporate governance is simply sophisticated bribery.

Wild Heritage by Sally Carrighar, illus. by Rachel S. Horne, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
In her Foreword to Wild Heritage, Sally Carrigher, author of One Day At Beetle Rock addresses the problem of “anthropomorphism—the attributing of human emotions to animals.” When she was writing in the early 1960’s—and until long after the 1980’s when Frans deWaal began to attribute words of emotion to primates—some ethologists (animal behavior scientists) refused to acknowledge that “human beings behave like the simpler creatures.”

Recent careful studies have now established a large body of knowledge that answers Carrighar’s question, “What similar impulses (if any) move both animals and men?” Wild Heritage is a treasure, summarizing many extensive studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, that confirm the anatomical and biochemical evidence that we are all closely related.

Her section tracing the history of anthropomorphism from Victorian sentimentality to the careful studies of her time is an interesting study in the human growth, maturation if you will, in rational scientific thinking.

Carrigher also offers insights into the concepts of instinct, imprinting, song and play that are still valid today. And her detailed accounts of lemming behavior and animal painting are revealing in what have become clichés.’

The Law of Parsimony—“...denying animals any qualities except those of reflex mechanisms” is dead at last. See also another book attacking that notion: Theodore X. Barber’s The Human Nature of Birds. And, of course, don’t neglect the work of Frans de Waal.Frans de Waal
Sally Carrighar