From the Bookshelf of The Transition Movement…

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Mark Lynas

Start date: January 21, 2017

Finish date: December 20, 2018

Discussion: 2017 Book Discussions

Why we're reading this: Important book on climate change
[close] Important book on climate change

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2017 Book Discussions

Organic Marxism
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Six Degrees by Mark Lynas
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What Members Thought

Jan 16, 2017 Dave Schaafsma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: environment

I saw this book when it first came out in 2008 and deliberately did not pick it up. But’s it’s not exactly as if I have been in denial. I’m a long-term environmental activist. As a young man in the sixties I read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I was there for the first Earth Day, when it appeared we all began to realize we were killing the planet. I’ve long been a reader and (sometimes) supporter of various ecoterrorist/environmental acts and movements. I k ...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Ted rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews-liked, global-warming, environment, natural-science

Expanded review

From the weeping ground there sprang a wind,
Flaming with vermillion light,
Which overmastered all my senses,
And I dropped like a man pulled down by sleep.

Dante, Inferno, Canto III:
Dante enters the First Circle of Hell

Gustave Doré's illustration of Canto III: Arrival of Charon.

Well the first circle of hell wasn’t all that bad, comparatively – Purgatory.

“Climate change is the canvas on which the history of the 21st century will be painted.”
Mark Lynas

A friend who recommended this book ...more

63 likes · Like · see review

Aug 13, 2016 Antonomasia added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016, environment, scribd, decade-2000s

Why is climate change not the biggest issue for the loudest group of protestors in the West these days? I'm starting to wonder. Why do student firebrands (who are usually middle class and comfortable, often protesting about things that don't directly affect them) mostly treat it as a secondary issue, some way further down the list than their main concerns? Why are SJWs SJWs and not CJWs? What if we'd had as much progress in legislation and in attitude change among the media in the last five year ...more

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Apr 03, 2017 Laura rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, outstanding, millenials-2000-s, science

** My review is a call to action for anyone in healthcare in particular, as well as the general public.**
I finished Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet several days ago, but wanted to let the book's subject matter sit with me a few days before I wrote a review. Plus, I've been freakin busy! There are many insightful reviews on the subject matter itself, so I'm going to focus more on what the book meant to me as a human, and as a nurse. Bottom line: our earth is warming up. What is *cau ** My review is a call to action for anyone in healthcare in particular, as well as the general public.**
I finished Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet several days ago, but wanted to let the book's subject matter sit with me a few days before I wrote a review. Plus, I've been freakin busy! There are many insightful reviews on the subject matter itself, so I'm going to focus more on what the book meant to me as a human, and as a nurse. Bottom line: our earth is warming up. What is *causing* the warming, and how *severe* the warming will be constitutes almost all the discussion on climate change in mainstream media...when any discussion occurs at all. But as another astute reviewer put it--while the patient is alive we focus on the symptoms and a cure. Autopsies occur AFTER the patient dies. So, with our planet, I fear that we are so focused on the cause that we won't address the symptoms or a viable cure until its too late.

Mark Lynas has written a book that does just that...focuses on the symptoms. He outlines what each increasing degree Celsius means for our environment, and by extension us. His book is rooted in a 300 item long bibliography of scientific studies. His lens is broad, and his chapters encompass the entire globe, cataloging changes from the Amazon rain forest, to to the Savannah of Africa, to the Alps, to the poles. It may be hard for readers to wrap their mind around the scale of projected changes, to remember that each of these large areas contains countless villages, communities, neighborhoods, families. People whose entire way of life may very well change.

When I finished the book, my first thought was...how am I a nurse in a large university teaching hospital...and we aren't talking about this. We aren't actively participating in local or state governmental policy or taking action to advocate for our community. Some nurses, maybe even dozens of nurses are, but there isn't a collective, unified action. So then I wondered...are there any platform statements by nursing/health organizations? Turns out there are some, but many are woefully outdated. Here's one from the WHO--

Environmental Health...also refers to the theory and practice of assessing, correcting, controlling, and preventing those factors in the environment that can potentially adversely affect the health of present and future generations.

*1992*

And here's another quote, also from 1992, from the International Council of Nurses.

The concern of nurses is for people's health--it's promotion, its maintenance, its restoration. The healthy lives of people depend ultimately on the health of Planet Earth--its soil, its water, its oceans, its atmosphere, its biological diversity--all of the elements which constitute people's natural environment. By extension, therefore, nurses need to be concerned with the promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health of the natural environment, particularly with the pollution, degradation, and destruction of that environment being caused by human activities.

Much more recently the Ohio Nurses Review released a paper in September, 2016. They agree with many of the predictions that Lynas laid out in his book--namely the looming threats to public health of temperature related death and illness (heat stroke), air quality impacts, increasing extreme events (heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, floods, wildfires, and drought), growing food insecurity, and increased vector-borne diseases. These are serious threats to populations, and nurses need to educate themselves so that they can educate and advocate for their communities. We need to be doing this now!

I'm well aware of the educational challenges though. Almost 10 years after this book was published, a large percentage of Americans still refuse to believe that climate change is real. An even smaller percentage believe that climate change will affect them personally. Lynas does a great job of discussing the forms that denial take. Here are some of the major ones: 1. denial of responsibility (I'm not the main cause of the problem) 2. rejection of blame (I've done nothing wrong) 3. powerlessness (nothing I do makes much of a difference) 4. comfort (It's too difficult for me to change my behavior) 5. fabricated constraints (there are too many impediments and 6. faith in some kind of managerial fix or technological "white knight" which will solve the problem for everyone. This is a problem that requires grass roots, mass effort.

To close, Florence Nightingale wrote the first rule of Nursing in 1859. Back then wounded soldiers lay in squalor in dank wards. She famously said "Keep the air within as pure as the air without". In 2017 we must care about the air without. We must fight for its purity. ...more

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