The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread to discuss the environmental sciences.

Carl Safina

Goodreads Synopsis:

An exhilarating journey of natural renewal through a year with MacArthur fellow Carl Safina

Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again. We meet Eskimos whose way of life is melting away, explore a secret global seed vault hidden above the Arctic Circle, investigate dilemmas facing foraging bears and breeding penguins, and sail to formerly devastated reefs that are resurrecting as fish graze the corals algae-free.

"Each time science tightens a coil in the slack of our understanding," Safina writes, "it elaborates its fundamental discovery: connection."

He shows how problems of the environment drive very real matters of human justice, well-being, and our prospects for peace.

In Safina's hands, nature's continuous renewal points toward our future. His lively stories grant new insights into how our world is changing, and what our response ought to be.

Rachel Carson

Alston Chase
Details the policies and consequences of those policies as applied to Yellowstone National Park. Good coverage of predator-prey ecosystems as well as the problem of "only you can prevent forest fires" leading to the devastating fire of 1988.

Alston Chase
Details the stories of the scientists, activists, and loggers involved in the struggle over old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Well-researched and well presented, the author also details some of the life cycles and ecosystems of temperate rain forests and old growth forests (including Northern Spotted Owl).

Aldo Leopold

Jane, what terrific additions. Our thanks.

Environmental science was a pet project of mine for some years. I'll add more here when I peruse my bookshelves more thoroughly. ;)

Thank you Jane...we look forward to more great books.

I ran across this one:

by Douglas Brinkley

Product information:
A riveting history of America's most beautiful natural resources, The Quiet World documents the heroic fight waged by the U.S. federal government from 1879 to 1960 to save wild Alaska—Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Lake Clark, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured landscapes—from the extraction industries. Award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley traces the wilderness movement in Alaska, from John Muir to Theodore Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold to Dwight D. Eisenhower, with narrative verve. Basing his research on extensive new archival material, Brinkley shows how a colorful band of determined environmentalists created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge just before John F. Kennedy became president.

Brinkley introduces a lively gallery of characters influential in preserving Alaska's wilderness resources: the indomitable U.S. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who championed the Brooks Range; charming Ivy League explorer Charles Sheldon, who led the campaign to create Denali National Park; intrepid Bob Marshall, who cofounded The Wilderness Society; hermit illustrator Rockwell Kent, who lived in isolation on Fox Island like a modern Thoreau; nature photographer Ansel Adams, whose image Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake set off a tsunami of public interest in America's tallest peak; and U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Rachel Carson, who promoted proper ocean stewardship; among many more.

Wildlife fervently comes to life in The Quiet World: Brinkley tells incredible stories about the sea otters in the Aleutians, moose in the Kenai Peninsula, and birdlife across the Yukon Delta expanse while exploring the devastating effects that reckless overfishing, seal slaughter, and aerial wolf hunting have wrought on Alaska's once-abundant fauna. While taking into account Exxon Valdez–like oil spills, The Quiet World mainly celebrates how the U.S. government has preserved many of Alaska's great wonders for future generations to enjoy.

That looks good too; what an interesting looking book. It seems to have a little bit of everything.

I'm finishing up by Richard Heinberg and it's excellent. Little bit of everything, kind of an overview of current environmental thinking. I have a degree in Enviro sci, so it's definitely my pet subject.

That sounds excellent Kirsten and we hope you add some more books that you have read or are reading to this list.

Well let's see...
by Alan Weisman is a really interesting look at what would happen if humans just vanished from the earth. He researched into plastics, cities, etc. It's very cool.

by Claire Parkinson is kind of dry, but really well researched and gives a nice overview of global climate change for those who are interested in knowing more about it.

by Mark Lynas talks about what will happen to the world as we increase the temperature by 1 degree C. He lays out the first six degrees of increase.

by Heidi Cullen covers 10 or so case studies and what will happen in those areas as weather patterns change and sea levels rise. She consulted many expert opinions and ends with New York.

I really enjoyed . I still remember Alan Weisman discussing how quickly the New York subway tunnels would collapse. The pumps run continuously to keep water out.

All of these books seem to project disaster on New York.

Definitely scary how fine the line is between functioning and not functioning, isn't it?

That is scary.

You can see it in your home with bugs coming in or grass coming through your driveway. Or you see it on vacant lots where nature just carries on. Fascinating.

We will reclaim our closest lot with a Trader Joe's. A sweet victory (lol).

Recently published evaluating the impact of toxins ~

by Mckay Jenkins
Do you know what chemicals are in your shampoo? How about your cosmetics? Do you know what’s in the plastic water bottles you drink from, or the weed killer in your garage, or your children’s pajamas? If you’re like most of us, the answer is probably no. But you also probably figured that most of these products were safe, and that someone—the manufacturers, the government—was looking out for you. The truth might surprise you.
After experiencing a health scare of his own, journalist McKay Jenkins set out to discover the truth about toxic chemicals, our alarming levels of exposure, and our government’s utter failure to regulate them effectively. The result of his two-year journey, What’s Gotten into Us?, is a deep, remarkable, and empowering investigation into the threats—biological and environmental—that chemicals now present in our daily lives. It reveals how dangerous, and how common, toxins are in the most ordinary things, and in the most familiar of places:

• Our water: Thanks to suburban sprawl and agricultural runoff, 97 percent of our nation’s rivers and streams are now contaminated with everything from herbicides to pharmaceutical drugs.
• Our bodies: High levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals from cosmetics, flame-retardants from clothing and furniture, even long-banned substances like DDT and lead, are consistently showing up in human blood samples.
• Our homes: Many toxins lurk beneath our sinks and in our basements, of course, but did you know that they’re also found in wall-to-wall carpeting, plywood, and fabric softeners?
• Our yards: Pesticides, fungicides, even common fertilizers—there are enormous, unseen costs to our national obsession with green, weed-free lawns.

What’s Gotten Into Us? is much more than a wake-up call. It offers numerous practical ways for us to regain some control over our lives, to make our own personal worlds a little less toxic. Inside, you’ll find ideas to help you make informed decisions about the products you buy, and to disentangle yourself from unhealthy products you don’t need—so that you and your family can start living healthier lives now, and in the years to come. Because, as this book shows, what you don’t know can hurt you.

Here is a timely book about the British Petroleum Gulf oil spill, which threatened so many migratory birds and the economy and ecolology of the Gulf of Mexico just two years ago. It was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology.

Goodreads blurb:

It was a technological crisis in an alien realm: a blown-out oil well in mile-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. For the engineers who had to kill the well, this was like Apollo 13, a crisis no one saw coming, and one of untold danger and challenge.

A suspense story, a mystery, a technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach’s groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well.

Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like, behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was an environmental 9/11. The government did not have the means to solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools, and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the Internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical ma-neuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. This was a confounding mystery, an engineering whodunit. The lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us.

Achenbach has written a cautionary tale that doubles as a technological thriller.

by Joel Achenbach (no photo)

Thank you for the add.

Happy Earth Day, everybody!

Earth Day is a day early each year on which events are held worldwide to increase awareness and appreciation of the Earth's natural environment. Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year. In 2009, the United Nations designated April 22 International Mother Earth Day. Earth Day is planned for April 22 in all years at least through 2015.

The name and concept of Earth Day was allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. Earth Day was first observed on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise was later sanctioned in a Proclamation signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations where it is observed each year. About the same time a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson (see below for his book and a biography) as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues.

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day



Earth Day 2012 Poster

by Gaylord Nelson (no photo)

by Bill Christofferson (no photo)

And a very Happy Earth Day to you too Bea.

This looks interesting:

First Along The River: A Brief History Of The Us Environmental Movement
by Benjamin Kline

Synopsis
First Along the River is the premier text that introduces students to the U.S. environmental movement. Concise, accessible, and informative, this third edition has been updated to include a new chapter addressing environmental issues in the post 9/11 world, policy shifts under the Bush administration, climate change, and the future of environmental movements.

First Along the River provides students with a balanced, historical perspective on the history of the environmental movement in relation to major social and political events in U.S. history. The book highlights important people and events, places critical concepts in context, and shows the impact of government, industry, and population on the American landscape.

Comprehensive yet brief, First Along the River discusses the religious and philosophical beliefs that shaped Americans' relationship to the environment, traces the origins and development of government regulations that impact Americans' use of natural resources, and shows why popular environmental groups were founded and how they changed over time.

by The Union of Concerned Scientists (no photo) is an excellent book on how individuals can help the planet. UCS is full of smart scientists and they aren't afraid to stir the pot. In this book, they try to find ways that you can have a big impact without a ton of effort.

Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World

by Bill Carter

Synopsis
A SWEEPING ACCOUNT OF CIVILIZATION’S COMPLETE DEPENDENCE ON COPPER AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR PEOPLE, NATURE, AND OUR GLOBAL ECONOMY COPPER is a miraculous and contradictory metal, essential to nearly every human enterprise. For most of recorded history, this remarkably pliable and sturdy substance has proven invaluable: not only did the ancient Romans build their empire on mining copper but Christopher Columbus protected his ships from rot by lining their hulls with it. Today, the metal can be found in every house, car, airplane, cell phone, computer, and home appliance the world over, including in all the new, so-called green technologies.

Yet the history of copper extraction and our present relationship with the metal are fraught with profound difficulties. Copper mining causes irrevocable damage to the Earth, releasing arsenic, cyanide, sulfuric acid, and other deadly pollutants into the air and water. And the mines themselves have significant effects on the economies and wellbeing of the communities where they are located.

With Red Summer and Fools Rush In, Bill Carter has earned a reputation as an on-the-ground journalist adept at connecting the local elements of a story to its largest consequences. Carter does this again—and brilliantly—in Boom, Bust, Boom, exploring in an entertaining and fact-rich narrative the very human dimension of copper extraction and the colossal implications the industry has for every one of us.

Starting in his own backyard in the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona—where he discovers that the dirt in his garden contains double the acceptable level of arsenic—Bill Carter follows the story of copper to the controversial Grasberg copper mine in Indonesia; to the “ring” at the London Metal Exchange, where a select group of traders buy and sell enormous amounts of the metal; and to an Alaskan salmon run threatened by mining. Boom, Bust, Boom is a highly readable account—part social history, part mining-town exploration, and part environmental investigation.

Page by page, Carter blends the personal and the international in a narrative that helps us understand the paradoxical relationship we have with a substance whose necessity to civilization costs the environment and the people who mine it dearly. The result is a work of first-rate journalism that fascinates on every level.

Very interesting post,Kathy and some good supplemental books to read as well. Don't forget to put the citations for those books at the bottom of the post.

by Alan Weisman

by Frederic P. Miller

by Mary Shelley

Maybe because I live in earthquake country, and travel to San Francisco frequently, this is one of those books I find intently interesting but really don't want to read at the same time.

A Crack in the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester

Synopsis
In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was overcome by the violent shocks of an enormous earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The tremors and rumbling, affecting a swathe of California more than 200 miles long, triggered a vast firestorm in the city, effectively destroying the gold rush capital that had stood there for half a century. Simon Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities to this extraordinary event, exploring not only what happened in northern California nearly 100 years ago, but what we have learned since then about the geological underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place.

That would spook me out too.

Earthquakes are very short but can seem like an eternity and they come without warning and can be completely unnerving.

Terrific add Kathy, thank you very much.

A wonderful one.

Rambunctious Garden

by Emma Marris (no photo)

Synopsis:

A paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. Emma Marris argues convincingly that it is time to look forward and create the "rambunctious garden," a hybrid of wild nature and human management.

In this optimistic book, readers meet leading scientists and environmentalists and visit imaginary Edens, designer ecosystems, and Pleistocene parks. Marris describes innovative conservation approaches, including rewilding, assisted migration, and the embrace of so-called novel ecosystems.

"Rambunctious Garden" is short on gloom and long on interesting theories and fascinating narratives, all of which bring home the idea that we must give up our romantic notions of pristine wilderness and replace them with the concept of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden planet, tended by us.

I thought it sounded like a very interesting premise, and something different.

The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow

by B. Lynn Ingram (no photo)

Synopsis:

The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is �normal” climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future.

The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861�62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.

Thank you Kathy.

Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

by Daniel James Brown

Synopsis:

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping more than two thousand people. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. As temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, the firestorm knocked down buildings and carried flaming debris high into the sky. Two trains—one with every single car on fire—became the only means of escape. In all, more than four hundred people would die, leading to a revolution in forestry management and the birth of federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires.

A spellbinding account of danger, devastation, and courage, Under a Flaming Sky reveals the dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the tragedy and brings into focus the ordinary citizens whose lives it irrevocably marked.

Great adds Kathy - thank you for keeping up the threads.

Thank you Kathy for all of the adds.

Thanks Kathy

Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment

by Denis Hayes (no photo)

Synopsis:

As a source of labor and food, cows were integral to the settlement of the American frontier, and they have placed an indelible stamp on American culture, politics, and economics. In Cowed, Denis and Gail Boyer Hayes offer a nuanced look at our centuries-long relationship with this animal how cows helped us tame the wild American landscape and how their outsized influence on soil and air quality today threatens plant and animal populations and endangers our own well-being.

The current national herd of 93 million cows is wasteful and unsustainable and poses a threat to our environment and health. To produce one calorie of beef protein requires 40 calories of energy energy that could be used to light homes, transport water, or grow crops.

Written by two lifelong advocates of sustainable living, Cowed explores the alarming effects of our dependence on cows, and it proposes practical ways to improve our health while protecting the environment."

The Brown Agenda: My Mission to Clean Up the World's Most Life-Threatening Pollution

by Richard Fuller (no photo)

Synopsis:

Pollution is the single largest cause of death in the developing world. One in seven people in low- and middle-income countries die as a result of it. Simply put, pollution is now the world’s most prevalent health risk.

And yet, while most everyone has heard about “going green,” few are aware of the more dire and sinister “brown” pollution—places where man-made toxic pollutants have taken root and spread. Brown sites poison millions of people every year, causing needless suffering and death.

After witnessing several brown sites firsthand and meeting families trapped by poverty in these toxic hot spots, environmentalist Richard Fuller founded the Blacksmith Institute, now renamed Pure Earth, a global nonprofit that initiates large-scale cleanups of some of the most polluted places on earth.

The Brown Agenda details Fuller’s inspirational journey—from his dangerous yet ultimately successful fight to save hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon rain forest to his creation of Pure Earth.

In this vivid account of his perilous travels to the earth’s most toxic locations, Fuller introduces readers to the plight of the “poisoned poor,” and suggests specific ways people everywhere can help combat pollution all over the world.

by Ted Steinberg no photo

One of the key texts in the young field of Environmental History, this was originally Ted Steinberg’s dissertation. His advisors were David Hackett Fischer, Morton Horwitz, and Donald Worster (nice committee!). Steinberg’s thesis is that “industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well” (11). This idea goes beyond the obvious (but important) recognition that the environment influences social and economic choices, toward a more subtle discussion of how “the natural world came to represent new sources of energy and raw materials [that were] perceived more and more as a set of inputs.” Steinberg mentions Environmental Historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant in this context, but the thrust of his argument develops Horwitz’s theme of “an instrumental conception” of both resources and the “law that sanctioned the maximization of economic growth” (16). Basically, Steinberg takes Horwitz’s argument that the law became a servant of economic progress and extends it to the natural world, which also became an “instrument” of particular human designs rather than a common ground shared equally by all.

I assigned Steinberg’s Introduction to my American Environmental History class last semester, and incorporated much of the story Steinberg tells of the takeover of the Charles and Merrimack Rivers by textile industrialists, and the associated shift in social ideas of the public good and the changing role of incorporated organizations from providers of public services to private, for-profit business. A key issue in Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law, which Steinberg picks up, is that this sneaky hijacking of common law and attitudes toward ownership, along with the confusion of public and private sectors that springs from it — all these changes have distributional and social justice consequences. So the point is not only that over time it became “commonly assumed, even expected, that water should be tapped, controlled, and dominated in the name of progress,” but that the rewards of this control legitimately belonged to the few, to the exclusion of the many. This was a big change, and it opened the door for the modern world.

Steinberg’s story of the beginning of textile milling in Massachusetts calls attention to the contested nature of all the changes the mills tried to make to the flow and control of rivers like the Charles. How and why people reacted to these sneaky changes in the social contract was the element missing from Horwitz’s story (why we don't remember these challenges better in US History is a question yet to be addressed). Steinberg begins filling in the details, including the story of how the Boston Manufacturing Company used the legal system to settle what amounted to a class-action lawsuit in 1848, by paying just $26,000 to get permanent uncontested control of the Merrimack River. In 1850, as a consequence of their uncontested control of what had once been a common resource, the BMC made $14 million. I stressed this moment in my lecture, because it seemed so typical: a corporation (which is technically immortal) uses the courts to buy off the people it has injured with a pile of cash that seems significant to them, but is actually minuscule in comparison to the damage the corporation has evaded responsibility for. How many superfund sites, oil spills, and industrial accidents have been bailed out over the years by this trick, I wonder?

Like Horwitz, Steinberg also shows how much the changes in our society’s understanding of property rights and commons owed not to free competition in the market, but to government interference on behalf of the rich, through the courts. This is another important thing for students to understand, I think. Current debates about the relationship between businesses and the environment are too often framed as a sort of Atlas Shrugged episode, with “statist” environmentalists trying to infringe on the rights of “individualist” businesses. Steinberg’s story of the textile industry helps explain that building corporate power was a social process — the BMC was given power in the elaborate set of choices Steinberg describes. And some people objected, but the changes went ahead despite the regular complaints of area farmers and upstream fishermen. This led many people in places like the Charles River valley in the early 1790s to believe “their natural rights [had been] stolen from them, and their best property at the mercy of one or two Millers, still the lucky favorites & likely to remain, so long as the rage for Factory at every place, whether others sink or swim, continues the rage of Government” (37). Interesting that these complaints were made early in the story, when Massachusetts residents were still filled with the “Spirit of ’76” and the populist understanding of natural rights that led to the Revolution. By the end of the story in the middle of the 19th century, the language of resistance had been forced to change because the things people were resisting hadn’t even been dreamed of in the Revolutionary era.

Steinberg describes the Boston Associates’ campaign to control Lake Winnepissiogee, the destruction of fisheries and then the capitalists’ attempts to reintroduce fish and manage what was formerly a common good, and the problem of industrial and urban pollution in rivers controlled by the industrialists. Each of these topics have been expanded by others, along the lines Steinberg suggests. The only flaw in the book, for me, is the Thoreau-ian wrapper Steinberg adds at the beginning and end. As recorded in the 1849 classic, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau was horrified by what he saw happening in New England, but I don’t think Steinberg shows how Thoreau represents any type of viable alternative. Of course, Thoreau is familiar to most students from High School, and my students got a bit caught up in the Thoreau thing -- so it works. At the conclusion of the book, Steinberg admits that “greater command over…nature in general, had its positive points.” But, he concludes, “this aggressive, manipulative posture toward the natural world [is] a problem that penetrates to the core of modern American culture” (271). Like Thoreau, this sentiment is easy to agree with but difficult to act on. In addition to the sneakiness of the legal and social changes, our inability to see how things might have gone leads to a sense of inevitability. So when I taught this segment last semester, I tried to frame the story with Robert Owen. At the beginning of the story, Nathan Appleton and Francis Cabot Lowell went to Scotland to visit Owen’s mill city New Lanarck. By the end of the story, the BMC had built cities on the Merrimack, made millions, polluted the water, and then took their money and left when the industry went into decline, leaving behind permanent social and environmental problems. Owen, on the other hand, had left industry to found the cooperative community New Harmony in America and became the father of the Cooperative movement in Britain. It’s not a perfect counterpoint, but Owen’s story compared to Appleton’s and Lowell’s at least suggests that things could have gone differently in Lawrence and Lowell.

by Morton J. Horwitz

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I'm new here, so I'm posting a book review and a more topical piece today (which still mentions a book), to see what people might be interested in. Here's the topical piece:

The argument about energy independence, renewability, and ethanol isn’t new: it has been going on for nearly a century. Samuel Morey’s 1826 internal combustion engine burned ethyl alcohol because it was readily available. Henry Ford and Charles Kettering both expected their future cars would burn alcohol fuels. Ford saw ethanol as a way to support American farmers and use grain surpluses that were depressing prices. Kettering’s statement that alcohol was the best way to convert solar energy to fuel reflected a belief that it was better to live on annual solar “income” than to become dependent on drawing down fossil fuel “capital.” And both men worried that gasoline would involve the United States in the affairs of faraway regions. A speaker at a 1936 conference sponsored by Ford remarked that the biggest known oil reserves were “in Persia…and in Russia. Do you think that is much defense for your children?”

Since energy is such an important and contentious issue today, why aren’t we more aware that these debates are not new? General-purpose American History textbooks have a lot to cover, it’s true. They can’t go into detail on every issue. Checking the indexes of several popular textbooks reveals that if they address the petroleum industry at all, it’s usually just to mention that Standard Oil pioneered horizontal business integration and that John D. Rockefeller eventually controlled 90% of the industry. But even respected histories of technology like Vaclav Smil’s 2005 book, Creating the Twentieth Century, tell the story of early internal combustion as if gasoline was the only fuel used until the end of World War I, when diesel trucks began entering the market. In Smil’s history, there was no solution to the “violent knocking that came with higher compression. That is why all pre-WWI engines worked with compression ratios no higher than 4.3-1 and why the ratio began to rise to modern levels (between 8 and 10) only after the introduction of leaded gasoline.” This is simply not true, so why doesn’t an expert like Smil know the facts?

Ethyl alcohol fuels were already widely used before the beginning of the kerosene and petroleum boom dominated by Standard Oil. Engineers at both Ford and General Motors were aware that ethyl alcohol ran at high compression ratios without knocking. So how is it possible that historians, even historians of technology, seem to be unaware of the battles fought in the early years of the twentieth century over what American drivers would put in their tanks?

Part of the answer, I think, is that the winners of those battles left more records for historians than the losers. History depends on evidence. A seemingly comprehensive history of the petroleum industry can be written, based on mountains of documents in academic libraries and corporate archives. Books about companies like DuPont and Standard Oil, written by both supporters and opponents, could fill a library. Anyone who undertakes a new history of these subjects must read all this material, which leaves little time to dig for other perspectives.

The makers of ethanol in the early twentieth century, unlike the corporations, left few documents. And finding the story of alcohol in the archives of Ford or General Motors requires dedication and persistence. A good percentage of the records left by these companies, after all, are not objective accounts at all. They’re advertisements, public relations statements, and internal documents arguing not about what could be done, but about what they wanted to do.

As a result, the history we read tells the story of an apparently inevitable, unstoppable journey toward the petroleum-powered world we live in today. This type of history celebrates the winners while at the same time excusing them. When we assume the outcome was inevitable, we conclude that if it hadn’t been Rockefeller, it would just have been somebody else. And that’s the biggest problem. When we believe the present was inevitable, we lose the ability to imagine alternatives. In the past, and also in the present and the future.

by Vaclav Smil

Hello Dan!

When mentioning a book, put it at the end of your post, after the text, to make it better visible and accessible to other members. Like this:

by Vaclav Smil

Samanta wrote: "Hello Dan!

When mentioning a book, put it at the end of your post, after the text, to make it better visible and accessible to other members.

Thanks. Done.

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

by Edward O. Wilson

Synopsis:

In order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature.


If we are to undertake such an ambitious endeavor, we first must understand just what the biosphere is, why it's essential to our survival, and the manifold threats now facing it. In doing so, Wilson describes how our species, in only a mere blink of geological time, became the architects and rulers of this epoch and outlines the consequences of this that will affect all of life, both ours and the natural world, far into the future.


Half-Earth provides an enormously moving and naturalistic portrait of just what is being lost when we clip "twigs and eventually whole braches of life's family tree." In elegiac prose, Wilson documents the many ongoing extinctions that are imminent, paying tribute to creatures great and small, not the least of them the two Sumatran rhinos whom he encounters in captivity. Uniquely, Half-Earth considers not only the large animals and star species of plants but also the millions of invertebrate animals and microorganisms that, despite being overlooked, form the foundations of Earth's ecosystems.


In stinging language, he avers that the biosphere does not belong to us and addresses many fallacious notions such as the idea that ongoing extinctions can be balanced out by the introduction of alien species into new ecosystems or that extinct species might be brought back through cloning. This includes a critique of the "anthropocenists," a fashionable collection of revisionist environmentalists who believe that the human species alone can be saved through engineering and technology.


Despite the Earth's parlous condition, Wilson is no doomsayer, resigned to fatalism. Defying prevailing conventional wisdom, he suggests that we still have time to put aside half the Earth and identifies actual spots where Earth's biodiversity can still be reclaimed. Suffused with a profound Darwinian understanding of our planet's fragility, Half-Earth reverberates with an urgency like few other books, but it offers an attainable goal that we can strive for on behalf of all life.

Thanks Francie for all of the adds

You are welcome.

What satellites can tell us about how animals will fare in a changing climate

by Maria-José Viñas


A young polar bear sitting on the shore in southern Beaufort Sea, Alaska. In some parts of the Arctic, sea ice loss is causing polar bears to spend longer periods on shore each summer. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Eric Regehr.

From the Arctic to the Mojave Desert, terrestrial and marine habitats are rapidly changing. These changes impact animals that are adapted to specific ecological niches, sometimes displacing them or reducing their numbers. From their privileged vantage point, satellites are particularly well-suited to observe habitat transformation and help scientists forecast impacts on the distribution, abundance and migration of animals.

In a press conference Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, three researchers discussed how detailed satellite observations have facilitated ecological studies of change over time. The presenters discussed how changes in Arctic sea ice cover have helped scientists predict a 30 percent drop in the global population of polar bears over the next 35 years. They also talked about how satellite imagery of dwindling plant productivity due to droughts in North America gives hints of how both migratory herbivores and their predators will fare. Finally, they also discussed how satellite data on plant growth indicate that the concentration of wild reindeer herds in the far north of Russia has not led to overgrazing of their environment, as previously thought.

Long-term polar bear declines

Polar bears depend on sea ice for nearly all aspects of their life, including hunting, traveling and breeding. Satellites from NASA and other agencies have been tracking sea ice changes since 1979, and the data show that Arctic sea ice has been shrinking at an average rate of about 20,500 square miles (53,100 square kilometers) per year over the 1979-2015 period. Currently, the status of polar bear subpopulations is variable; in some areas of the Arctic, polar bear numbers are likely declining, but in others, they appear to be stable or possibly growing.

“When we look forward several decades, climate models predict such profound loss of Arctic sea ice that there’s little doubt this will negatively affect polar bears throughout much of their range, because of their critical dependence on sea ice,” said Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle and co-author of a study on projections of the global polar bear population. Eric Regehr of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska, led the study, which was published on December 7 in the journal Biology Letters.

“On short time scales, we can have variable responses to the loss of sea ice among subpopulations of polar bears,” Laidre said. “For example, in some parts of the Arctic, such as the Chukchi Sea, polar bears appear healthy, fat and reproducing well — this may be because this area is very ecologically productive, so you can lose some ice before seeing negative effects on bears. In other parts of the Arctic, like western Hudson Bay, studies have shown that survival and reproduction have declined as the availability of sea ice declines.”

Regehr, Laidre and their colleagues’ results are the product of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List assessment for polar bears. To determine the level of threat to a species, IUCN requests scientists to project what the species population numbers will be after three generations. Using data collected from adult females in 11 subpopulations of polar bears across the Arctic, Regehr and Laidre’s team calculated the generation length for polar bears—the average age of reproducing adult females—to be 11.5 years. They then used the satellite record of Arctic sea ice extent to calculate the rates of sea ice loss and then projected those rates into the future, to estimate how much more the sea ice cover may shrink in approximately three polar bear generations, or 35 years.

Lastly, the scientists evaluated different scenarios for the relationships between polar bear abundance and sea ice. In one of them, the bear numbers declined directly proportionally with sea ice. In the other scenarios, the researchers used the existing, albeit scarce, data on how polar bear abundance has changed with respect to sea ice loss, using all available data from polar bear subpopulations in the four existing polar bear eco-regions, and projected forward these observed trends. They concluded that, based on a median value across all scenarios, there’s a high probability of a 30 percent decline in the global population of polar bears over the next three to four decades, which supports listing the species as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.

“It is difficult to predict what population numbers will be in the future, especially for animals that live in vast and remote regions,” Regehr said. “But at the end of the day, polar bears need sea ice to be polar bears. This study adds to a growing body of evidence that the species will likely face large declines as loss of their habitat continues.”


Adult female mountain lion in Oquirrh Mountains, Utah. This collared female was part of a study examining mountain lion population dynamics that ran from 1997 to 2013. Credit: Utah State University/David Stoner

Drought and mountain lions

The southwestern United States is expected to become more prone to droughts with climate change. The resulting loss of vegetation will not only impact herbivores like mule deer; their main predator, mountain lions, might take an even larger hit.

To estimate the numbers and distribution of mule deer and mountain lions in Utah, Nevada and Arizona, David Stoner, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, used imagery of plant productivity from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, flown on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, plus radio-telemetry measurements of animal density and movements. He found that there is a very strong relationship between plant productivity and deer and mountain lion density.


Taimyr reindeer in northern Russia, summer of 2003. Credit: Leonid Kolpashchikov

Read the remainder of the article: http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2529/...

Discussion topics:

a) What is the biggest impact to our environment, with the reduction of animal species?

b) What do you think can be done to reverse the decline of certain animals due to climate change?

Source: NASA.gov

Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

Synopsis:

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.

Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.

Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man named Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the United States and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.

Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World

by Scott Harrison

Synopsis:

An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water.

At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models--repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience, Harrison founded charity: water. Today, his organization has raised over $300 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 8.2 million people around the globe.

In Thirst, Harrison recounts the twists and turns that built charity: water into one of the most trusted and admired nonprofits in the world. Renowned for its 100% donation model, bold storytelling, imaginative branding, and radical commitment to transparency, charity: water has disrupted how social entrepreneurs work while inspiring millions of people to join its mission of bringing clean water to everyone on the planet within our lifetime.

In the tradition of such bestselling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life--and a gritty tale that proves it's never too late to make a change.

100% of the author's net proceeds from Thirst will go to fund charity: water projects around the world.

I recently finished this great history of Americans' relationship with birds. Weidensaul talks about our enthusiasm for birds and the ornithologists who have studied them, but also some of the horror stories of what we have done wrong and of the need for and potential methods for conservation in the 21st century. This is a great book for anyone interested in science, conservation, birds, and/or American history.

Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding

by Scott Weidensaul (no photo)

Synopsis:

From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds' great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly colored songbirds. Of a Feather traces the colorful origins of American birding: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between border skirmishes; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Scott Weidensaul also recounts the explosive growth of modern birding that began when an awkward schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds in 1934. Today birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive "listers" among its tens of millions of participants, making what was once an eccentric hobby into something so completely mainstream it's now (almost) cool. This compulsively readable popular history will surely find a roost on every birder's shelf.