As various other reviewers have said, this is like Michael Crichton without an editor. The same mix of intriguing what-if premise, more-or-less-plausiAs various other reviewers have said, this is like Michael Crichton without an editor. The same mix of intriguing what-if premise, more-or-less-plausible scientific speculation, movie-ready plotting, simplified characters, and populistic views and prejudices. And also as with Crichton (or Dan Brown, to whom I have the same reaction), afterwards I felt a little annoyed with myself for having gotten hooked by the implausible plot and as a result spending so much time reading the book when all I was really interested in was the premise and some of the science.
Less so this time, though, because I speed-read it :-)....more
If, like most people, you have been drifting along, vaguely aware that there might be something called global warming and that it might have some not If, like most people, you have been drifting along, vaguely aware that there might be something called global warming and that it might have some not so good consequences, but you haven't really taken the time to work out how serious it is and whether or not it is something that you could or should do something about... then do yourself, the rest of us, and the animals and plants with which we share the world a favor and read this book. It is short, easy to understand, based on personal experience and solid research, and is guaranteed to shock you out of your slumbering complacency (if you are one of those aforementioned drifters).
"The Weather Makers" isn't perfect, but it is effective, and that, for most potential readers, is more important. Once aware, awake, and concerned, then you can find other books that marshal the scientific evidence more carefully and comprehensively (if you still have questions about how bad global warming could become and what catastrophic effects it will have), or which give you a wider set of recommendations as to what you can do personally or what needs to be done collectively (if you are ready to take action), but you need to wake up to the danger first.
So read this book and if it works for you then recommend it further to several friends (who should recommend it further to various of their friends... and so on). There may be better reasons to start a chain-letter than waking up to the risks of global warming, but if so, I don't know what they might be.
Note: this review is for the 2005 edition which has apparently been reissued and updated extensively in 2010. I'll post a review for the updated version once I've read it. There's also a young adult edition of this book that was published in 2010. ...more
Not as good as his brilliant "The Future Eaters" about Australia, but still very good. Flannery's basic thesis is that North America has been "the froNot as good as his brilliant "The Future Eaters" about Australia, but still very good. Flannery's basic thesis is that North America has been "the frontier" for one species after another ever since that "Most unfortunate day for North America 65 million years ago" when a massive meteorite struck in the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out almost all life in North America south of the Arctic Circle.
For millions of years thereafter, as one land bridge after another opened and closed, new species arrived and then displaced or found an accomodation with those already there. The last, and most destructive, of these was the Clovis culture of Homo Sapiens some 13,000 years ago, who in all likelihood wiped out almost all of North America's megafauna in a thousand bloody years (although ultimately we of Homo Europa may end up outdoing our forerunners by nickel and diming many more smaller animals and plants into extinction).
There are aspects of the book that will not appeal to all readers. The first half is basically a long list of descriptions of the arrival, rise, and fall of in the meantime mostly extinct animal and plant families, which, if you were never the sort to get excited when reading about short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, mastodons, or sabre toothed cats, might drag. The last sixth, dealing with the ecological sins of post-1800 America is fairly scathing and will no doubt irritate the "my country right or wrong" crowd. But anyone who quits early or even skips a chapter will do themselves a disservice -- there are so many interesting observations along the way.
So, read "The Future Eaters" first, then come back to this one....more
Meh. Uninspiring writing. Feels a little like Holmgren's heart wasn't in it. As if a lot of people told him that he should write about what the world Meh. Uninspiring writing. Feels a little like Holmgren's heart wasn't in it. As if a lot of people told him that he should write about what the world might look like under varying assumptions of peak fossil fuels and climate change, so he did, but it isn't what he's really interested in (which is permaculture, permaculture, permaculture!). There are better books to read in this general subject area....more
Say this for Greer: he makes you think. This is the first time I've come across the idea of applying the ecological theory of succession, including thSay this for Greer: he makes you think. This is the first time I've come across the idea of applying the ecological theory of succession, including the concepts of R-adaptation and K-adaptation, to human societies... and yet it clearly works and leads to many further insights. And this is just one of many, many intriguing ideas in this book. Greer has thought long and deep about the implications of a post-fossil-fuel world and if that's a subject that interests you (and it should!) then you should read this book.
That being said, I think that there are a few logical holes in his arguments, and I'll discuss one of the largest of these because it opens up possibilities that could dramatically shorten our way to the ecotechnic future.
Greer argues that transitioning to an industrial society based on renewable energy is impossible given where we are on the oil depletion curve. To justify this he argues that cheap oil is required to economically make anything else (such as solar panels), and that any other energy source would need massive investment either in new machinery to use the new fuel, or in a distribution system for the new fuel, or both -- and he eviscerates the hydrogen strawman to prove his point.
But there is one energy source that does not suffer significantly from these drawbacks: electricity generated from renewables (in particular CSP -- concentrated solar power). CSP modules are primarily made of glass, a little steel and copper, and a tiny amount of semiconductor. Glass is not a problem -- we aren't going to run out of sand anytime soon -- and the amounts required of the other elements are trivial compared to current production and reserves. And the power required to melt the sand and drive the machines making the modules can come from electricity generated by CSP plants.
The investments required for a beefed up and smarter grid to distribute CSP-generated electricity are (relatively speaking) quite manageable. Much existing machinery already works with electricity... and as for cars and trucks, Greer himself in this book waxes lyrical over how easy it will be for a legion of retrofitters to turn their petroleum powered vehicles into electric ones.
This is an important logical weakness, since if it is possible to get a significant renewable electrical generation capacity up and running before everything breaks down then we have a much better chance of saving significant parts of our current technological infrastructure and making the transition to a sustainable future in decades rather than centuries. Not without a lot of suffering and disruption, but much less than Greer foresees.
Anyway, even when Greer is wrong, he's interesting... and, who knows, he might be right after all....more
The goal is worthy, of course. In a finite world nothing can grow larger for ever... neither lemming nor human population numbers, neitheUninspiring.
The goal is worthy, of course. In a finite world nothing can grow larger for ever... neither lemming nor human population numbers, neither global oil production nor GDP. In our case the end of growth seems likely to come sooner rather than later, given that we are already in ecological overshoot, about to be confronted with peak fossil fuels, and with catastrophic climate change a few decades away if we continue with Business As Usual. So, we can either think about what growth is supposed to be good for, find ways to achieve the same ends by other means, and voluntarily and in a controlled manner stop growing, or we can charge blindly ahead until we drown, starve, or go over a cliff into steep decline.
I bought this book because I hoped it would provide some insight into what a world without growth would look like and how to manage the transition. And it sort of does, but not well. For a start, it reads like a report rather than a popular science book or a manifesto... it's a little dull. Secondly, although it does a reasonable job of identifying where the problems are today, it mostly fails to lay out clear and useful solutions to these problems, and those that it does provide tend, more often than not, to suffer from the same hybris as communism... to whit, that state bureaucracies can effectively micro-manage their economies and people. Indeed there is more than a whiff of Marxism here, with advocacy of state enterprises and dark hints of the necessity of "revisit the concepts of... asset ownership and control over the distribution of surpluses."
I'm not a radical free-marketeer, but neither do I think that communism has any useful answers. I'm basically a socialist, who believes that the role of government is to define the rules of the game and then to let market capitalism come up with optimal solutions. In order to transition to a sustainable future we need inspiring visions and pragmatic advice as to how to craft new green and sustainable rules to play by. Neither are easy to find in this book....more
Somewhat lost its interest for me early on when Whitefield admitted that he'd never actually made a full-scale forest garden himself. As one might susSomewhat lost its interest for me early on when Whitefield admitted that he'd never actually made a full-scale forest garden himself. As one might suspect, therefore, his descriptions and advice are fairly generic. There are some useful pieces of information, but more often than not only what you'd expect to find in a standard organic gardening book rather than specific to forest gardens. He doesn't give any "communities" either, although since these would tend to be relevant only to the UK, I guess it wouldn't have helped me much even if had done so....more
Impressive. For the clarity and consistency of his ecological thought, and even more so given that the book was first published in 1980 when even amonImpressive. For the clarity and consistency of his ecological thought, and even more so given that the book was first published in 1980 when even among green activists and academics there was only a fuzzy understanding of the nature and depth of the ecological predicament created by our industrial civilization. For that matter, even now there probably aren't more than 5% of the population of the US who would really understand his worldview.
Catton gets so many things right that it feels a bit like nitpicking to note that he doesn't understand either wind or solar power (and thus comes down against them), and that he didn't foresee the vast strides science and technology would take in the next 30 years (thus creating opportunities to sustainably maintain a high level of civilization).
But he absolutely nails the basic issues of carrying capacity, the unsustainability of a fossil-fuel-driven economy, and the various types of reactions that people would have to the news that there are not only limits to growth but that we have overshot them and have thus set ourselves up for a possibly civilization-ending crash (said reactions ranging from ostrichism, through cosmeticism and the wonderfull named cargoism, to realism).
One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was when Catton described what it was like to live through the first oil shock... and analyzes people's reactions from an ecological perspective. Spooky... it felt like I was reading an account of our own future. And all the more frustrating therefore that this book was largely ignored for so many years during which we (the Western world) could have been doing things that would have allowed us, if not to completely avoid the coming die-off, at least to minimize its severity and impact....more
First book I've read by a druid... and a very interesting book it is. Greer is an out-of-the-box thinker: faced with a choice between two alternativesFirst book I've read by a druid... and a very interesting book it is. Greer is an out-of-the-box thinker: faced with a choice between two alternatives, he automatically looks for a third. And into the critical debate over how industrial civilization will respond to ecological overshoot (peak oil, peak soil, resource shortages, overpopulation, and so on), which is dominated by a vigorously contested struggle between Cornucopians, who think that science and technology will find a way for economic growth and progress to continue ad infinitum, and Doomers who think that Cormac McCarthy's "Road" is perhaps optimistic, he injects a very plausible third alternative: gradual stepwise decline.
Intellectually his forefathers are the historians of civilizations (such as Spengler, Toynbee, Tainter, and Diamond), whose primary interest has been to explain why civilizations rise and fall. What Greer adds to the picture is his assertion that despite our wonderful science and technology our modern industrial civilization will be no different, because it has an Achilles heel: the continued availability of adequate supplies of cheap fossil fuels... and this is coming to an end (if you don't believe this, you haven't been paying attention).
Greer does a good job of explaining such key concepts as net energy, overshoot, problems vs predicaments, and the roles of myth and political interest in our collective inability to see and respond to our Achilles heel, while pointing out the implausibilities of the arguments of both the Cornucopians and the Doomers. He is less good on explaining the role that global warming will play, but since it basically reinforces his other arguments this is not a major flaw. He has certainly convinced me that a gradual decline punctuated by crises is the most likely scenario (although I remain more optimistic about the ability of science and technology to arrest and then reverse this decline at some point prior to a reversion to a medieval pastoral lifestyle). But in his prescriptions as to what we should do to prepare for gradual decline he goes astray.
His problems, I believe, are twofold. First, I think that he has spent too much time around Doomers -- despite his explicit rejection of their theses, his thinking has become coloured by their worldview -- and as a result he loses sight of the implications of his own ideas. Second, despite advocating a focus on preparing to survive the intermittent periods of crisis during the decline, his own focus is too long term. Both of these problems are visible in his recommendation that we should learn basic skills such as soap-making and herbal medicine as a way to prepare for the decline. While we may eventually get to the point where every community will be more or less self-sufficient, Greer's own timeline of 150 years or so of decline means that none of us alive today will see the endpoint. In the interim global supply chains will almost certainly break down, but regional integration and consequent advantages of specialization and economies of scale will still apply: there will continue to be soap factories and medical clinics for a long time yet. Learning how to make soap in your kitchen and to perform simple surgery in your woodshed will not be particularly useful in this case.
Still, the book is very well worth reading. Greer is an excellent writer and a first-rate analyst -- he cuts through to the heart of very complex issues and creates clarity and understanding with a modicum of fuss. But at the end of the book, although you'll understand the problems our civilization faces well, you won't have a clear and useful plan for what to do about them, or what you can personally do to prepare for the Long Descent. ...more
This is not a perfect book, but it is an important book. A friend of mine described it as a sort of global warming overview -- almost everything of reThis is not a perfect book, but it is an important book. A friend of mine described it as a sort of global warming overview -- almost everything of relevance to the subject is touched on somewhere inside. It is written for the general public, but it doesn't talk down to the reader, nor does it unduly simplify.
If you think you know all about global warming, you should read this book as a completeness check. If you know you don't know all about global warming, you should read the book as an introductory course to provide yourself with the concepts, technology, and basic facts that will serve as a structure into and onto which you can bolt everything else you subsequently learn about ecology, geoengineering, peak oil (and other resources), sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and many other related issues.
In fact, everyone should read this book. Unfortunately, relatively few will, and most of those who do won't be those who most need to do so. Why not? Oh, many reasons. I'm most familiar with the US, so I'll focus on it, but similar lists can be made in many other countries of the world. Here are the groups in the US who most need to read it (but won't), from the most powerful to the seemingly powerless:
o Republican legislators should read it because they are blocking meaningful climate change legislation in Congress. But they won't read it because Gore's a Democrat and destroying Democrats in order to regain political power is far more important than learning how they might save a livable world for their children.
o Conservative opinion makers in the media should read it because they are creating the global warming denier movement through their inaccurate and biased coverage. But either they won't read it for the same reason as Republican politicians, or because they no longer see it as their role to judge and assess truth or falsehood, or if they do read it they'll have ideological blinkers on and will primarily be cherrypicking for minor mistakes or things that can be taken out of context to discredit both the author and the subject.
o Titans of the oil and gas and coal industries, and industrial agriculture and consumer goods companies, should read it because they are funding charlatans and think tanks to cast doubt on the existence of global warming. But they won't read it because it's not relevant to making more money and that's really all they care about (Hey, the rich will inherit the earth, right? Or at least, that small part of it that will still be habitable. So better get as rich as you can as quickly as possible...).
o Ordinary Republican voters should read it because their votes are keeping just enough Republicans in Congress to make sure that nothing will be done to mitigate global warming. But they won't read it because they've been told by their political representatives, and the media personalities they watch and read and listen to, and in some cases by their preachers too, that Gore's a liar, and he's only out to make a buck through book sales and driving up the share prices of the wind and solar companies in which he has invested, and anyway global warming is a hoax the world is really cooling, and didn't God gave the Earth to Mankind to do as they wish, and why bother if the Rapture is just round the corner, and the Bible says nothing about global warming does it?
o And lastly the vast numbers of Americans who don't vote should read it because in their case no decision is a decision in favor of the ruinous status quo. But they won't read it because when they aren't working in their dead-end jobs they are sitting in front of televisions an average of 5 hours a day, consuming ever greater mountains of junk food and rivers of soda, becoming more and more obese, and sinking deeper and deeper into debt... and frankly they just don't have the time or energy to think or learn about what their lifestyles are doing to the planet.
But you know who might read this book? Young people. Not young children, but say from about 12 onwards, especially if they are guided by thoughtful teachers in their schools. And some of those children will go home to their Republican or non-voting parents and ask them why they aren't doing anything to save the world. Most of them will get slapped down, one way or another, but some won't. And maybe, just maybe, that will make a difference.
So, if you know a teacher who hasn't read this book, or a young person whose parents probably either don't vote or vote Republican, think about giving them a copy of "Our Choice" this holiday season. It's a very democratic (with a small "d") thing to do....more
A remarkable and fascinating book. I thought that Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" had created the gold standard for ecological history, but FA remarkable and fascinating book. I thought that Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" had created the gold standard for ecological history, but Flannery gives him a run for his money and, in some respects, surpasses him. While Diamond's scope and goals are more grandiose (to explain from first principles why Europeans ended up ruling the world, if only for a while), Flannery's analysis of the ecological history of Australasia is more detailed and left me with a much better understanding of and appreciation for the complex networks of cause and effect that define and influence ecological systems as they change over time.
I also felt like, after reading "The Future Eaters", I understood much better the intellectual challenge of piecing together thousands of disparate clues from many fields of study to derive a big picture explanation of why things are the way they are. Flannery knows a vast number of facts, but he thinks in terms of systems, and this allows him to arrive at convincing explanations of what must have happened in the past based on not only what exists now and in the fossil record, but also on the gaps, on what is missing.
The conclusions he reaches have relevance not only for those who are interested in Australasia's past and the present, but also for those who would understand what sorts of futures are possible for the region. In particular, his observations about the limited carrying capacity of the Australian ecosystem should be required reading for all Australians and their political representatives who advocate continued immigration. It may be a huge and sparsely settled country, but from an ecological perspective it is probably already overpopulated....more
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