Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts

2022-03-28

"The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves" by J. B. MacKinnon


 

Publisher: Random House Canada
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 9780735275539

This was an extremely interesting book to read, and opened my eyes to a lot of things that go on in the world that I never really paid much attention to before. In addition the fact that it is so current takes into account the effects of the Covid 19 virus and how it has changed the world.

The book is divided into four sections First Days, Collapse, Adaption, and Transformation. As you can likely figure out the first talks about what would happen when people did stop shopping. Examples are given from various industries and how they coped or didn't when certain things such as the pandemic happened. It does however look at more than Covid and takes into account things like the Mideast oil embargo that happened in the early 1970s for example. One of the chapters in this section was very interesting and that dealt with the effects of stopping shopping on the climate. When for example residents of some of the world's most polluted cities saw clear blue sky. 

The second section deals a lot with the economics of stopping shopping and how this will effect both macro and micro economies. It takes a hard look at the Finnish Depression of the early 1990s. Then goes on to look at advertising, and how people will adapt to not shopping.

Adaption deals with as the title suggests how people will and have adapt(ed) to not shopping as much, and looks at the concept of planned obsolescence and how it has been forced upon us. It also looks at a couple of programs in England called Worn Again and Every On Every Day. 

The final section Transformation starts off by talking about whaling and how it decimated the population of Right Whales, and then talks about even when petroleum became common the whaling industry went into even higher production as they could now go further. It gave me a fair bit of insight into the way I consume things and I've found out that I would likely be considered a down-shifter, or a simplifier.

This was an extremely interesting book to read, and I plan on reading the others books that the author referenced within such as Vicki Robin's "Your Money or Your Life" and Michael Lee's "The Simple Living Guide."

2022-01-31

"Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law" by Mary Roach


 

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 9781324001843

This book is Ms. Roach's seventh, and it is just as delightfully informative and fun to read as all the others.

In Fuzz she investigates the world of interactions between humans and nature. Some of these are extremely funny, while others are rather tragic, and unfortunately it's usually nature that gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop, but not always.

She investigates human interactions with bears, elephants, leopards, macaques, cougars, trees, beans, birds and then goes on to look at what the human animal does to prevent their cousins from doing what they do naturally by digging into how to scare animals away, pest removal, and also gene manipulation.

Like her other books (Grunt, Gulp, Packing for Mars, Bonk, Spook, and Stiff - I'll leave it to you to figure out what they are about), the amount of research she does is absolutely incredible, and the detail that this produces on the page is astounding.

Looking forward to book #8!

2022-01-24

"Dome" by Michael Reeves and Steve Perry


 

Publisher: Berkley Books
Copyright: 1987
ISBN: 0425095606

Dome is an extremely well written, and well plotted out novel. That tells the tale of a massive, mostly completed, mobile underwater city and it's inhabitants. Now while this might not seem too exciting, things do become very interesting early on in the book when a nuclear detonation/test is conducted in Asia that triggers a number of volcanic events throughout the world.

These "natural"" disasters trigger a number of political events that lead to a limited nuclear war between Vietnam and Laos, and when one shot misses its intended target and ends up in Cambodia they retaliate with banned bacteriological weapons, that have mutated and these spread to devastate the surface of the earth.

The characters in this novel are quite memorable, and you really get a feeling that they could be actual people, which at least in my books, is an excellent way of doing characterization.

The action is fast-paced, and the writing style very concise. The story is told from multiple perspectives at one time and this leads the reader to be even more involved in the actual story. Even though it was written 34 years ago the technology is not dated, and the science itself is sound. I was some somewhat sceptical with regard to the genetics / biological part of the science, but it sounded good, and this is not something I have studied my so it may very well be perfectly legitimate but I don't know.

Well worth the read, highly recommended.

2021-11-22

"The Flooded Earth" by Peter D. Ward

 


Publisher: Basic Books, New York
Copyright: 2010
ISBN: 9780465009497

I'm relatively sure that most rational people by now realize the climate change is something we will have to contend with in the future. There will of course be those hold out who refuse to acknowledge this, or chalk it up to a distrust in science etc. But hopefully these people make up a very small minority.

This book takes the reader through a number of scenarios that deal with the possible consequences of inevitable global warming. Each chapter begins with a fictional depiction (at least I sure hope so) of what life could be like in the future if nothing is done.

As the title suggests one of the major outcomes of the warming will be the rising of the mean sea level. Whether it rises just a metre or so, or up to the 200+ metres that are possible humanity is essentially in deep trouble. However most people seem unlikely aware of what this could actually mean to people's everyday lives - in many cases the term disaster is a gross understatement as it will change the way people live, work, how they commute, how energy is generated, and many more factors.

Highly recommended, especially for those who don't believe climate change is real.

2021-10-25

"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need" by Bill Gates


Publisher:
Copyright:
ISBN:

This book is well written, easy to understand, and laid out in a format that should make it easily accessible to all readers. I found this to be an extremely interesting book to read, and Mr. Gates has definitely done a lot of research to support his proposed solutions.

A lot of his facts and figures are drawn from the United States, but Mr. Gates has used a number of other countries as examples of what the United States and other rich countries can and should do to alleviate the climate problems the world is currently facing.

It was nice to see that the opinions and actions of climate change deniers we're ignored, as not only was thus outside the scope of the book, but it would simply have derailed a very important discussion.

An excellent book, highly recommended.

2020-08-31

"Earth: The Operators' Manual" by Richard B. Alley



Publisher:New York : W.W. Norton & Co., [2011]
Edition:First edition.
Copyright Date:©2011
ISBN: 9780393081091
Characteristics: x, 479 pages :,illustrations ;,25 cm

This is a companion book to the PBS television series, unfortunately I have not been able to get my hands on a copy of the video to compare the two, but in any case while the video would undoubtedly enhance the book, I'm fairly sure it wouldn't detract as this book is very well researched and written.

The amount of detail in this book is amasing, and the information should be indispensible to anyone doing research on the effects of climate change both historically and in modern times. The book takes the reader a journey via a series of stories that does delve into the scientific end of things, but it is kept to a basic level so it should be understandable to readers of a Junior High School level or higher.

Dr. Alley, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, takes on topics such as how did we get fossil fuels to begin with, the establishment of the American National Academy of Science, glaciation and the ice ages. He then delves into how humans can help be looking at solutions based on human waste, the wind, geothermal energy, nuclear, and solar energy.

Highly recommended to anybody who is interested in the future (or the past for that matter) of this rock we live on.

Going on Hiatus

 Greetings, I have decided to put a hold on doing further book reviews for a while. In fact I'm not sure if I will resume doing reviews ...