NON-FICTION
Proust was a Neuroscientist
By Jonah Lehrer (2007)
If you are like me, the only thing you really remember about Marcel Proust is the occasional reference in Monty Python sketches to his complex prose and homosexuality.
Proust wasn't really a neuroscientist, at least in the modern sense of the word, but he did write about the nature of memory in his masterpiece "Remembrance of Things Past," and that's enough to feature him in Jonah Lehrer's book about artists who anticipated the discovery of neuroscience. Lehrer says the book is "about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the mind-real, tangible truths-that science is only now rediscovering. Their imaginations foretold the facts of the future."
Lehrer explores science and culture through stories about a poet, four writers, a painter, a composer and a chef, all of whose work offered key insights about human cognition and emotion that have only recently been "rediscovered" by traditional scientists.
The book is organized into chapters, each devoted to one artist and one type of brain function, and each equally fascinating. First is Walt Whitman and the substance of feeling; then George Eliot and the biology of freedom. Lehrer credits Eliot with rejecting hard-core scientific determinism and affirming free will. In her fiction, she asserted that the human mind is malleable, always changing. Neuroscientists only verified this idea of neural plasticity many decades later, with the discovery of "adult neurogenesis."
Following are chapters about the chef Auguste Escoffer, on the essence of taste, Proust on the method of memory, and Paul Cezanne on the process of sight. There's a very interesting section here on individuals who have had injuries to certain parts of the visual brain who can nevertheless perform visual tasks-essentially, they can see but do not know that they can see.
The chapter on Gertrude Stein and the structure of language is superb. The final chapter is about Virginia Woolf and the emergent self, but my favorite is the essay on Igor Stravinsky. For those of us who grew up with Walt Disney's "Fantasia," the 1940 animated feature set to music, "The Rite of Spring" is burned into our visual and auditory cortices. When "The Rite of Spring" was first performed in 1913 in Paris, however, its alien harmonies and jagged rhythms caused a furor among theater goers, and the police were called. In fact, it was made famous by the uproar, and gradually enjoyed wider performance-and ever rising popularity.
Writes Lehrer, "Stravinsky's [musical] malevolence was rooted in a deep understanding of the mind. He realized that the engine of music is conflict, not consonance. The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt."
Stravinsky understood the ability of the brain to discover new patterns and be reshaped by them. Observes Lehrer, "Our ability to adapt to new kinds of music was Stravinsky's enduring insight.... Nothing is difficult forever."
Lehrer appears to be a wunderkind of sorts-a Rhodes Scholar, and a double major in neuroscience and English, who worked in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and as a line chef in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernadin. So his writing is broadly informed and astute. The writing is engaging and fun, with just enough humor to keep the stories serious but interesting. He argues that writers and musicians consistently lead the way to new theories about the workings of the mind, and the scientists mop up with hard data. He demonstrates that artist A's work preceded Scientist B, but not necessarily that A influenced B.
But that is really not the point.
From the book's prelude:
"Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like a ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true; the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff."
Artists can learn from science, and scientists, clearly from artists. Each is material for the other, but retains its own integrity, and virtue. The sciences lift us outside of our experience, so that we can more clearly survey it. The arts immerse us in experience, so that we can more fully encounter it. In the end, we are all better off if we pay attention to all of our brains and embrace both art and science.
New Reasons to go to Work
By Daniel Pink (2009)
Daniel Pink's prior books have much to do with the business of managing workers (Free Agent Nation, A Whole New Mind, and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko). His training is legal (Harvard) but his website says that "to his delight," he has never practiced law.
In this short, snappy volume, Pink promises "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." He presents a history of the still-dominant "operating system" (analogous to a computer operating system) used in the industrial world that depends largely on carrots and sticks to engage and motivate workers. He describes situations where it has worked and reviews some fairly longstanding scientific data of where is has not.
Pink weaves in the changing nature of today's work—less routine, more "right-brained"—and predicts that the current system, with its rewards based on readily quantified metrics, will not sustain us into the new century because in the next few years and decades, our success will depend less on rote, mechanical work and more on creative and flexible tasks.
He proposes a new operating system with three main three elements-autonomy, mastery and the greater good-to motivate workers more effectively once their basic needs are met.
Most workers, he contends, value autonomy—the ability to do their work with some self-direction. The more cognitive and creative, the more this may be so.
In addition, workers seek mastery—no one wants to be bad at what they do.
Finally, workers want to contribute to a greater good.
Pink avoids black and white thinking, noting that carrots and sticks do work in some settings, but that as the nature of our work changes, the things we want to incentivize also change. He offers a "test" to let people see if they are more type I (intrinsically motivated) or type X (extrinsically motivated).
In medicine, we have traditionally been paid on a piecework basis, but over the last 20 years, we have seen how that has created a fragmented and dysfunctional system of care (or non system). Now our task is to provide consistent, cost effective high-quality care, and that does require increased standardization (and that conflicts with autonomy), but if we continue to incentivize the wrong thing (piecework), we won't get there.
We have highly skilled workers who by and large want to be good at what they do and value the opportunity to contribute to the greater good. We may fail if we incentivize them as if they were line workers on an assembly line. We need to explore ways to foster autonomy and mastery in our work—which may mean less control in some cases, not more.
The tool kit in the second part of the book describes some ways in which this might work. The toolkit consists of a series of exercises focused on several building blocks of the three main elements, to allow us to examine our own work situations.
In today's stressful workplace, it would be easy to sell the notion that work could be more fulfilling. With a series of clinical studies, anecdotes and expert testimony, Pink makes a compelling case that extrinsic motivation, although perhaps effective for repetitive tasks, might actually be detrimental in environments that call for more creative thinking or cognitive reasoning.
With the current presumption that ingenuity and innovation will be key to success in the 21st century economy, nurturing intrinsic motivation and restructuring the workplace to the extent possible to foster autonomy, mastery and purpose are essential tasks for the entire system.
In addition (although Pink does not dwell on this), generational differences will affect the willingness of workers to sacrifice for monetary rewards, so much so that non-monetary rewards may be more important. With professional positions like physicians "life style" often trumps salary.
The high-stakes rewards for short-term payoffs on Wall Street (extrinsic rewards) are in large part responsible for the economic suffering that has spanned the globe. In much of the important work in our world today, short-term gain may not be the relevant focus. In the health care workplace, as we struggle to transition from a culture of individual craftsmen to systems of more integrated care, perhaps there are some elements of the industrial model we can just skip.
This is a great book for health care workers, especially for those in leadership positions. Why do we continue to embrace an industrial model that is not always a good fit for the personal but high-tech world of medicine today? We may create more problems than we solve by trying to fit medical practice into an industrial model that leading business thinkers have already begun to abandon!
Are you a type I or a type X??? To find out, take the quiz at www.danpink.com/drive.html.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
By Daniyal Mueenuddin
I don't have as much time to read as I would like (something about this job thing . . . ), so each year in the fall, I get the lists of books nominated for National Book Awards in fiction and non-fiction. I have found these to be a reliable source of readable and worthwhile material that lasts through the following summer. That said, I also usually avoid collections of short stories. However, I am happy to report that this debut collection, by a Pakistani author educated in America but now living in Pakistan, is a remarkable and thoroughly enchanting read.
The book consists of eight stories, linked by time, place and the feudal landowner K.K. Harouni. Harouni owns a large farm in Dunyapur (in the Punjab region of Pakistan), and a manor in the colonial city of Lahore. The stories describe the lives, the relationships, and the daily challenges of the managers, drivers, gardeners, cooks and servants on the farm and in the mansion in Lahore.
The first story, "Nawabdin Electrician," selected by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2008, is the most lighthearted in the book and the only one with what approximates a hero—resourceful and capable of optimism and upward mobility. Nawab is an enterprising mechanic whose primary task is to keep the water pumps in the irrigation system at the farm in working order. He talks Harouni into purchasing a motorcycle to travel the vast distances around the farm and promptly ascends in the world. "The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing." He is soon traversing the region, increasingly successful in helping others alter their electric meters so as to cheat the power company, the first hint of the corruption that seems to be ever present. When he picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a thief, both suffer gunshot wounds and end up side by side in a clinic. The thief begs Nawab to forgive him, but he refuses and after the death of the thief, he becomes almost giddy at his success: "He was growing. Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them had killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician."
In the title story, Husna, a young woman from Lahore, applies to her distant relative, Harouni, for employment. The aging Harouni, whose estranged wife lives elsewhere, takes her into his house, and eventually his bed, but does not seem to know what to make of this relationship, as she is "neither rich nor poor, neither servant nor begum." Harouni and Husna share time together that is not unhappy, but when he dies without making provisions for her, she is banished by Harouni's daughters so quickly that she cannot even pay final respects to her lover.
In another story, "Provide, Provide," the powerful manager of Harouni's estate finds love with the sister of his driver. He is politically powerful but also corrupt. When the call comes to raise money to support the needs of the family, he would "sell land at half the price, the choice pieces to himself, putting it in the names of his servants and relatives. He sold to the other mangers, to his friends, to political allies. Everyone got a piece of the quick dispersion. He took a commission on each sale." Powerful and wealthy, he finds love late in life, then is diagnosed with cancer and is promptly gone.
Each of the stories has a similar trajectory—we learn about a character's past, then about the central crisis of the moment, then a fairly quick resolution. The stories enhance one another, forging connections between characters and blending with authority a vision of Pakistan, from its "ugly concrete buildings, crowded bazaars, slums, ponds of sewage water choked with edible water lilies" to its "open country, groves of blossoming orange trees, the ripe mustard yellow with flowers," with characters who are both irresistible and compellingly human.
There are recurrent themes—elaborate formalities persist amidst painstaking manipulations for position and advantage, everyone is corrupt, sexual liaison just another "plainly mercantile transaction." Ultimately, I think, the theme is about real people, struggling amidst radical change to understand one another.
It is an interesting look into a culture that happens to be at the center of world events at the moment, authentic and beautifully written. Each story is enjoyable in its own right, but taken together they present an engaging portrait of post-colonial Pakistanis, not so different from ourselves.
The Best of It
By Kay Ryan
Like so many of us, I was biology major as a pre-med student. At the University of Illinois at Urbana, we crowded by the thousands into large lecture halls for Bio 101, Calculus and Organic Chemistry. I had one professor in organic chem who wrote on the board with his right hand and erased with his left as he traversed the front of the classroom so that everyone had to pay maximal attention to each moment of each lecture. Like it or not, we never missed an opportunity to soak up every moment of any basic science course that might make a difference as we later applied to med school. As a result, however, few of us took the time to explore the wealth of liberal arts courses available to us. I took two literature classes (that was the requirement) as an undergraduate, and I am not making this up, one was "English 246, Film as Literature."
So, despite my life-long love of reading, I have not spent much time in organized pursuit of literature, and in my leisure, I have stuck pretty much to interesting fiction and current events non-fiction. So poetry is not my thing—too much work, much too hard. I have always felt a little about poetry like most people feel about modern visual art—it makes you grab your chin and nod as if you understand and appreciate it, but you really don't want to live with it. Kay Ryan's The Best of It, however, is sly, witty, engaging and accessible. You want to spend time with these poems and savor the beauty of the language.
Kay Ryan is our most recent United States Poet Laureate. I wasn't sure exactly what the responsibilities of the poet laureate are, so here's what I found from the website of the Library of Congress:
"The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.
"The Poet Laureate is appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress and serves from October to May. In making the appointment, the Librarian consults with former appointees, the current Laureate and distinguished poetry critics. The position has existed under two separate titles: from 1937 to 1986 as ‘Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress' and from 1986 forward as ‘Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.' The name was changed by an act of Congress in 1985."
The Best of It is a collection of more than 200 poems comprising much of Ryan's previous work, along with some new pieces. Her poetry is striking in that she writes very short verses. In addition, and unlike most modern poetry, they rhyme—how unhip is that? They are a bit whimsical but usually with a point. Even though they are over quickly, I found myself drawn back to consider the subtleties and implications.
The title of the book is also the title of a selection from her volume The Niagara River, 2005, that reads in its entirety:
However carved up
or pared down we get
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn't matter that
our acre's down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we'd rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.
I particularly enjoy her restraint, with a sense of compact refinement, devoid of arbitrary and sometimes contrived intensity that seems to characterize so much of contemporary poetry. In "Bitter Pill":
A bitter pill
doesn't need
to be swallowed
to work. Just
reading your name
on the bottle
does the trick.
Consider "The Test We Set Ourself," about the power of our work, preceded by a verse from Annie Dillard: An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given.
If we could be less human,
if we could stand out of the range
of the cataracts of the given,
and not find our pockets swollen
with change we haven't-but must have-
stolen, who wouldn't?
it isn't a gift; we are beholden
to the sources we crib-
always something's overflow,
or someone's rib hidden in our breast;
the answer sewn inside us
that invalidates the test we set ourself
against the boneless angel on our right
and at our left the elf.
And finally, thinking about the complexities of health care in our world today, ponder "Force":
Nothing forced works.
The Gordian knot just worsens
If it's jerked at by a person.
One of the main stations
of the cross is patience.
Another, of course, is impatience.
There is such a thing as
too much tolerance
for unpleasant situations,
a time when the gentle
teasing out of threads
ceases to be pleasing
to a woman born for conquest.
Instead she must assault
the knot or alp or everest
with something sharp
and take upon herself
the moral warp of sudden progress.
There is much wisdom here. This magnificently compressed poetry elicits and rewards the reader's intellect, imagination and emotion. It is quirky and sly, but topical, timely and smart. So go ahead, try it—you'll like it!!!
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care
By T.R. Reid
Passage of federal health care reform doesn't mean the U.S. health care system has been fixed, and this book, published on August 20, 2009, remains profoundly relevant. The new federal law will modify payment and insurance schemes, but the health DELIVERY system itself will need to change its outlook and approach to promote better health outcomes, accessibility, quality and cost containment.
The U.S. health system is the most expensive in the world, yet the United States lags relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. In the most recent update of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall from the Commonwealth Fund, the United States ranks last among the seven nations studied. Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom all do better than the U.S., as they did in the 2004 and 2006 editions of Mirror, Mirror. Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, we are last in access, patient safety, efficiency and equity.
How is it that all the other industrialized democracies provide health care for everyone at a reasonable cost, yet the United States, despite all its resources and resourcefulness, cannot manage to accomplish this?
When the World Health Organization rated the national health care systems of 191 countries in terms of "fairness," the U.S. ranked 54th. That puts us slightly ahead of Chad and Rwanda, but just behind Bangladesh and the Maldives.
As I write this, Virginia and Missouri, the first of what will likely be many states, are preparing to "opt out" of the PPACA, or Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March. The one dependable feature of the discussion on the act is the heated and generalized (and polarizing) rhetoric. If you favor public sector involvement, you are a socialist; if you don't, you have no concern for the poor or the sick. In my view, this tendency to trade bumper-sticker slogans for actual thought obscures the detail and nuance needed to pragmatically address what is a serious problem facing our country.
In this crisp, serious and incisive volume, T. R Reid probes beneath the rhetoric to report on how other systems actually operate. In the end, he delivers a hopeful message: We can learn from these systems, which face many of the same issues we do, and at the same time we can adopt an approach consistent with our needs.
The book begins with a prologue constructed around a situation familiar to anyone involved in patient care today. A vigorous, healthy young woman (Nikki White) develops a serious illness, is not able to work, loses her insurance and her access to care and dies prematurely. (It is estimated that 22,000 Americans die yearly just because of lack of access). Should we guarantee medical treatment to everyone who needs it? Or should we let Americans like Nikki White die from "a lack of access to health care"? Once we settle that point, we have much to learn from other countries about the mechanics of fixing our costly, unfair health care system.
Reid uses his own quest for care for a chronic shoulder problem as he traverses the globe. This is obviously a gimmick but provides a useful thread to keep the book from slipping into a string of anecdotes. He has sufficient understanding of health care policy to articulate immensely complicated concepts in a clear and concise fashion.
First he describes the four basic approaches to health care systems across the developed world:
The Bismarck Model. Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and parts of Latin America use this model, originally conceived by Otto Von Bismarck in the mid 19th century. It uses private health insurance plans, typically paid for by employers and employees. Unlike the U.S., the insurance companies are not for profit, and cover everyone. Provision is made for the unemployed and such systems are tightly controlled by government in terms of services and fees.
The Beveridge System. This is the only true example of socialized medicine, and is the model of the National Health Service in the UK. It was developed by the British economist and social reformer William Henry Beveridge and is found, with variations, in Great Britain, Spain, New Zealand, Scandinavia and Cuba. Health care is provided by the government and paid for by taxes, like national defense. In the U.S., the Department of Veterans Affairs operates according to this model.
National Health Insurance. Canada, South Korea and Taiwan have this system where medical bills are paid by a government-operated insurance program. There is no expense for marketing, underwriting or profits. All citizens pay into the system. Services are rationed in part by waiting lines.
Out-of-Pocket Model. Generally a Third World phenomenon, but encompassing a minimum of 17% of U.S. health expenditures, higher if copays and deductibles are included. Reid notes, "The basic rule in such countries is simple and brutal: The rich get medical care; the poor stay sick or die." This "plan" provides 91% of care in Cambodia, 85% in India, and 73% in Egypt.
Health care delivery in the U.S. combines all four models. The employer-based coverage most workers get follows the Bismarck model. Veterans and soldiers are treated under the Beveridge model (often criticized as socialized medicine). Medicare is so similar to Canada's system that they share the same name. And the 47 million uninsured do as Cambodians do.
Using his "quest" for care for his chronic shoulder problem, Reid discovers many truths about health care abroad that Americans generally don't know. For example, Germany and Switzerland provide universal coverage yet preserve a greater role for competing private-sector physicians and insurance companies than does the U.S. In Britain, most doctors are in business for themselves and individual physicians are often highly entrepreneurial in that they determine which patients they will see, they compete on service for patients in their local areas, and they often add other products and services that are "out of pocket" and not covered by the NHS.
In France and Japan, consumers have quicker access to a broader range of providers than most Americans do (and no additional cost for going "out of network"). Canada does have long waiting lists for elective procedures, but other nations such as Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark outperform the U.S. in providing quick access to specialists. And no provider is ever denied an insurance claim, or any patient driven to "medical bankruptcy."
Reid also acknowledges that each system has its own set of problems and that none has figured out how to curtail the long-term trend of rising costs as populations age, technology advances and our Western lifestyle spreads.
The book includes a chapter on preventive care, i.e., keeping a population as healthy as possible; preventive care is emphasized with religious intensity in the UK where it helps keep costs down. The best example is prenatal care, where pregnant women are cared for "as soon as the line turns blue," with dramatic results in terms of perinatal outcomes. Finally, threading through the book are anecdotes about the use of electronic health records and other devices, like smart cards with a universal reading system, which improve communication and reduce duplication.
This is an important and optimistic book. It is comprehensive but engagingly written, loaded with facts but not too wonky. Instead of rationalization and hand-wringing, Reid offers the notion that health care systems can be changed, even in the face of very powerful entrenched interests, and that we need to look outside ourselves for workable solutions that are relevant for our needs.
In his closing paragraph, Reid says: "At the start of the twenty-first century, the world's richest and most powerful nation does not have the world's best health system. But we could. Given our country's remarkable assets—the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced facilities, the most innovative research on earth, a strong infrastructure of preventive medicine—the United States could be, and should be, providing its citizens the finest health care in the world. We can heal America's ailing health care system-and the world's other industrialized democracies can show us how to do it."
Physicians must be engaged and central to this discussion. Let us abandon all fear-mongering and distortion, so that an honest and productive debate can arise out of all this complexity.
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
By Bill McKibben
Twenty years ago, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the first books describing the phenomenon of global warming. Since then he has written more books and articles on this topic and about our response (or lack of), including Deep Economy, which I reviewed here in April 2008.
Eaarth, his new and startling book, assesses our current state of affairs, where climate change has already remade our world, with substantial consequences now and into the future. More than a million square miles of the Arctic ice cap have melted, the oceans have risen and warmed, and the tropics have expanded two degrees north and south.
Climate change is not an issue for our grandchildren, but for us aging boomers and everyone else. Global warming has caused such pervasive and irreversible changes that we now live on a planet with a new set or environmental and climatic realities—hence a new (unpronounceable) name "Eaarth."
We cannot realistically hope to restore the world that we grew up in, but we must make adjustments to prevent its further destruction.
In the first half of Eaarth, in chapters entitled A New World and High Tide, McKibben describes the profound effects of the one degree centigrade rise in global average temperatures that we have experienced already. For example, changes in rainfall patterns, caused by rising temperatures, are creating permanent drought in Australia and the American Southwest; the intensity and frequency of hurricanes and cyclones are increasing; and the wildfire season in California is 78 days longer than it was in 1970s and 1980s, with fires burning four times as long. And I thought we just had more media coverage.
Rising temperatures have provided the conditions for the mountain pine beetle to flourish in the Rocky Mountains, destroying millions of acres of forest. Ocean acidity is up 30%, and some coral reefs are threatened with permanent extinction.
Did you ever notice that despite waves of new technology, the weatherman is rarely reliable? Increasingly erratic weather not only affects meteorological credibility but also influences food security, imposing a severe burden on those who live directly off the land.
Natural feedback mechanisms that threaten to accelerate warming are starting to kick in. For example, did you know that the polar ice caps also function as reflectors to dissipate energy? As those caps melt, not only do the oceans rise and warm, but more energy is directed to warming the earth.
McKibben points out that historically, our focus has been on growth to drive our economy. But that just adds fuel to the fire (see Deep Economy). He writes:
I understand that this is the worst possible moment to make such a point. The temporary halt to growth that we call a recession has - in an economy geared only for expansion - wrecked many lives. We're deep in debt, as individuals and as nations, and in an effort to climb out from beneath that economic burden, we've bet yet more money that we can get growth rolling again. That's what an "economic stimulus" is - a wager that we can restart the growth machine and make back not just the amount we spent stimulating but also the debt that caused the trouble in the first place.
In the midst of criticism about stimulus-related debt, President Obama responded that the country was already running huge deficits to pay for follies like the war in Iraq. His new spending, on energy, education, and health care would be different; it would put us on "a pathway to growth." That over time would shrink those deficits. "Let's make sure that we're making investments that we need to meet those growth targets," the president said. "It's going to be an impossible task to balance our budget or even approximate it if we are not boosting our growth rates."
Many commentators, Thomas Friedman most prominently, have proposed green growth strategies to address both concerns, but McKibben details why those strategies will be no doubt helpful but not sufficient.
The second half of the book, two chapters entitled Backing Off and Lightly, Carefully, Gracefully, covers other possible responses to climate change.
In general, McKibben describes a need to change scale—from mega corporate structures to smaller, community-focused solutions to meet our top-line needs: food, energy, and interestingly, the Internet. He highlights a number of small initiatives in the U.S. (farmers' markets, for example), and inspirational solutions for food security in smaller countries. Our current system of industrialized agriculture is vulnerable to peak oil-oil output is expected to peak in the next few years and steadily decline thereafter—and is a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas creation. Small, smart, labor-intensive natural systems are a path to a sustainable future.
McKibben is generally dismissive of larger energy projects and instead favors wind and solar approaches.
He has an interesting view of the Internet as a vehicle for sharing information and transport bypassing—e.g., shopping without leaving home—and as a low-energy device to promote low-carbon services (like car sharing).
Bottom line, we no longer inhabit the world we grew up in. We have passed a tipping point, and even if we could stop emissions yesterday, our world would continue to warm up, triggering more extreme storms, droughts and other catastrophes into the foreseeable future.
We're going to have to do more than change a few light bulbs, buy a Prius and seek out a few locally grown items of produce. It is time for us to get creative about our ultimate survival. We need to make local decisions about energy use, food, agriculture and land use. We need to participate in regional and national political advocacy that defines and advances legislation to promote sustainable industry, transportation and agriculture and to discourage the ongoing carbonization of the atmosphere.
McKibben writes with clarity and zeal on a topic of supreme importance. He is reasonable and compassionate, engaging and persuasive. His generous pragmatism gives reason for hope. Everyone should read this book. The tragedy would be if we then reverted to our SUV-driving, planet-destroying ways.
For more information
www.350.org, an organization coordinated by an international team of organizers, including author Bill McKibben and young climate leaders from around the world. The number 350 refers to the parts per million CO2 that scientists say is needed to retard global warming.
www.pachamama.org, an organization working for balanced global energy conservation and environmental preservation.
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