Book Review

Maczulak, Anne (2010) Sustainability: Building Eco-Friendly Communities. New York, NY: Facts on File.

The title doesn’t reflect what the book is about. This is more of a textbook covering various practices like biotechnology, sustainable agriculture, aquaculture, alternative materials, and finally the last chapter on sustainable communities. Once you get past that misperception about the intent, it’s got some interesting information. This might make a good textbook for a course on ecology in the industrialized world.

Kellogg, Scott and Stacy Pettigrew (2008) Toolbox for Sustainable City Living. Cambridge MA: South End Press.
 
Click here to buy this book: Toolbox for Sustainable City Living

This is a do-it-yourself guide for eco-lifestyles. It covers everything from mushroom cultivation to rainwater collection, home-made composting toilets and bioremediation. It’s a useful guide for people who want to go beyond recycling. This is not useful for organizations.

 Pink, Daniel (2009) Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. London, England: Riverhead Books.

The best part about this book: The message. “When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and business does. Our current business operating system—which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators—doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; 2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and 3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.” (p203-4) Given the values of Gen-Y and the increasing need for creativity, this is an important message. This is an important aspect of social sustainability.
 
The most discouraging thing about this book: The message. Geez Louise. Marsha and I were teaching this stuff, along with Self-Directed Teams in the 80’s and 90’s. Eric Trist and Tavistock, where socio-technical systems theory was born, was in the 60’s. Alfie Kohn’s work, Punished by Rewards, was released in 1993. Why does each generation of managers have to rediscover certain truths about human nature? Why is it so easy for the ‘system’ to revert to paternalistic, controlling paradigms?
 
The best idea to emulate: The structure of his book. The table of contents includes little quotations from the text as an advance organizer. Then after engaging and witty chapters, he provides a set of tools for different audiences (how to help yourself, how to do this at work, how to do it at school). And at the very end, he provides a summary chapter, including a Twitter-length summary, the cocktail party summary and then a chapter by chapter summary. Brilliant.
 

Edwards, Andrés (2010) Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a resilient society. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Finally a book that doesn’t waste chapters documenting the problems. This book pulls together a lot of the solutions already underway. Chapters include learning from our ancestors, going ‘glocal’, greening commerce, regenerative design, etc. The up-side is that this book pulls together a bunch of good initiatives; the down-side is that if you’ve been in the industry for a while, only dribs and drabs will be new to you.

The last chapter lays out his SPIRALS framework, a set of criteria for what he calls a ‘thriveable future’: scaleable, place-making, intergenerational, resilient, accessible, life-affirming, self-care.

Miller, Debra (ed) (2010) Conserving the Environment. New Haven, CT: Greenhaven Press.

This book is one of a series that lays out both sides of an issue, with authors presenting different points of view, which could make it a convenient teaching tool. This book covered climate change, biodiversity loss, and steps needed to protect the environment. That’s an odd assortment. You might assume that in the case of climate change, the debate would be between the doubters and the doomsayers. But that was not the case. Probably the most interesting insight for me was that the arguments against positions I might hold myself were less about questioning the need.

The authors, by and large, didn’t question the need to do something about climate change, for example. Their position was just that there was only so much money to go around and we shouldn’t forget other pressing issues like HIV/AIDS, malaria, etc. Mostly the issues were about clamoring for whose issue was the biggest, the one deserving the most attention. And to me, this was a symptom of the lack of systems thinking. Everything is connected, right? We have to solve all these problems. To me the issue is not money, it’s about will.

Margonelli, Lisa (2007) Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline. New York, NY: Doubleday.

The back cover of this book said it was humorous. After the horror in the Gulf of Mexico lately, I was all for a funny book about oil. Margonelli is a journalist with the descriptive capacity of Barbara Kingsolver. This book is really the back-story about how gas gets into your car. It’s a story most of us are blissfully ignorant of and dangerously incurious about.

Margonelli traces the supply chain backward from the gas station (yes, a whole chapter on the strange microcosm of our society) to the distributors (who live a gamblers existence, betting 24 hours a day on fuel prices and trying to get tankers to the gas stations before they run out.)

She goes to a refinery, but before she is let in, she gets training on all the safety warning signals, which ironically go off while she is there. She visits a drilling rig in Texas to discover people with nicknames like Midget, Worm and Lost & Found in a carefully orchestrated ballet, taking pipe in and out of the ground, fascinated with ancient geologic formations and the story they tell.

She is one of the rare individuals to get access to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve where she finds “Boy Scouts gone mad; they are always preparing to be prepared.” In her view the SPR is ineffective both for national security (it’s in the same Gulf area that likely will be hit by the same storms) and price control (where just the mere mention of increasing reserves sends panic waves through the markets.

Then she visits the trading floor, the NYMEX oil market with crude women and men in garish coats and ‘otter haircuts’ (you know, the slicked back wet look) who go berserk in the ‘crude pit’ where oil futures are traded.

And she visits where we get oil from: Venezuela, where the land around Maracaibo Lake is sinking as the oil is withdrawn, leaving the surrounding city with a dike to hold back the waters. She explores the odd dis-empowerment that comes with a petrostate and the forces encouraging them not to invest in improving their equipment.

She visits Chad and Iran and Nigeria where she uncovers the hidden costs of letting the oil companies manage our petro-diplomacy and the short-sighted missteps of our government, including in 1988  a nine-hour war the President Reagan unleashed on an oil platform to send a message to the Iran government but instead unleashing anger that is still harbored today.

She ends her world tour in China where she gets a nasty lung infection from the air pollution and meets people who feel they have got to have a car to be a respected part of society. While the central government is trying to radically improve fuel efficiency, they need the jobs a New Detroit could give them. They are investing heavily in new technologies (like the Aspire, part of the 863 Project) but at the same time, some cities like Guangzhou ‘have forbidden small cars from their streets on the grounds that they are beneath the dignity of a metropolis.

This book is sprinkled with factoids but is very readable. It provides important insights about this history and future of the petroleum industry and, not coincidentally, our future as well.

Paskal, Cleo (2010) Global Warring: How environmental, economic, and political crises will redraw the world map. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

No, that’s not a typo; it’s a play on words. Global Warring, not Warming. Think geo-politics meets climate change. Despite the book’s title, this is less about war and more about nation’s jockeying for position. Much of the book examines the positioning that is already underway to control the Arctic Sea once we’ve defrosted the last of the ice.

Paskal brings a historical perspective, drawing lessons from past fights over shipping lanes. You’d think in this modern age that ships would no longer be so strategic. For heavens sake, this isn’t the time of the British Empire. But in a globalized world, it is a lifeblood. She explains, “This expansion through importation is also what made most modern powers, which is why transportation routes are so critical.”

She also considers the impacts of rising sea levels to national security, mostly from the perspective of the US. For example, we may lose a vast portion of the Gulf Coast, from Houston to Mobile, in the next 50-100 years, (where ¼ of the oil and about 15% of the natural gas is produced and where a number of refineries are located). A storm surge less than that of Katrina also could flood a significant percentage of ports, interstates, railroads and even some airports.

The author reveals how much more strategic China is being, with their ‘nationalistic capitalism.’ A Chinese company, HPH, runs many of the ports and shipping choke points (including the Panama Canal.) As she puts it, “Countries in which national security policy makers don’t have control over energy supplies…are geopolitically more vulnerable than more politically integrated nations.” China is also seen by some as a better negotiation partner because their interests are clear and their policy is less likely to change than in the US where Congress changes its mind regularly.

She also examines the interests of many other nations. The arctic sea lanes are opening along Russia before Canada. India is considering requiring that all new infrastructure be ‘climate proofed. Europe may soon find dangerous heatwaves and every-other-year phenomenon.

This book will have you considering a whole new basket of issues to worry about. You better hope the policy wonks are reading this book.

Brune, Michael (2008) Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

The author is the executive director of Rainforest Action Network. Each chapter includes startling facts and recommended actions you can take personally (behavior and activism). But in the end, I couldn’t get through the book, even after renewing it at the library a couple times. Something else always seemed more appealing to read. After a while, my brain goes numb from facts and angry accusations. I recognize that there is an important role activists have but I’m not one of them. It doesn’t make sense to me to blame people. For example, in the book, Blume points out that the amount of money Citi and Bank of America will spend to invest in or finance renewables is a fraction of what they have invested in traditional energy. Um, well, have you checked the mutual funds in your 401-K recently? This is a societal problem and vilifying certain organizations seems counter-productive to me. I’ll admit that sometimes they need a shot across the bow but I don’t care to be the one with the cannon.

That said, this book is well researched so there are a lot of good factoids here that (in moderation) could spice up a presentation:

• Alberta tar sands oil: to get one barrel of oil, you dig up 4 tons; it has 3x the ghg’s of conventional oil.
• US subsidies for oil: $39 billion including guarding the Alaskan pipeline and Persian Gulf (2007)
• Transportation: US spend about 1 billion on Amtrak (2003) but China is spending $16-20 billion on passenger rail. The EU allocates about 20% of their transportation budget to this; US, 2%
• Coal: American Lung Association estimates that coal plants cause 550,000 asthma attacks, 38,000 heart attacks, 12,000 hospital admissions and 24,000 premature deaths.

For those of us in the US where we still don’t have an energy policy, it’s sobering to see the investments that China, Europe, Japan and even Mexico are putting into things like high-speed rail. However, since the book was published in 2008, many of the factoids are now several years old.

Zandt, Deanna (2010) Share This! How you will change the world with social networking.  San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

The premise of this book is that social networking can be a force for democratizing our world, for social justice, for the little guy to be heard. The author talks both about the potential and the dark side. It made me think differently about technologies like Facebook and Twitter, which I have mostly associated with narcissistic, self-absorbed, multi-tasking-distracted youth. But the author shares her personal experiences with having a discussion on race broaden her view. There’s an instance when a glitch in Amazon’s system basically took a bunch of books off the market and the tweeters made enough of a ruckus, that the problem was quickly identified and corrected.

There are a couple how-to chapters but it assumes you’re at least somewhat conversant in the technology. She covers more about netiquette like how to be viewed as authentic and not self-serving.

The book shared some interesting statistics and perspective on them. Internet access is still a social justice issue in that 63% of American households have broadband but only 46% of African-American households do. There are gender differences too. Men are twice as likely to follow men on Twitter than women and 80% of Wikipedia contributors are male. The author cautions that we risk letting men alone write our history. The author encourages us to follow a diverse group of people so we don’t set up our own worldview echo chamber.

Lehrer, Jonah (2009) How We Decide. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Lehrer uses stories about quarterbacks, Navy radar operators, professional gamblers, managers at IKEA and airline pilots to set up the discussions about what we are learning from brain science around decision making. I found the stories too long and involved when what I wanted was the insights. Some of the points of this book in a nutshell:

• Many decisions are made subconsciously and then we justify them (eg moral decisions)
• Buying behavior is an argument between the part of your brain flooded with dopamine in the expectation of a reward and the prefrontal cortex which evaluates price. Scientists can view the intensity of these opposing forces and know before you do if you are going to buy.
• The subconscious/emotional brain can be more effective at arriving at a good decision (after looking at the facts) for complex decisions you care a lot about (e.g., getting married, choosing a new sofa, changing jobs, or deciding on vacation). Distract yourself for a bit and then don’t be afraid to let your emotions decide.
• You must guard against ‘certainty’ which makes you ignore potentially important information that doesn’t fit with your current view of the situation.
• Regarding sustainability, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that morality is wired into our brain. Unless an individual has a mental defect, we share a moral code. Our subconscious makes a decision that something is ‘wrong’ and then we justify it. This is, of course, blasphemous for religions and those who think that the world would run amok without the Ten Commandments (or other codifications of this innate moral code). “Moral emotions existed long before Moses.” Even other primates can understand a personal moral violation as ‘me hurts you.’
• The bad news is that we are really good at ignoring information that doesn’t fit our view of things. Drew Westin, a psychologist at Emory, exposed voters to the inconsistencies of their candidates. Voters found the inconsistencies of their own candidate much less worrisome than those of the other political party. Brain imaging shows that these people were using their prefrontal cortex to preserve their partisan certainty. Then, once they’d arrived at favorable interpretations, they got a rush of positive emotion. “Self-delusion, in other worse, felt really good.” We are all ‘rationalizers.’