ZebraBear

Revelatory

Reviewed: 06-01-22

A couple of years ago, I started to understand what I think I first heard Derrick Jensen say in an interview a long time ago. Something about how to live sustainably, or in balance or reciprocity with the environment, we have to start with the land.

I think I first started to figure out what this meant after reading Dick Manning's Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, And Promise Of The American Prairie, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization and James Scott's book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

The most profound realization I got from these books is that human beings can't eat grass, but, unfortunately, grass is pretty much all that grows naturally in the arid plains of the Midwest and the rest of the bread baskets of the world. Industrial agriculture is only able to squeeze corn, wheat, and soybeans out of these lands because farmers pour huge amounts of fossil fuel based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on these cash crops. Also, irrigation. And, government subsidies. This makes ridiculous, at least in my mind, any claim that vegan, and even just all-plant based diets, are a viable long-term solution to food shortages around the planet given the current global population. There's nothing vegan about industrial monocrop dead-zone agriculture.

Anyway, this book is an amazing companion to the aforementioned Manning titles and really drives home the Jensen point about everything starts with the land, i.e. the soil.

I learned so much from this book, but perhaps the most remarkable piece came in Montgomery's analysis of the American Civil War in which he argues that erosion of southern plantation soils, and thus their drop in productivity, was a contributing factor that lead to the war. This was mind blowing to me.

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Revelatory

Reviewed: 06-01-22

A couple of years ago, I started to understand what I think I first heard Derrick Jensen say in an interview a long time ago. Something about how to live sustainably, or in balance or reciprocity with the environment, we have to start with the land.

I think I first started to figure out what this meant after reading Dick Manning's Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, And Promise Of The American Prairie, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization and James Scott's book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

The most profound realization I got from these books is that human beings can't eat grass, but, unfortunately, grass is pretty much all that grows naturally in the arid plains of the Midwest and the rest of the bread baskets of the world. Industrial agriculture is only able to squeeze corn, wheat, and soybeans out of these lands because farmers pour huge amounts of fossil fuel based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on these cash crops. Also, irrigation. And, government subsidies. This makes ridiculous, at least in my mind, any claim that vegan, and even just all-plant based diets, are a viable long-term solution to food shortages around the planet given the current global population. There's nothing vegan about industrial monocrop dead-zone agriculture.

Anyway, this book is an amazing companion to the aforementioned Manning titles and really drives home the Jensen point about everything starts with the land, i.e. the soil.

I learned so much from this book, but perhaps the most remarkable piece came in Montgomery's analysis of the American Civil War in which he argues that erosion of southern plantation soils, and thus their drop in productivity, was a contributing factor that lead to the war. This was mind blowing to me.

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Secret Lives of Pigments?

Reviewed: 05-26-22

Fun book that surprised me in that it's actually about the pigments and the history of the pigments, how they were discovered, who discovered them, how they were made, and used, exchanged, how the colors went in and out of style, both in fashion and in art and décor. Really, this book ought to be called The Secret Lives of Pigments!

Also, St. Clair is a fantastic narrator.

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A Real Mix of Emotions

Reviewed: 05-25-22

Impressive and alarming research. A mix of emotions for sure. Anyone who's paying attention shouldn't be surprised that pollution and chemicals in our environment do us and other lifeforms significant harm. It should also not be surprising to learn that most aren't paying attention and that those with the power to advance positive change ignore these problems for a number of reasons: greed, laziness, power.

As someone who, with his partner, has decided not to have children, I definitely felt some, only slightly self-conscious, schadenfreude reading this book; accompanied by the weak hum of the usual terror that comes with most things one reads today; and frustration, because Swan, towards the last third of the book, ends up parroting the same bullshit we keep hearing about economic growth and aging or shrinking populations. As if capitalism is some natural law like gravity. It's the same old joke: it's easier to imagine the end of the world, in this case, the extinction of the human race, than the end of capitalism. The only people I hear today who actually think we need more people on the planet and not less, are religious zealots and economists. Swan doesn't even acknowledge, she hardly even mentions, the potential ecological benefits of fewer human beings on this planet. Benefits not only to Homo sapiens, but all other non-human lifeforms on this planet!

If you're someone like me, who believes modern industrial civilization has overshot its carrying capacity, then you'll probably find it hard to express exactly how you feel about this book.

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1 person found this helpful

Bruce Mann Sounds Mad at Me For Some Reason

Reviewed: 01-29-21

As if West's book wasn't hard enough to listen to and follow along with already, cause it's all over the place and he basically just tells you a little bit about a bunch of different stuff instead of a bunch of interesting stuff about a few important things, Mann's narration is way over the top! He sounds like he's angry at me the whole time he's reading. Mann, what did I ever do to you?!

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One of the Best

Reviewed: 10-25-20

One of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to. Didn't know much about the field of chaos before this book, and what I thought I knew was either a gross oversimplification or completely wrong. As a visual artist, especially an abstract painter like myself, I found an array of parallels in the observations these early scientists were studying and the phenomena in nature that informs my own work. Rob Shapiro is one of my favorite narrators. Aided by Gleick's nibble prose, Shapiro's reading sounds sometimes like a conversation I'd have with a friend at a bar. A all around great book on a fascinating subject. I highly recommend it to anyone.

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Life Began As a Porous Rock

Reviewed: 10-06-20

Nick Lane has become one of my favorite science writers. Graeme Malcolm is a fantastic narrator.

Here's a bit from my favorite passage:

"Life must have evolved a surprising degree of sophistication in its rocky hatchery. This paints an extraordinary portrait of the last common ancestor of all life on earth. If [William] Martin and [Michael] Russell are right, and I think they are, she was not a free living cell, but a rocky labyrinth of mineral cells lined with catalytic walls composed of iron, sulfur, and nickel, and energized by natural proton gradients. The first life was a porous rock that generated complex molecules and energy right up to the formation of proteins and DNA itself."

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A Story About Pretty Much Everything

Reviewed: 09-09-20

Super interesting book that covers the formation of the earth, the beginning of life on our planet, evolution, genetics, health, lifestyle, diet, etc. Lot's of new information to me like:

1. LUCA, the last universal common ancestor or last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA), is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent, the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth.

2. The Great Oxidation Even or Catastrophe might not have been a catastrophe at all. Meaning, a surplus of oxygen in the atmosphere after the invention of photosynthesis might not have caused a mass extinction as has been widely speculated.

3. Photosynthesis evolved only once.

4. Were it not for the invention of photosynthesis, which created a surplus of oxygen in the atmosphere, which in turn helped to create an ozone layer, Earth would have lost it's liquid oceans to evaporation as happened to the liquid oceans on Mars and Venus. This also points to the fact that if life ever existed on Mars and Venus, it certainly never evolved the ability to photosynthesis.

5. Mitochondria, by taking up residence, or more likely, seeking refuge inside a the cell membrane, might have found a way to perpetuate the conditions of a low-oxygen environment from which it originally evolved as a bacteria billions of years ago! Whoa!

Finally, I listed to the audio book which was read by Nigel Patterson. Patterson might be my favorite narrator. I could listen to him read just about anything.

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20 people found this helpful

Read It the Old Fashioned Way

Reviewed: 08-12-20

Lot's of data points and good information. Will probably be nothing surprising to the choir this book was intended for, but without a doubt the most striking thing for me about this audio book is, contrary to how I typically feel about authors reading their own work, is how much I couldn't stand hearing Wallace-Wells read. On top of his voice, his writing style is self-consciously academic. His tone or timbre or something about his voice, gives the impression that he's a 23 year old undergraduate. Like he's reading aloud from his final report, or at his worst, at a poetry slam. I tried to look past the surface and his stylization. And there's way too many instances where Wallace-Wells says one thing and then adds, "that is to say..." or, "i.e.," or, "to put it another way." His editor should have stepped in and saved his readers the repetition. Say what you mean the first time!

The best part about this book for me was learning about the writers Timothy Morton, Robinson Jeffers, Paul Kingsnorth, and the Dark Mountain Project. Ironically, some of these are folks whose philosophy and general attitude Wallace-Wells tells his readers to avoid.

Definitely wish I had skipped the audio book edition and read this the old fashioned way.

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1 person found this helpful

Talk About Deep Time!

Reviewed: 08-12-20

Favorite parts of this book include:

1. The part about abiogenesis and biogenisis and Hazen's theory that Earth's impressive array of mineral diversity is due to the life that it's supported for the past 3.5 billion years.
2. The part about the Great Oxidation Event/Catastrophe.
3. The part about how the moon was formed and how its orbit around Earth used to be much, much closer.

I listened to this audiobook while I was reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us and watching the NOVA series, The Making of North America. A great triad for learning about geology and deep time and contemplating deep futures.

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2 people found this helpful