Excellent natural history and more optimistic than usual.
A passionate argument for protecting the world’s rapidly shrinking wilderness.
A century ago, 15% of the Earth’s surface was farm or pasture; today, it’s 77%. Many experts maintain that this loss of natural land as well as the “sixth extinction” and all the effects of climate change have passed the point of no return. Former New Yorker staff writer Hiss disagrees, and he describes a campaign to protect 50% of the world’s land, a plan that may strike many as absurd—until they read his cogent argument. Three great forested areas—Siberia, the Amazon, and the North American Boreal (in Canada and Alaska)—make up most of the world’s wilderness. “Siberia is 60 percent cut over,” writes the author, “and so is more than 20 percent of the Amazon, where the rate of deforestation is spiking.” The Boreal, however, is 85% intact. Since human activities account for less than 40% of our continent, and 15% is already protected, the author’s plan is feasible. Readers accustomed to a litany of doom will discover a modest amount of good news. Many well-financed environmental organizations are working toward the 50% goal, and, unlike the case with reducing global warming, governments tend to be amenable. The best scenarios have occurred in Canada and Australia, which have returned large amounts of land to previously displaced Native populations. The U.S. government is unlikely to buy into the entire plan, but a combination of activists, naturalists, and a few billionaires are making progress. Hiss illustrates his thought-provoking arguments with a handful of North American projects, including a major expansion of the Appalachian Trail, rejuvenation of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, restoration of the vast pine forests in the Southeast, and conversion of Yellowstone into a Greater Yellowstone protected area, essential to preserve its diminishing species. With its combination of passion, inspiration, and rigor, this makes a good companion to Bill Gates’ How To Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Excellent natural history and more optimistic than usual.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65481-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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