Here are some reviews of some books on two environmental visionaries, an article about a world-famous campaigner against the looming specter of climate change, and a lucid, comprehensive and deep report on managing solid and hazardous wastes.
In The Ecstasy of John Muir, Robert Pogue Harrison reviews an apparently magisterial biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster. (You have to have the print edition [imagine!], or an electronic subscription, or pay $3 to read this.) Harrison praises the book and eulogizes the man. I’m an old Sierra Club activist and so share a very high regard for Muir from way back. Harrison centers much of his review on Muir’s anti-materialist ethic, his affinity for nature. Looking at our world today, Harrison asks: “What human civilization must do to survive materially is a question that is bound to engage us in the decades to come, yet alongside it there are other questions, easily brushed aside, that are no less paramount in import. Will a greener technology transform our relation to nature? Will a more sustainable economy merely provide a more sustainable basis for our consumerist sloth? Does nature make any spiritual demands on us, or is it purely the supplier in a supply-demand relationship?” (Is nature a mere provider of “ecosystem services?”) For some more on this theme, see Galloping Consumption from the blog about a year back.
The FT’s Fiona Harvey, who I cite and laud often, as I did in the last post below, has reviews here of a book by James Lovelock and one about him. I consider Lovelock a hugely less important visionary than Muir, but important nevertheless in his contemporaneity with the global environmental crisis. He has been talking about what’s happening now. His Gaia hypothesis, as Harvey points out, presaged the study of “… earth systems sciences, a new discipline that seeks to understand how the natural processes of the earth interact with one another.” He is also a prophet of climate change doom, and wholeheartedly embraces nuclear power, and these are both points with which I, among a good many others, take vigorous exception.
Another environmental warrior, Tim Flannery, is profiled here at the “FT” this weekend. His book, The Weather Makers, came out just before “An Inconvenient Truth.” Flannery, universally recognized as an important contributor to the message of concern regarding warming, says “People like myself, with a perhaps more in-depth view, may have influenced specific people but for the mass movement, I think it was really Gore.”
Finally, I touched on waste management in the last post below. Here is an excellent look at the subject from “The Economist.” Great reading, well worth your time.
