The World in 2050

The World in 2050, Laurence C. Smith

This book is written by a professor at UCLA – the same college as Jared Diamond who has written the classics – Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.  Taking up the need to analyze the civilizations of the world and the reaction of culture, economics, geography, and environment like Diamond, Smith chooses to look forward instead of backward and tries to project a possible future – one that is within the range of many of the potential readers.

His projections are based on four criteria:

·       Demography – both change in population numbers and population distribution

·       Demand upon our natural resources, services, and gene pool of the planet

·       Globalization of the economy, as well as, political and cultural ideas

·       Climate change

He then makes us accept that for the projections we must anticipate that the models are correct, that these four issues will continue on the path that they are currently on, and a few other basic assumptions that are necessary to limit the possible scenarios this book might find.

This book also does not engage in the pseudo-science debate about climate change, it is a fact and science and facts, not politics and religion are the basis for his writing.

"From Spittlebugs in California to butterflies in Spain and treees in New Zealand, it is a broad pattern that biologists are discovering. By 2003 a global inventory of this penomenon found that on average, plants and animals are shifting their ranges about six kilometers towards then poles and six meters higher in elevation every decade."

That is equivalent to having your lawn move north 5 1/2 feet a day or your birthday coming 10 hours earlier each year.

Population is not judged good or bad, the growth of population and the leveling of population in various parts of the planet are accepted statistics:

“For the last two decades, cities in the developing world have been growing by about three million people per week.  That is equivalent to adding one more Seattle to the planet every day.”

“The modern city survives upon constant resupply from the outer natural world, from faraway fields, forests, mines, streams, and wells.  We scour the planet for hydrocarbons and deliver them to power plants to zap electricity over miles of metal wire.  We take water from flowing rivers with distant headwaters of snow and ice.  Plants and animals are grown someplace else, killed, and delivered for us to eat. Without this constant flow of nature pouring into our cities, we would all have to disperse or die.”

The limit of natural resources is analyzed, along with the new opportunities that ice free Arctic Ocean and a warmed northern region represent.

“After the US oil peaked in 1970 at 10 million barrels per day. “American oil comp”anies launched an epic search to find new domestic reserves.  Within ten years the United States was drilling four times as many wells as during the peak, but its production still dropped anyway to 8.5 million barrels per day and falling.  By December 2009 it was down to just 5.3 million barrels per day.  So much for ‘drill baby drill’ as the solution for energy supply problems.”

"Tar sands are an environmentalist's nightmare. The extraction process gobbles enormous quantities of energy and water. Migratory birds land in the tailing ponds and die. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates are released into the air alongside up to three times more greenhouse gas than released by conventional oil drilling. Depending on the technology, it takes 2 - 4 cubic meters of water, and 125 - 214 cubic meters of natural gas to produce a single cubic meter of synthetic oil."

"The tar sands are one of the biggest reasons why Canada not only failed to meet her pledged reduction in carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto Protocol (to -6% below 1990 levels), but actually grew them +27% instead."

He has plenty of personal travel and research as he projects his ideas to 2050.  He admits that regional wars, regional economic agreements can change the outlook and that there will be a disparity in the benefit and damage of the climate change.  While islands will disappear and some places will become deserts his research says that from 45 degrees north upward there will actually be an increase in water resources – more rain, more thawing and thus more disparity between the water haves and have nots.  He sees the nations bordering the Arctic having a potential boom and interestingly in Canada where there has been the creation of native run subdivisions of the tundra created as political entities over the last few decades, those indigenous people could be winners, if there cities and homes do not disappear into the thawing permafrost. 

It is a chaotic projection and one to fear, even for those potential winners.  As I write this review today I have just read a NYT article on the research related to the permafrost and the release of more greenhouse gases:

“Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.

“A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

“Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.”

Another Man’s Moccasins, Craig Johnson

 A Vietnamese woman is killed in Wyoming.  Sheriff Longmire must solve her murder and relive in his mind the death of a Vietnamese woman when he was serving in the war.   Sheriff Longmire is the series star and is tough, has lost his wife, has a daughter recovering from injuries, and is surrounded by a cast of characters – Indian, Mexican… He has a female deputy trying to seduce him, a giant Indian found living in a culvert under the freeway that manhandled him and two of his group, and a selection of possible murderers for a Vietnamese woman who was killed and dumped on the freeway. 

He has to sort out his Vietnamese past and the war that he struggles to get past, and he has the job of being the super cop of the lonely landscape of Hole in the Wall and other lonely locations in his jurisdiction that centers on Sheridan. 

There is some good dialogue and some good action.  Like the last two books the lead character has a personal relationship to the case – I do not know if this is a trend or just a coincidence.  Most characters are clichés and at least for me only the sheriff has a developed personality.  It is the fourth book in the series so I might have missed something in the first three stories.

Bad Bird Chris Knopf

An entertaining book.  Lightweight like so many mysteries: the characters are interesting and developed well.  I am a little tired of the family connection aspect of the mysteries since this is the second of three in a row where the author has needed to have the hero have a personal connection to the crime.  The female lead is an attorney, but has an attitude that is slightly edgier than the Kinsey Milhone character of Sue Grafton.  The problem is that I am still trying to figure out the reason for the toss of a camera to the heroine that begins the book – it makes the story, but I am not sure it stands up.

The book has a good number of errant leads and give and take conversations. 

Jackie Swaitkowski investigates the death of a female pilot who had a family tree filled with ex-cons and a passenger list packed with Hamptons high society. Just before Eugenie Conklin's plane took a nosedive, she tossed out a camera case that held an unusual set of photos. While defending Eugenie's husband during the accident investigation, Jackie realizes that she recognizes more than a few of the faces in those pictures. They may be able to prove her client's innocence, but Jackie soon learns that to find the answer to Eugenie's death will mean uncovering a mystery from her own family's past as well. (audible.com)

Zoo Story Thomas French

What a well written and complex story.  It raises many questions that need to be reflected on for the future.  The zoos started out as terrible places in human history, torture facilities for animals that actually contributed to the destruction of wildlife. But the shift in ecological perspective in the 60’s has also shifted the zoos into the arks for endangered and disappearing life.

Here is a story of a conflicting needs:  How to help the animals, how to raise the money;  The sense of being overworked by the staff; the need to grow and get publicity to maintain the facility that is the concern of the director.  It gives great insight in to the competing demands and the social fabric of the zoo staff which is stressed throughout what should have been a time of great success.  Our non-profits are in a constant tension to do their mission and to survive in economic difficulties.  The conflicts within the zoo is a classic clash of styles and job descriptions.  But the problem with seeking dollars there is a fuzzy line that separates promotion, self-promotion, and profit taking from the mission of a non-profit.  Some very questionable decisions were made by the people in charge.

The stories are also a part of a growing dialogue that demonstrates the intelligence and the individual emotions and personality of the animals.  It brings the reader to an important point of thinking about the animals as species with rights and needs and much more than exhibits and entertainment.

There is no easy answer to the future role of zoos, but we have come to understand that they have a much more important need to fulfill now than they ever had:  Deforestation, ozone, climate change, and a burgeoning human population threatening all life forms.  It is also an expose of a non-profits and the ease by which the board made questionable and dangerous decisions. 

The animals, the people and the stories are all well told.  Kate worked at a Zoo, I do not have any reference so I cannot say whether this is a typical zoo and zoo story or not.

Welcome to the savage and surprising world of Zoo Story, an unprecedented account of the secret life of a zoo and its inhabitants, both animal and human. Based on six years of research, the book follows a handful of unforgettable characters at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo: an alpha chimp with a weakness for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in Obsession perfume, and a brilliant but tyrannical CEO known as El Diablo Blanco.Zoo Story crackles with issues of global urgency: the shadow of extinction, humanity's role in the destruction or survival of other species. More than anything else, though, it's a dramatic and moving true story of seduction and betrayal, exile and loss, and the limits of freedom on an overcrowded planet - all framed inside one zoo reinventing itself for the 21st century.Thomas French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, chronicles the action with vivid power: Wild elephants soaring above the Atlantic on their way to captivity. Predators circling each other in a lethal mating dance. Primates plotting the overthrow of their king. The sweeping narrative takes the listener from the African savannah to the forests of Panama and deep into the inner workings of a place some describe as a sanctuary and others condemn as a prison.All of it comes to life in the book's four-legged characters. Zoo Story shows us how these remarkable individuals live, how some die, and what their experiences reveal about the human desire to both exalt and control nature.

Late Night on the Air, Elizabeth Hay

This Canadian novel is one I picked up on our walk around Lake Superior.  It is about a radio station in far off Yellowknife where the air ways play to the tundra and the scattered populations of white and native.  It is a place where voices become attached to a complex group of people who are far from the fame of media and pulled together around the need to broadcast.

They are a diverse group, each journey is independent, and their stories interact with one another, yet each character is richly written to avoid the normal clichés.  There is the changing darkness to light and brief summer to winter, and modern pressures on ancient communities (a pipeline). 

Each person filters the place through their personal life story and they are all transients who can only touch on the truth of Yellowknife.  There is the lure of the arctic explorer as the characters are drawn in to the true life story of a group that died trying to overwinter away from civilization and there is the canoe trip that bares their emotions and their minds in a raw and beautiful nature.

FROM ELIZABETH HAYS WEBSITE
About the book

Harry Boyd, a world-weary, washed-up television broadcaster, has returned to a small radio station in the remote reaches of the Canadian North. There, in the golden summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real Dido Paris is even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric and fascinating characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, are at the heart of the novel.

Then one summer, four of them embark upon a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and almost continuous light. In that wild and dynamic arctic setting (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who starved to death in the Barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by a proposed gas pipeline that threatens to displace Native people from their land.

Emily Carr, Lewis DeSoto

Emily Carr is a significant artist of the NW she captured the art and story of the totem pole unlike any other artist.  Recognized as one of the most significant artists in Canada her story is told in an interesting way by DeSoto without any effort to probe and personalize the information.  He does undo some of the mythological stories that are bound to build up around an artist who was unmarried all her life and had numerous animals as constant companions.

He major works on the forests of British Columbia are where her fame can be found today, but not in her life.  It was her books that finally got her national attention and she became known as Klee Wyck as a result – a friend and associate of the NW Indians.  In fact, her record of the Indians and the Totems is essential, but her relationship to them is overrated.  Eccentricity does boil out even though DeSoto does his best to control it.

The following four paragraphs from the Epitaph chapter is an excellent summary of both Emily and the book: 

“Emily Carr’s life reads as one of these quest stories.  The naïve young girl leaves home with only one ambition, to be an artist, but she does not yet understand the true meaning of art.  She completes one task, to study in San Francisco, but finds it is not enough, and sets off again, this time for England.  There she encounters prejudice, loneliness, and isolation.  She must also sacrifice the hope of love.   A setback comes in the form of illness that temporarily ends her quest.  Once recovered, she journeys to France, and finds success when she develops a new painting style and has two of her pictures shown at the Salon.  But the success brings no immediate benefit.  The goal has not yet been achieved.

“Then the journey takes her into the deep forest, where she encounters a world that is different and mysterious.  She begins to develop as an artist, yet the world turns away from what she offers.  She gives up the fight, having sacrificed personal happiness and her youth for an unattainable goal.  The years of retreat follow.

“The benevolent helper appears in the form of Lawren Harris [one of the Group of Seven who are trying to establish a Canadian style of painting].  Like the wizards of old, he gives her the key, by indicating where the path might lie.  Once more, she journeys into the forest.  She think she has found her goal at last, in the totem pole paintings, which now bring her recognition and acceptance.  But the totem poles are only signposts.  She goes beyond them, into the true mystery, and it is there [in the trees and forest], in her spiritual transformation, that the journey reaches its conclusion.

“At the end, Emily has become a wizard herself, and her magic- in the form of paintings and books-spread outward to touch lives everywhere.  The apotheosis comes only after her death, when she is elevated into a kind of myth herself, and what was a solitary journey by one woman becomes a story for all.”

A view from the Wolf's Eye, Carolyn Peterson

This small book is Candy Peterson’s memoir.  For forty years she has accompanied her husband Rolf Peterson to Isle Royale, the magnificent rugged and wilderness island complex in Lake Superior that is one of our least visited and most natural National Parks. 

Through those forty years she has gone from supportive wife, to research assistant, to young wilderness mother, back to research, and finally as an equal partner in island life.  Candy shares insights about the wolves, stories of living in the old fishing shack with mice underneath, a gartersnake falling on her shoulders as she left the house and wind blowing behind the boards.

It is a story of simple living, adapting to the wilderness as observers and recorders who were careful not to have an impact on the land and animals they studied. You learn about their social life and the simple isolation that comes without the accoutrements of today’s urban lifestyle.

Through all of this I get the feeling of a great solo adventure and solos in the outdoor education community were always a means of self-discovery.  There is loneliness in some of the passages and a quest to find a spiritual base through Candy’s philosophical and religious musings.  The book is very personal.

The Lobster Chronicles, Linda Greenlaw

This is the second book by Linda Greenlaw, an islander and fisherman from Maine.  One of the few female lobster fisherman (her first book covered her time catching swordfish).  There is a lot of information about Lobster fishing and particularly the frustrations inherent in the challenge of small boat operations versus factory boats, changing climate conditions, and the dangers of the sea. 

This is a chronicle of her fifth year after lobsters, but the key to the book is the subtitle: Life on a very Small Island.  Here are stories of the characters that inhabit the back side of the island that holds Acadia National Park.  It is an isolated life with a diminishing population that sees the school numbers tumbling and nearing extinction.  This is a frustration that runs through the book as the author would like to have children, but in the isolation of her existence cannot even find a boyfriend (maybe someday). 

She fishes with her father, anguishes over her mother’s illness, devotes two pages to the postmistress who has engaged in the epitome of conversation – Hi.  We learn about Rita and the quirks that make people hide so that she does not see them through the windows of their home; and the various ways they try to avoid being in contact with this strange woman who seems to possess mysterious social powers.  There are the two brothers who moved to the island as handymen, but create most of their own work by the mistakes that they inevitably make.  There are conflicts with the mainlanders, territorial squabbles about fishing territory, and the threats of shipwreck and death at sea.

It is a satisfying book that feels like an exercise in spying on a small community and absorbing the stories of their existence.

Four for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving week was a strange holiday for me this year.  Hip replacement on Tuesday and then a stay in the hospital over the holiday gave me time to finish off some books between drugs and PT.  Here are some short summaries of those books.

I listened to This House of Sky by Ivan Doig on Audio Book and loved it.  Doig has both the experience and the language to bring live in the sagebrush plains to life.  He lost his mother early in life and moved around to a variety of places sharing their home with another wife that did not work out and his grandmother.

His dad frequented the bars too often, life was rough and rewards were few, yet you see the richness that Ivan was able to derive from life whether his dad was working cattle or sheep. 

The story is timeless and might be as true today as it would have been in the late 1800's.  Not a cowboy story, not a true pionee story, but an example of people making do with both life and location.

Live Wire by Harold Coben
Myron, the sports agent, is drawn in to intrigue by two tennis clients in a spiral that reaches the mob, rock music, drugs, murder, extortion, and ultimately, Myron's family.  It is a story that involves his normal cast of characters (who are anything but normal) - his partners a formal professional wrestling woman and a very rich partner with connections and a skill for violence.

The book is longer than necessary and I found myself drifting at times despite the thriller aspects of the book.  Myron is an interesting character to build a series around and his role as an agent connects him with fields that differ from the usual PI.

There is humor and exageration that sets a light tone even if the topics are heavy.

Brimstone, Robert Parker
I really enjoy the western series that Parker has developed.  These are the same characters as you find in Apaloosa and they are excellent personalities to play against the amoral west.

Cole and Everette make an interesting team that mixes education and violence with a black and white sense of right and wrong which basically translates to the fact that they are hired as the peace officers so what they say is right and anything in conflict with that is wrong.

The towns are filled with bold personalities - in this case a preacher and a bar owner - as well as secondary characters - their whore friend, an old Indian warrior, and a Mexican/Indian deputy.

The showdown is inevitable, it is just a matter of how long the author wants to let the interaction play out.  Simple western motif that will please any old west reader.

Muir Among the Animals, Mighetto
A 1986 collection of essays from Muirs writing that center on animals that he encounters.  Some of the essays are less compeling because they are historic and you have to remember that there are no field guides, no photographs, and very little awareness of what he is seeing among the readers who bought his work - primarily on the East Coast.

We learn about his dislike for sheep - hoofed locusts, his first nearly fatal attack at trying to get a bears attention by charging the bear, the role of bees in the mountain meadows, his adventure in Alaska with the dog Stickeen, and a variety of vignettes that honor the animals.

Other than sheep he writes with respect and lack of judgment.  Predators fare as well as the birds.  He sees the beauty that animals contribute and he specialized in becoming part of the land he was in and just observing their actions. 

It is the acceptance and respect of other species that is the theme of the book.  It is a good appeal for a higher moral value that does not place humans first in every equation.