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Blue Revolution
Unmaking America's Water Crisis
by Cynthia
Barnett
Americans see water as
abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for
less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture
in the world, much to quench what’s now our largest crop—the lawn.
Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to
our taps, irrigates our food, and produces our electricity. And most
don’t realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble.
Blue Revolution exposes the truth about the water crisis—driven not
as much by lawn sprinklers as by a tradition that has encouraged
everyone, from homeowners to farmers to utilities, to tap more and
more. But the book also offers much reason for hope. Award-winning
journalist Cynthia Barnett argues that the best solution is also the
simplest and least expensive: a water ethic for America. Just as the
green movement helped build awareness about energy and
sustainability, so a blue movement will reconnect Americans to their
water, helping us value and conserve our most life-giving resource.
Avoiding past mistakes, living within our water means, and turning
to “local water” as we do local foods are all part of this new, blue
revolution.
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Break Through
From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of
Possibility
by Michael Shellenberger; Ted Nordhaus
Amazon.com Review
In the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy
with their essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it they argued
that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with
global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept
up. Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new
can be born. Now, three years later, Break Through delivers
on the authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new
century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints, human
possibility, not limits.
If environmentalists
and progressives are to seize the moment offered by the collapse of
the Bush presidency, they must break from the politics of limits,
and grapple with some inconvenient truths of their own. The old
pollution and conservation paradigms have failed. The nations that
ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their greenhouse gas emissions
go up, not down. And tropical rain forest deforestation has
accelerated.
What the new ecological
crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it.
Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a
new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy
economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet
and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the
European Union--those breakthroughs were only made possible by big
and bold investments in the future.
The era of small
thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore
environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics
focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.
Break Through
offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more than casual
consideration. With its challenge to conventional environmentalist,
conservative, and progressive thought, and its proposal for a
politics of possibility, Break Through will influence the
political debate for years to come.
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Climate Solutions Consensus, The
What We Know And What
To Do About It
By
National Council for Science and the Environment (Author),
David Blockstein (Editor),
Leo Wiegman (Editor)
Climate Solutions
Consensus presents an agenda for
America. It is the first major
consensus statement by the
nation’s leading scientists, and
it provides specific
recommendations for federal
policies, for state and local
governments, for businesses, and
for colleges and universities
that are preparing future
generations who will be dealing
with a radically changed
climate. The book draws upon the
recommendations developed by
more than 1200 scientists,
educators and decision makers
who participated in the National
Council for Science and the
Environment’s 8th National
Conference on Science, Policy
and the Environment.
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Dire Predictions
Understanding Global
Warming
by
Michael E. Mann, Lee R. Kump
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been
issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly
two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted
for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable
to the general public who may still question the validity of climate
change.
Esteemed climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, have
partnered with DK Publishing to present Dire Predictions-an
important book in this time of global need. Dire Predictions
presents the information documented by the IPCC in an illustrated,
visually-stunning, and undeniably powerful way to the lay reader.
The scientific findings that provide validity to the implications of
climate change are presented in clear-cut graphic elements, striking
images, and understandable analogies. |
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Flower Confidential
The Good, the Bad, and
the Beautiful
by Amy Stewart
From Publishers
Weekly
Stewart, an avid gardener and winner of the 2005 California
Horticultural Society's Writer's Award for her book The Earth
Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, now tackles
the global flower industry. Her investigations take her from an
eccentric lily breeder to an Australian business with the alchemical
mission of creating a blue rose. She visits a romantically
anachronistic violet grower, the largest remaining California grower
of cut flowers and a Dutch breeder employing high-tech methods to
develop flowers in equatorial countries where wages are low. Stewart
follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown
to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge,
stock –exchange–like Dutch flower auction. These present-day
adventures are interspersed with fascinating histories of the
various aspects of flower culture, propagation and commerce.
Stewart's floral romanticism—she admits early on that she's "always
had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers"—survives the
potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz, though her
passion only falters a few times, as when she witnesses roses being
dipped in fungicide in preparation for export. By the end, this book
is as lush as the flowers it describes. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.
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Four
Fish
The Future
Of The Last Wild Food
by
Paul Greenberg
(Author)
From Publishers Weekly
In this unusually entertaining and nuanced investigation into
global fisheries, New York Times seafood writer Greenberg
examines our historical relationship with wild fish. In the
early 2000s, Greenberg, reviving his childhood fishing habit,
discovered that four fish--salmon, tuna, bass, and
cod--"dominate the modern seafood market" and that "each is an
archive of a particular, epochal shift": e.g., cod, fished
farther offshore, "herald the era of industrial fishing"; and
tuna, "the stateless fish, difficult to regulate and subject to
the last great gold rush of wild food... challeng us to
reevaluate whether fish are at their root expendable seafood or
wildlife desperately in need of our compassion." He found that
as wild fisheries are overexploited, prospective fish farmers
are likely to ignore practical criteria for
domestication--hardiness, freely breeding, and needing minimal
care--instead picking traditionally eaten wild-caught species
like sea bass "a failure in every category." Greenberg contends
that ocean life is essential to feeding a growing human
population and that rational humans should seek to sustainably
farm fish that can "stand up to industrial-sized husbandry"
while maintaining functioning wild food systems.
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View
from Lazy Point, The
A Natural Year in an
Unnatural World
by
Carl Safina
From Publishers Weekly
The environment's glass is half-full for lyrical conservationist
Safina (Song for the Blue Ocean)--even though coral reefs are
suffocating under seaweed as parrotfish, which normally consume it,
are netted to near extinction; penguins are finding less food to
forage for as the Antarctic Ocean's winter sea ice melts earlier and
freezes later, reducing the krill they can feed on; and migrating
shorebirds are starving because horseshoe crabs have been overhunted
and there aren't enough eggs to fuel the birds' annual 20,000-mile
roundtrip. These are a few of many cause-and-effect calamities
addressed in Safina's compassionate account of both a year of four
seasons around his eastern Long Island beachfront home, and his
travels that same year to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Caribbean,
and the islands of the Pacific. He leavens the gloom, however, with
this perception: œI'm continually struck by how much beauty and
vitality the world still holds--an optimism that suffuses this
sensible and sensitive book. Safina reserves his real anger for
capitalists, whose predatory practices, he writes at some length,
œcontinually privatize profits and socialize costs, brazenly fouling
the environment. (Jan.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved. |
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Visions of the Land
Science, Literature, and the American
Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Under
the Sign of Nature)
by
Michael A. Bryson
Book Description
The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren
Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite
their range of genres—including exploration narratives, technical
reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional
utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature—these
seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of
nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to
1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the
authors, their work, and the ways in which science and nature unite
them.
Visions of the Land explores how our environmental attitudes have
influenced and been shaped by various scientific perspectives from
the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the
mid-nineteenth century to the start of the contemporary
environmental movement in the twentieth century. Bryson offers a
literary-critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds,
scientific training, and geographic experiences represented nature
through various kinds of natural science, from natural history to
cartography to resource management to ecology and evolution, and in
the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science
itself.
Visions of the Land examines the varied, sometimes conflicting, but
always fascinating ways in which we have defined the relations among
science, nature, language, and the human community. Ultimately, it
is an extended meditation on the capacity of using science to live
well within nature.--This text
refers to the Hardcover edition.
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