I’ve been looking for a popular book that gets at the issues I’m interested in here: Without holding out any false hope, how do we figure out how to change our ways so we can avoid catastrophic breakdown?
Until now, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down was the best I’d found. But Homer-Dixon is an academic, albeit one far better than most at storytelling. But still the book is fairly abstract and wasn’t really the kind of thing I was looking for.
I just started reading The End of the Long Summer by Dianne Dumanoski, and I think it’s the book I’ve been looking for. (The first two chapters of The End of the Long Summer are available as a free download from Scribd, or you buy it from AddAll or IndieBound—or the megastore of your choice.)
I’ll post more about it on here, but for now, here’s a bit from it. It starts off by pulling the rug out from any comfortable notions:
Whatever the coming century brings, it will not unfold smoothly as some improved but largely familiar version of life as we know it. This is the only thing that seems certain.
She points out the possibility of surprises and the need for resilience:
The faster the warming and the higher the temperatures climb, the greater the danger that change will arrive in abrupt shifts and surprises—shocks that could lead to the collapse of social and economic systems…. The real danger of abrupt shifts in planetary systems has figured little in the public discussions of global changes.
Some researchers, like the reputable climate scientists that blog at RealClimate, have complained about journalists’ coverage of “tipping points” and abrupt change. But when governments and the UN’s IPCC have said little about the possibility, then somebody’s got to.
So how to deal?
If, indeed, surprising shifts, abrupt change, and increasing climatic variability are among the possible challenges in our future, we must turn our attention to a new aim, as yet largely unconsidered—the task of shockproofing our human systems.
The modern way of organizing life leaves us badly prepared for the disruption and instability it has engendered. The current trend toward interdependence and globalization is only increasing our vulnerability….
The pursuit of global integration at this time poses a real danger that critical institutions could unravel or suffer outright collapse from relatively minor climatic discontinuities.
OK, this is getting a bit abstract. But still she’s hitting the nail on the head.
Structural principles that have made the Earth system remarkably resilient include functional redundancy, in which a variety of different species do the same job; a modular structure in which the whole is comprised of smaller, relatively self-sufficient units; and compartmentalization, which limits the connections of parts of the system to the whole.
Here are a couple of her prescriptions:
We need to give serious thought to a new security founded on increased local and regional self-reliance rather than thinking simply about efficiency and cost….
First and foremost, we need to insulate and redesign our social and economic systems so they can better withstand disruption and shock and can change in the face of altered circumstance.
Based on reading, in Paul Roberts’ The End of Food, about how the tightly interwoven food system works, this is going to be much easier said than done.
UPDATE: I got all excited at first about The End of the Long Summer, but after reading more, it turns out it really is all about ideas and the thinking that (the author argues) got us into this mess in the first place. As such, it tends to be pretty abstract. Even if it hits the nail on the head in many ways, I’m not so sure that this kind of analysis is what the world needs. Maybe if economists read it, they’d be swayed to change their approach, but for the general public I’m skeptical about how much difference it would make.
I’m still looking for a book that covers resilience, adaptation, and more on the ground. I haven’t found it yet—maybe I’ll have to try to write that book myself. Mark Herstgaard, who covers climate change for The Nation and others, is working on a book on adaptation called Living Through the Storm: Our Future Under Global Warming. But his bio blurbs for the last few years have been saying that this book is “forthcoming,” so who knows when it will come out. Judging from his reporting, it will be a big romp around the world to explore ideas of how people might get by in the coming century.
Related posts:
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- City dwellers to face more frequent hot summer nights Global warming will make cities hotter—and when people try to cope by using air conditioning, they'll make it worse...
- Read: “The Nature of the Age” Chapter 1 of "The Age of the Unthinkable" by Joshua Cooper Ramo...
