| TIPPING POINT FOR PLANET EARTH: How Close Are We To the Edge? Anthony D. Barnosky & Elizabeth A. Hadly New York: Thomas Dunne Books,1 April 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-05115-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-05115-0 | 264pp. | HC | $25.99 | |
This husband-and-wife team of scientists2 have been exploring the world for twenty-five years (and separately for longer.) One thing I can say with assurance: their journey has been consistently fascinating.
"This is the story of a journey. Like most journeys, it started out as a personal quest, but for us it has also been a professional one. It began when we were young scientists, driven mostly by curiosity and looking for the next big adventure. We found adventures aplenty, because our jobs as paleoecologists — people who study how our planet changes through time — took us to remote places all over the world. Along the way we fell in love and got married, and then the personal and professional adventures started inexorably to intertwine. We had one daughter, and a few months later got her a passport and hopped a plane to Australia. Then another daughter, same routine, but this time it was six weeks in Patagonia. By the time our kids were two-year-olds, they'd spent many nights in wilderness tents with us, buried their fingers in koala fur, been carried on our backs as we forded waist-deep rivers and stared down grizzly bears, and fallen sound asleep in their snugglies as we skied back-country trails. By the time they were fifteen, they had their own list of exploits: they'd hunkered down in their own tent as lions paced through camp, taught our graduate students the Latin names of various species, trapped rodents in Patagonia, faced off angry rattles in the Oregon desert, and watched grapefruit-sized chicken-eating spiders lead around their hundreds of young on a dark Amazonian night." – Pages 1-2 |
Their narrative in this book reflects the spirit with which they have always approached their work: honest and straightforward, with a sense of humor and a gift for improvisation. If it is also grim throughout, that is because the substance of the message is grim throughout. As you can see from the Table of Contents, it encompasses the multiple facets of the harm that ongoing climate change portends. At this late date, I don't need to go into those facets in detail. Suffice it to say that the essentials of life — safe water & food, safe dwelling, health — will be imperiled. — and that it is everyone's problem. Ameliorating global warming calls for the involvement of individuals, cities, states, nations — and global cooperation through international agreements.
Honest as they are, the authors of this book don't promise that the tipping points will be avoided, that the situation can be turned around. But they hold out hope. And that is the appropriate position, for humanity has an immense will to survive and remains capable of mustering immense effort on a short time-frame, when the awareness of imminent peril strikes home. In their final chapter, they present a report on which they spent a year working. It sets forth a number of initiatives that could trigger a helpful tipping point. For example, there could be a widespread switch to sustainable agriculture, with less use of nitrogen-rich fertilizers and better soil retention. Or, governments could spring for insulation of residences and businesses to promote energy conservation. There are other possibilities too. The keys to all are communication and cooperation; "America First" — any nation first — is a road to nowhere.
"If you string together all of the things we have written about in the previous chapters into a science-fiction novel about a species inexorably destroying its own life-support systems, you wouldn't believe it. It would be just too far-fetched. Yet nearly all of the things we've written about here ave actually already happened, or are in the process of playing out right now. The reason we're seeing so many crises pop up one after the other— water shortages here, terrible storms there, a new disease outbreak that sets us scrambling, a humanitarian crisis in yet another place — are explained when you look at one of the key findings that came out of our Nature study. For the first time in our species' history, indeed in the entire planet's history, the Earth is being squeezed from the bottom up and from the top down simultaneously. "By 'from the bottom up' we mean that every building farm, or other new human construction takes away a little of what was there to support us before, even as it's adding something we may need in the short term. And the number of us just keeps growing... *
* * "We suspect it is the obvious impact of those bottom-up plus top-down pressures — the things everyone is experiencing or hearing about on the news almost every day [* * *]— that made the results of our Nature article, among others, strike a chord with the public. That's what first made us think people were starting to take notice of the big challenges, and that they might, just might, be thinking it's time to do something about them." – Pages 229-230 |
Because its message is so unsparingly grim, the book is hard to read. Nevertheless, it must be read. The time for leisurely adjustments is over; we are in for some discomfort, and we had best make it count by changing our ways. But though it is grim, the book is not hopeless. The attitude expressed in the excerpt quoted just above is, in my opinion, just what is needed: "Things are going to get rough, but by gum we ain't licked yet." Also there is the sense of humor I mentioned, and a tone of optimism throughout. The book is rich with references, and has an excellent Index. Full marks.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.