A primer of legal terminology and a plea for recognizing the potential dangers of space exploration.
An assessment of the possibilities for a multinational agreement on the regulation of space.
Grayling, the eminent British philosopher, worries about the planetary impact of the human pursuit of “profit and advantage.” The author claims that the prospect of valuable minerals on the moon and the planets, the commercial and military possibilities of low and medium Earth orbit, and the territorial longings of nation-states are likely to breed competition and conflict. Grayling particularly fears a repeat of what occurred in the late 19th century when powerful countries colonized Africa for wealth and territory—a problematic comparison on many levels. The 1967 United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty is inadequate regarding both the militarization of space and its exploitation by private enterprise. Any new international treaty must be carefully tailored to how space should be managed, include all nations as signatories, be supported by a central body with monitoring capabilities and enforcement powers, and benefit all humanity. In this way, “although no one owns the moon…we will all be responsible for it.” Space will thereby become “the common possession of humanity.” To this end, Grayling examines current international treaties that govern two similar realms: the oceans and Antarctica. He searches for language that will garner wide consensus and be legally enforceable. Despite his pessimism that the international order “is an anarchy of self-interests only tenuously constrained by expediencies,” Grayling believes that creating an informed public and crafting treaties and conventions through the U.N. can prevent space from turning into “yet another but even larger arena of human conflict.” His appeal to the reasonableness of people and nations, though, is a weak basis for a sustainable agreement. His argument is aspirational, and the book is mainly background for a more in-depth discussion.
A primer of legal terminology and a plea for recognizing the potential dangers of space exploration.Pub Date: May 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780861547258
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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