The book comes full circle, right back to “What now,” and is best fit for those who delight in zero-sum policy wrangling.
A turgid but well-meant attempt to decentralize environmental standards, embellish grassroots activism, and tap industry goodwill to fashion a new blueprint for environmental action, from academics Sabel, Fung, and Karkkainen.
If the national government either overregulates or underregulates when it comes to the environment, and local groups lack scale or encourage a myopic parochialism, what, the authors ask, is an effective middle course? Their proposal: “Local units set their own environmental performance targets and devise means to achieve them. In return, they provide detailed reports on actual performance and possible improvements to overarching public authorities.” They suggest this “rolling-rule regime” will stimulate vast public participation in the process, provide a face-to-face forum for polluters and victims to hammer out solutions (“disciplined consideration of alternative policies leads protagonists to discover unanticipated solutions provisionally acceptable”), and have the immediacy of a perpetual feedback loop to tinker with the system as it needs adjustment to set new standards, targets, and pathways. Their format is call-and-response: Sabel, Fung, and Karkkanien present their idea, offer evidence, and then a panel of experts attempts to shred their grand proposal. The experts usually win here, although they are far from a cohesive group. The sharpest is DeWitt John, who sympathizes with civic environmentalism but worries about cross-border conflicts, and whether people have the time or money to invest: Mr. Practical. The dimmest bulb is Theodore Lowi, who squawks “Propaganda” like Chicken Little and then smacks his lips over Milton Friedman’s 30-year-old inanity: “How much pollution can we afford?” Most respondents simply point out that industry goodwill is not to be expected at this juncture, and why should government abrogate its responsibility to protect the health and safety of its citizens?
The book comes full circle, right back to “What now,” and is best fit for those who delight in zero-sum policy wrangling.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8070-0445-6
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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