Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample—and dispiriting—evidence for it.
A Princeton historian examines the shameful destruction of the environment as an instrument of war.
Ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems in order to bring suffering upon the people living within them, is not an international crime—not yet, anyway, although Kreike notes that “several individual states have defined ecocide as a crime.” Aggressor states that employ scorched-earth techniques of battling enemies can always plead military necessity—and so they often have in places such as the grain belt of the Ukraine or the Brabant in Holland, looting what they could carry and then destroying what they could not to deny provisions to other armies or even civilian populations. As Kreike notes of territories destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, when seed corn and corn for eating were stored and then burned together, an aggressor force can deny another population food for two years—which, of course, amounts to genocide. The author recounts numerous episodes of just that: the use of eco-terror tactics against the people of Sumatra by the Dutch at the turn of the 20th century, the twin roles of plague and starvation in crushing the Inca Empire, the “Famine of the Dams” wrought on Indigenous peoples in South Africa by the actions of the White government, which placed economic development above their survival. “Loss of the environmental infrastructure was disastrous in the semi-arid floodplain. During the wet season, it meant exposure to cold, humidity, and disease. During the dry season, it meant hunger, thirst, and blistering heat,” writes Kreike—and that instance of “environcide” was by no means confined to the floodplain of a South African river, but has instead been repeated in places such as the Amazon basin. Famine, plague, destruction of food and water supplies: It all adds up to a heady catalog of crimes that warring states have too often applied and show no signs of eschewing in future conflicts.
Waging war against the Earth is an old business, and this book provides ample—and dispiriting—evidence for it.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-13742-1
Page Count: 538
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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