Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history.
Wide-ranging survey of the environmental damage wrought by industrial pollution in the last few centuries.
University of Burgundy historian Jarrige and scientific researcher Le Roux write of pollutions in the plural, for there are many channels that bring toxic materials within reach. “Never have so many chemical products—the safety of which generate widespread uncertainty—been in circulation,” they write in a narrative full of tables and hard data, adding, “chemical contamination is a feature of the entire planet.” These multiple pollutants combine and evolve along “complex pathways” that have developed over the roughly three centuries since industrialization emerged and then became economically dominant. The authors add that of course pollutions have been with us before that economic formation took shape, though in the main the concept of pollution (in the singular) was “rooted in religious cosmology and its ideas about purity and impurity”; some of those ideas associated such impurity with nonbelievers, outsiders, and the poor. With the rise of industrialization, those ideas gave way to the association of pollution as an inevitable collateral cost of progress. Still, as the authors note of the global market for recycled and castoff materials, “the waste trade is just one of the many examples that show that the burden of pollution is mainly borne by the poorest people in the poorest countries on the planet.” Meanwhile, citizens of wealthy countries are awash in goods and technologies. Laws have been written in poor and wealthy countries alike to curb pollution and polluters, the authors note, often to little avail, since, “as in the past, the most polluting industries do not cease to create new methods to resist, obfuscate, or soften environmental standards or reduce opposition.” So it is that pollutions are seen through the lens of capitalist economics as mere externalities rather than a shrouded and present danger.
Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-262-04383-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
An enthusiastic appreciation of a spectacular astrophysical entity.
A short, lively account of one of the oddest and most intriguing topics in astrophysics.
Levin, a Guggenheim fellow and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, knows her subject well, but her goal is appreciation as much as education, and there is much to admire in a black hole. Before Einstein, writes the author, scientists believed that the force of gravity influenced the speed of moving objects. They also knew that light always travels at exactly the speed of light. This combination made no sense until 1915, when Einstein explained that gravity is not a force but a curving of space (really, space-time) near a body of matter. The more massive the matter, the greater it curves the space in its vicinity; other bodies that approach appear to bend or change speed when they are merely moving forward through distorted space-time. Einstein’s equations indicated that, above a certain mass, space-time would curve enough to double back on itself and disappear, but this was considered a mathematical curiosity until the 1960s, when objects that did just that began turning up: black holes. Light cannot emerge from a black hole, but it is not invisible. Large holes attract crowds of orbiting stars whose density produces frictional heating and intense radiation. No writer, Levin included, can contain their fascination with the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole where space-time doubles back. Nothing inside the event horizon, matter or radiation, can leave, and anything that enters is lost forever. Time slows near the horizon and then stops. The author’s discussions of the science behind her subject will enlighten those who have read similar books, perhaps the best being Marcia Bartusiak’s Black Hole (2015). Readers coming to black holes for the first time will share Levin’s wonder but may struggle with some of her explanations.
An enthusiastic appreciation of a spectacular astrophysical entity.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65822-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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