Pie-in-the-sky visions meet gritty practicality in a book of interest to all environmentally minded readers.
Along with a host of researchers, scholars, and other contributors, Hawken assesses our “dying planet—a phrase that may have sounded inflated or over the top not long ago.”
In order to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change, we must figure out ways to contain carbon and reduce the surface temperature of a rapidly overheating globe. It also requires rethinking how we make our livings in an extractive economy governed by short-term thinking. “Regeneration,” as Hawken conceives it, is a project that restores every corner of the world to health. The process involves replanting overlogged forests, cleaning up the oceans, bringing sustainable power to consumers, and inculcating a new attitude of respect for all forms of life on the planet, among other goals. Hawken and a phalanx of contributors—including novelists Richard Powers and Jonathan Safran Foer and ecologists Carl Safina and Isabella Tree—examine carefully pinpointed strategies. One is to develop marine preserves around the world that are “absolute no-take zones,” forbidding fishing in large swaths of what is essentially a “lawless commons.” These marine preserves and other areas would be subject to “marine reforestation,” building kelp forests that have been depleted by chemical pollution and shifting oceanic currents. Another is to build sustainable food chains. A Japanese farmer, for instance, raises ducks that eat invasive snails and fertilize paddies of a plant called azolla, which, in maturity, becomes a wonderfully productive “green manure” for other plants. If you haven’t heard of azolla, you’re to be forgiven: As Hawken observes, we consume only a small fraction of the edible plants available to us, and we can be weaned from large-scale industrial agriculture in order to make use of the plants that “grow best where people live and help meet their nutritional needs.” The prescriptions are attainable and clearly stated, without jargon or hectoring.
Pie-in-the-sky visions meet gritty practicality in a book of interest to all environmentally minded readers.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313697-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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