An invigorating, thought-provoking plan to address climate change.
A systematic approach to reversing catastrophic climate change.
In an interesting narrative gambit, physicist and engineer Fiekowsky, who writes his nonfiction debut with Douglis, invites readers to imagine the future of Earth under what current-day climate specialists routinely refer to as the best-case scenario: Humanity comes together to bring the world’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. As Fiekowsky points out, this would still result in a nightmare world of barren (and menacingly rising) oceans and many millions of “climate refugees” fleeing their native countries—because even if carbon-zero initiatives succeed, they’ll only halt carbon emissions at what are already historically high, lethal levels. “Will humanity long survive on a planet where the climate patterns that all living things have relied on for 12,000 years have been permanently changed; where the last of the large fish and wild animals are on a path to extinction; and where human activity has taken over nearly all the land needed for diverse ecosystems?” Regardless of whether such survival is possible, Fiekowsky has an alternate solution: replace “climate action” with “climate restoration,” which has as its goal the reduction of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere to preindustrial levels. The author discusses tactics like using “marine permaculture” (vast seaweed farms), shunting CO2 to the infinite sink of the oceans, and something he calls enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation, which would involve “dispersing a very fine mist (aerosol) of iron chloride into the lower atmosphere to augment what forms naturally over the ocean.”
Fiekowsky covers fundamental issues involved in climate health, including global overpopulation, and in all cases, he matches his remediation suggestions with practical strategies for implementation. That last point underscores how effective and galvanizing this book is: Fiekowsky isn’t suggesting idle, unworkable fairy tales of restoring ecological balance. In brisk chapters supported by wide-ranging research, this work details not only the theoretical validity of the steps proposed, but also their workability. He doesn’t overstress one of the more subtle contentions, which is that humans seeking to restore climate health would be aided by the planet itself. In answer to why he’s so confident in climate restoration, the author says: “ ‘It’s been done before.’ Nature has removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 10 times in the last million years, and likely many more times before then.” True, projects like enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation (EAMO) may strike even some fanatic climate warriors as far-fetched and unlikely. And although the author is unquestionably correct about the disastrous effects human overpopulation has on the world, his suggestions for “population restoration” will likewise jar some readers who are convinced a healthy climate is impossible with current population levels. But the book’s prevailing tone of energetic optimism ultimately carries the day; readers of climate change classics like The Uninhabitable Earth(2019) by David Wallace-Wells will find these calls to specific, doable action intensely refreshing. The cause is not hopeless, Fiekowsky says; the world can still be saved.
An invigorating, thought-provoking plan to address climate change.Pub Date: April 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953943-10-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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