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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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