White Beech, by Germaine Greer

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Part natural history, part memoir, Germaine Greer's new book exhibits the author's well known intellectual energy. In it she tackles ecological problems to do with Australian rainforests. It's a personal and passionate trip about issues important to Greer, such as conservation and indigenous flora and fauna.  

Germaine Greer had been casting about for a plot of land to buy in Australia with the hope of rehabilitating it somewhat to its former indigenous glory. In 2001 she discovered 60 hectares of Queensland rainforest that had undergone various uses over time, most recently as pasture land for dairy cattle. Feeling the land was right, Greer took the plunge and bought it. She then ploughed a heap of cash into it, weeding, propagating native plants and rehabilitating the soil. The land, near Cave Creek, she came to call Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme (CCRRS).

Greer writes in White Beech that she didn’t consider herself to be a landowner, but rather involved in an environmental project. She ultimately turned the land over to a registered UK charity, The Friends of Gondwana Rainforest. Dismissive of the ability of government agencies to perform conservation work, Greer promotes the idea of private land ownership as a means to more effective and careful rainforest rehabilitation.

The book’s title, White Beech, is taken from a native rainforest tree found in eastern Australia. The subtitle, The Rainforest Years, perhaps best captures the book’s contents. It’s not exactly a diary of Greer’s years in the rainforest, but the text’s multifaceted nature and often breezy tone give it an informal and chatty feel. Greer mixes her redoubtable skills as a researcher with her punchy humour and muscular prose to create something that is a rather wild brew of a book.

There is, as you would expect, a lot of botany in White Beech. Greer’s younger sister, Jane, is a professional botanist, and the book contains a lot of funny and interesting dialogue between the two women as they try to nut out the best way to collect seeds and propagate them. For the non-botanist, like myself, you may find the long lists of Latin plant names a bit daunting and beside the point. But I presume there will be a lot of readers of this book who do find all this stuff endlessly fascinating. Greer also has chapters on the history of her land, the animals deriving a livelihood from her rainforest and other conservation issues.

I must admit, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy reading White Beech. The subject matter seemed dubious. How do you write a compelling book about 60 hectares of withered rainforest? But Germaine Greer is relentlessly inquisitive and interested in absolutely everything. She must have the physical and intellectual energy of a woman half her age. On every page she makes you sit up and take notice of what she’s investigating. In the end, White Beech reads as a mix of natural history, local history, politics and conservation. It’s a book written in Greer’s later years and in many parts reads as a love letter to the Australian land, its flora and fauna. It’s also a testament to her generosity of spirit that she spent several millions rehabilitating this piece of land only to finally give the land away.

White Beech: The Rainforest Years, by Germaine Greer. Published by Bloomsbury. ISBN: 9781408846711  RRP $39.99

Big Coal: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit, by Guy Pearce, David McKnight and Bob Burton.

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Guy Pearce, David McKnight and Bob Burton lift the veil on Big Coal to reveal an enormously powerful industry that does much harm, not only to the environment, but also to communities, democracy and the economy. If you want a sharp, concise book to explain all facets of the coal industry, then this is the one for you.

That coal mining is a big part of Australia’s economy is something we pretty much taken for granted. Despite our professed modernity, this dirty energy source provides most of the nation’s power, fuelling our computers, televisions and smart phones. But how much do we really know about this industry? The three authors of this excellent book are well known for their expertise and knowledge in the areas of environment, energy, politics and public relations spin. Together  Pearce, McKnight and Burton perform a forensic examination of every aspect of the coal industry.

The main areas they cover are: the environmental and human costs of coal mining (a fascinating short history of coal is provided in this first chapter); the main business players and financial backers of Big Coal; the millions the industry spends on PR spin; the incredible political influence Big Coal has; and finally, a long chapter on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), demolishing this technology as a form of wishful thinking that in reality doesn’t have much of a chance of getting off the ground (which is probably why we never now hear it spoken of much in the media).

Another uncomfortable fact the book highlights is that Australia’s expanding coal exports make a travesty of its emission reduction targets at home. Coal dug up and sold abroad will be burnt nonetheless, making huge contributions to global emissions. It seems Australia wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Big Coal makes for depressing reading. On the bright side, it brings a foggy subject into crystal clear focus and liberates the reader (this reader, anyway) out of ignorance on such an important issue.

Big Coal: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit, by Guy Pearce, David McKnight and Bob Burton. Published by New South Books. ISBN: 9781742233031 RRP: $34.99

Jane and Prudence, by Barbara Pym

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Barbara Pym's third novel continues the author's themes of love, marriage and the status of women.   

Jane and Prudence (1954) was British novelist Barbara Pym’s third novel, following on from her witty Excellent Women. One Barbara Pym novel is pretty much the same as another, yet if her style is your cup of tea, then her books become a fabulous addiction.

Pym's style could almost be described as stream-of-consciousness, yet her engaging manner is the antidote to Virigina’s Woolf’s intense personal interiors. (In one of Pym’s novels she almost spoofs Woolf by having one of her characters say she would like to write a stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman standing at the sink with her hands plunged in the dish water doing the washing up.)

The great thing about Barbara Pym is that she is here to tell you the plain truth: life isn’t full of transcendental possibilities, rather it’s consumed with boring domestic realities, especially for women, who must not only carry the burden of these chores, but also continually prop up fragile male egos. I suspect that the reason for the ongoing success of Pym’s novels is their honesty and faithful descriptions of English parish life in the middle part of the twentieth century. Pym never shies away from the embarrassingly plain realities of life. And where most of us lie to ourselves in some manner, about our prospects or abilities, Pym never does. She’s almost cruelly honest with herself.

The basic story of Jane and Prudence is about a friendship between two women. Jane is a vicar’s wife who has just turned 40, while her friend Prudence is 29 and works in an office. Jane, her husband Nicolas and daughter, Flora, move into a new parish and there meet Fabian Driver. Fabian is a rather morally flimsy character. His wife, Constance, has recently died, but the reader learns that he was notoriously unfaithful to her during their marriage. Overlooking these obvious faults, Jane thinks he might be a good match for Prudence. Yet Prudence already has her own unsuitable love interest, her rather dowdy boss Arthur Grampian. Grampian is married and hence completely out of reach, but Prudence likes to enjoy the fantasy rather than having to seriously contemplate the reality of a relationship.

All the plot machinations in the end result in a whimper rather than a bang. Jane’s plans for a romance between Prudence and Fabian don’t quite come off as she’d expected. In fact, all goes quite awry. Prudence, however, takes all in her stride and avoids the pains of reality by giving her soul the soothing balm of fantasy and reverie. She prefers to live a life of pleasant contemplation rather put herself through the meat grinder of reality, which is always certain to disappoint.

From what biographical details we have of Barbara Pym’s life, we know she was terribly dissapointed in love, had several relationships with men and never married. Her novels point to her taking a very philosophical view of love and relationships. If the main characters in her novels are anything to go by, she knew that women fatally idealised marriage as a perfect or greatly elevated state of being, whereas reality proved something different entirely. Pym seems to be saying it’s better to keep the fantasy of marriage and avoid the reality, because perfectly wonderful marriages don't  exist.

Jane and Prudence is not as funny or wryly humoured as her two previous novels, Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women, but it perhaps has more depth of character and a deeper consciousness than those two brilliant predecessors.

Jane and Prudence, by Barbara Pym. Published by Virago Classics. ISBN: 9781844084494  RRP: $24.99

The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

In this fascinating study psychological scientist and researcher Jonathon Haidt explores how humans use morality to bond groups and evolve into more advanced levels of civilisation. It will change the way you look at your own moralising tendencies!

This is an exceptional book, very much in the manner of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. While The Righteous Mind purports to explain ‘why good people are divided by politics and religion’, the book really explores the psychology of groups and our individual moral make-up. Jonathon Haidt has taught psychology for 16 years, and his immersion in the psychological sciences comes through on every page. It’s clear from the text that he has thought long and hard about the mind and its formation of moral attitudes.

Haidt's main contention is that our personal moral codes are more an intuitive response to phenomena we experience in the world rather than a rationally worked out scheme. We instinctively react to news and events, then create post hoc 'rational' explanations for our gut reactions. Haidt explains this in a series of tests he did on people. He would describe to subjects repellent situations where no one was actually hurt or embarrassed or compromised in any way. For example, he describes a woman using an old American flag as a cleaning rag. When interviewees were challenged as to why they felt this was wrong, they struggled to articulate a reason. Yet instinctively they knew it was wrong.

Haidt goes on to explain most of our moral consciousness as evolutionary, not a prior mental reasoning. Our instinctive adoption of moral codes is based on six foundations that Haidt has identified. He lists these moral foundations with their opposites. The first is: care / harm. Hence we feel an instinctive repugnance when we see people being threatened with harm and we identify a value in providing care.

The other five ‘moral foundations’ are:

fairness / cheating.
liberty / oppression.
loyalty / betrayal.
authority / subversion.
sanctity / degradation.

Why do the politically progressive misunderstand the politically conservative? Haidt argues that progressives are responsive only to care / harm, fairness / cheating and liberty / oppression moral foundations, while conservatives are equally responsive to all six moral foundations. He posits this as the major antagonism between the two groups and claims conservatives are likely to be more successful due to their wider moral base.

A final very interesting point that Haidt makes is that the evolutionary reason why moral feelings came into being is that it helped us to bond groups. If groups can bond and work in unison, using such cohesive measures as the six moral foundations, then they could become stronger and beat other groups. Haidt even goes on to say that this evolutionary process allowed large business corporations to come into being.

How these findings are to resolve political antipathies doesn’t seem that clear in the text. Haidt asks his readers to be a bit more empathetic and broad minded when dealing with political opposites. The main thrust of the book, however, is how our morality is not so much constructed in the brain, but is more of an evolutionary survival mechanism.

I found this book enormously satisfying as an answer to why we behave the way we do.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathon Haidt. Published by  Penguin. ISBN: 9780141039169  $22.99

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

David Sedaris' new book is more of what he does best. Painful memories and experiences from the past are turned into ironic and hilarious stories for the reader. 

It's been years since I've read a book by David Sedaris. I think I may have read two of his books in the past but I can't really remember. From memory, his books seemed like something out of the world of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar or J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. They were funny, ironic and perceptive. It was like he was really channeling those disgruntled 1950s American writers and somehow updating it for a contemporary audience.

Reading his latest book Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls it struck me why his writing could seem like a bit of a throwback. It's because, in his autobiographical essays, he often describes his family life in 1960s America. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, like Sedaris' other books, explores family, relationships and personal histories in a series of highly engaging essays and fragments (there's even a poem at the end, plus a half dozen small fictional pieces).

I really enjoyed this volume. Sedaris is absolutely brilliant at what he does and I found myself turning the pages fully absorbed in all he had to say. He can take any dull subject or memory and turn it into something fascinating. The key to his success, like all good writing, is his honesty about himself. As Quentin Crisp once wrote, the only truly boring thing is a lie. Anyone who will tell you the truth about themselves is necessarily interesting.

Actually, there are parallels between Crisp and Sedaris. Both gay, both diarists, both hopeless at holding down jobs in the real world. Against the odds they both made it as writers and attained a high degree of success.

I gave a copy of Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls to a friend who I thought might get a kick out of it and intend to plug the gaps in my Seadaris reading by trying out some of his other books.

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris. Published by Abacus. ISBN: 9780349121635  RRP: $29.99

Why We Argue About Climate Change, by Eric Knight

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

In this well considered short book Eric Knight argues that maintaining the individual’s economic freedom is the best way to combat climate change. 

This book is part of a new series by Black Inc. called Redbacks. They’re sort of like the Quarterly Essays, but a bit longer and are printed in a regular book format. Each one explores a particular issue and is about 150 pages long. 

Trying to unpick rigid attitudes to climate change is like trying to diffuse a bomb. Despite the fact that climate change is a scientific issue, it fuels high emotions on all sides of the debate. Eric Knight does a good job here of giving a dispassionate over view of the science and politics of climate change. There are, as far as I can see, two major points the book has to make. Firstly, there it too much moralising around climate change. This has been one of the left’s major blunders: trying to impose feeling of guilt as a spur to action has made people resentful and angry.

Secondly, there has been too much pessimism about potential solutions to the problem. The greatest offender in this regard is Clive Hamilton. Knight describes Hamilton’s view of the subject as Malthusian, after the English cleric and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) who famously warned that population growth would outstrip natural resources. Malthus predicted mass starvation and death. His views were enormously influential, but the thing is, none of his dire predictions came to pass. New technologies and efficiencies were discovered; populations actually grew. 

Too many left wing thinkers on climate, according to Knight, take this Malthusian view. Their argument is that we need to reduce consumption, the implication being that we are shamefully wasteful. Knight, on the other hand, maintains citizens should still be encouraged to consume as much as they wish. Economic freedom should remain the imperative. Who has the right to tell anyone to reign in their consumption because it is morally suspect? 

How can we continue to consume and at the same time reduce our emissions, as the science tells us we must? Knight argues that markets are the solution. They will create consumables that will both appeal to shoppers and at the same time deal with climate change. The only fly in the ointment is the often idiosyncratic nature of renewable energy technologies. They must be designed to fit particular locations – whether sunny or windy or overcast – and hence can’t be ‘scaled up’ into a mass market model. This is where government will have to enter the equation by giving a leg up to new and emerging technologies. Governments will have to pump money into research and development. How this will be done, that is, how political parties can go to elections promising to spend money on renewable technologies on the scale required without scaring off votes isn’t really explored. 

Why We Argue About Climate Change is an optimistic book that makes you think the solution to all climate problems are just within our reach, if only we will work a bit harder and think a little more imaginatively.

This is a rewarding and well thought out essay that offers much interesting food for thought, even if some of its arguments about the power of markets to solve problems seem too optimistic. 

Why We Argue About Climate Change, by Eric Knight. Published by Black Inc. ISBN: 9781863956086 RRP: $19.99