​Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, by George Mobiot

 

How farming is eating the world.

​George Monbiot is a well known columnist at The Guardian with a strong interest in environmental issues. In Regenesis, he looks at the impact of farming globally. The conclusions he comes to are pretty stark, to say the least. In fact, many will be shocked where Monbiot writes that farming is “the most destructive force to have ever been unleashed by humans.” That’s a pretty big call, and one would expect it to be backed up with compelling evidence.

The first half of Regenesis paints an almost apocalyptic image of a world despoiled by farming. The biggest culprit is animal farming, which produces enormous amounts of excrement. And not just any excrement, but poo that is full of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that have been pumped into animals to make them grow faster and bigger. Living as most of us do in cities, we aren’t directly exposed to this environmental degradation.

Another madness of the global food system is the volume of animal feed grown (soy beans, primarily) that humans could eat. Under ten percent of soy grown actually goes into soy drinks and protein like tofu. The rest is fed to cattle, shipped from countries such as Brazil, the United States and Argentina. This massive soy production causes environmental damage of its own, with millions of acres of forest and grasslands cleared.

What is the solution? A plant based diet. Globally. The amount of carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by this change in diet “would be equivalent  to all the world’s fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years.” Obviously this has little to no chance of happenening. What to do?

The second half of Regenesis sees Monbiot talking to specialist farmers and scientists about alternatives. One avenue is what is known as no-till farming, where the soil is not turned over (tilling soil causes much damage). But the biggest discovery is what is known as microbial farming, using “hydrogen-oxygenating bacterium”. It produces a flour high in protein and can be produced in tanks, reducing the need for large swathes of farmland.

Monbiot describes the joys of eating a pancake made with this bacteria, which reminded him of the ones he used to eat made with egg:

“I would have found it harder still to accept that the main ingredient was the dessiccated bodies of bacteria. It tasted rich and mellow and filling: just like the pancakes I used to eat.”

Regenesis is well researched and thoughtfully written. Monbiot shows great intellectual honesty in contemplating the problems ahead for the global food production. He worries that there could be ticking environmental time bombs that have not been anticipated in our increasingly complex food system. Anyone with a serious interest in environment, sustainability, food security, climate and fairness for poorer nations must read this book. 

​Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, by George Mobiot. Published by Allen Lane. $32.99

OCT22

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer

 

Jonathan Safran Foer explains the impact of diet on the environment.

Changes in diet may well be one of the most difficult requirements for reducing our carbon footprint. As novelist Jonathan Safran Foer discusses in his new book, We Are the Weather, emissions from livestock pose an enormous danger to the planet. Not only does livestock create methane and other emissions, but land cleared for grazing removes trees and foliage that would usually sequester carbon. A double hit to the environment. Some researchers even suggest that if the world went on a plant-based diet this would quickly and dramatically reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

No doubt this is all daunting to consider. Foer doesn't preach or thunder from on high about the need to eat more plants, and confesses to his lapses as a vegetarian. Indeed, for the most part, We Are the Weather addresses the psychology of inaction and draws parallels with historical examples of looming catastrophes that were ignored.

We Are the Weather is a book of ethical conundrums, a personal quest to find the right way to live. Melancholy reading for sure, sometimes confronting, yet  searingly honest about our collective failure to act and what needs to be done.   

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Published by Hamish Hamilton. $35

First published at northmelbournebooks.com.au April 2020

Hop, Skip, Go: How the Mobility Revolution Will Transform Our Lives and Our Planet, by John Rossant & Stephen Baker

Two experts explain how we will travel in the future.

Cars are great, as long as everyone doesn't drive. When everyone does, congestion and dangerous emission levels are the result. Commuting by car in some major cities, such as Los Angeles, has become almost impossible. Traffic barely moves, resulting in lost hours better spent elsewhere. What to do?

Mobility expert John Rossant and business journalist Stephen Baker team up to present transport solutions from the future. They visit cities and tech start-ups that are pushing ahead with new, better ways to do travel. There are businesses trying to build cars with less of a carbon footprint, cutting edge ride-share services and apps galore to more efficiently marshal travel services. The authors even look at the possibilities of drones – either to carry online ordered packages or humans.

Most of the future's mobility revolution will be run not on fossil fuels, but on data. Our mobile phones will allow technologists to figure out the most efficient ways for us to get around. The downside, or course, will be the loss of privacy and surrendering so much of our personal data to big business and government.

Hop, Skip, Go is one of those technology books that likes to repeatedly predict how we will live in the future. At best, we're given an array of nascent technologies. Which ones take off, if any, is anyone's guess. Also, there are bound to be “black swans”, those unpredictable events that turn all received wisdom upside down. Having said that, Rossant and Baker have written a valuable book that explains why car travel has become untenable and the possible ways it might be wound back to some degree.

Hop, Skip, Go: How the Mobility Revolution Will Transform Our Lives and Our Planet, by John Rossant & Stephen Baker. Published by HarperCollins. $32.99

First published at northmelbournebooks.com.au March 2020

 

James Howard Kunstler’s follow-up to his 2006 book The Long Emergency is a slight disappointment, and suffers from its author having nothing really new to say. The book can’t be entirely dismissed, however, as it does have its moments of insight and is generally interesting. It’s just that it’s not the consistently bracing read that The Long Emergency was.

Too Much Magic can pretty much be considered the follow-up to Kunstler’s 2006 peak-oil treatise, The Long Emergency. It’s a shame to admit it, but in the six years since he published that compelling book he doesn’t seem to have really found anything new to say. This is always the risk when you obsessively read a writer who specialises in a particular topic. Perhaps someone coming with fresh eyes to the subject of peak oil would find this book interesting and useful, but to me it seemed a bit stale. You would think that the 2006 to 2012 period would be full of new developments to report, but Too Much Magic doesn’t seem rich in new insights.  

The book is divided into nine chapters that cover technology, American history, the environment, finance, alternative energy sources, global warming etc. It’s all fairly interesting, as far as it goes, but doesn’t provide any real ‘wow’ factor. On the more negative side, Kunstler is prone to making plenty of sweeping generalisations and predictions about the future. And as is so often the case with futurists, they are often embarrassingly wrong. 

Despite the above caveats, Kunstler still has many interesting things to say. He has a bracing prose style that is very reader friendly. He’s unique in being primarily a novelist who has crossed over into fossil fuel depletion as a passionate subject. While Too Much Magic has its faults, Kunstler is too smart to ignore.

Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, by James Howard Kunstler. Published by Atlantic Monthly. ISBN: 978-0-8021-2030-4

The End of Growth, by Richard Heinberg

Resource depletion expert Richard Heinberg turns his considerable intellectual energies to the subject of economic expansion and its necessary counterpart, expanding debt. The End of Growth gives a new slant on the modern economy, one that is persuasively argued and highly convincing. Heinberg’s careful research and detailed references make his new book essential reading.

Richard Heinberg is a well-known thinker and writer on all things to do with resource depletion. His book, The Party’s Over (2003), discussed the inevitable peak and decline in oil, and the impacts this would have on the global economy, society and the destiny of humanity. The economy, and all that we enjoy from it, is predicated on the notion of cheap oil. Peak oil doesn’t mean that the substance will run out, but its price will certainly rise inexorably, leading to dramatic changes in the way we live, think and work.

In his latest book, The End of Growth, Heinberg tackles the notion that economic growth will continue without limits. Economic growth is a modern day article of faith, but as Heinberg demonstrates, economic growth is (perhaps ironically) based on expanding debt. Heinberg argues that the huge growth in debt, and the expansion of the financial industrial complex, has reached a peak. Modern day economies simply can’t be burdened with further levels of debt.

The case of America is a highlighted example. Their national debt has now risen to 100 per cent of GDP, a total of 14 trillion dollars. That is, the country owes what its economy makes in a year. Added to this are expanding interest payments. An increasing percentage of the country’s tax receipts must be used to service interest that is charged on its 14 trillion dollars of debt. This is putting further pressure on the government’s budget, making it difficult to meet other funding commitments for its citizens such as welfare and healthcare. The US, according to Heinberg, is at serious risk of getting stuck in a debt trap, with interest payments overwhelming the government’s expenditures.

Much of Heinberg’s writings read like accessible philosophy. He distils his wide reading in such a manner that is always compelling and informative. He also has a gift for arranging information to highlight historical patterns and trends. His arguments are well backed up with the data and are highly persuasive.

The End of Growth is for the most part an economic history. It also examines in close detail a lot of the major economic ideas or beliefs of the last fifty years. Most notably, it looks at the impact that cheap and easily extracted oil has had on the economy. Another philosophical strain in the book is how over time the economy has become decoupled from nature. It’s a popular economic assumption that the economy can continue to expand without having to worry about environmental impacts or resource depletion. As you can expect, Heinberg thinks this is wishful thinking.

For serious students of economics, the environment and resource depletion, Richard Heinberg has provided another indispensable book.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, by Richard Heinberg. Published by New Society Publishers. ISBN: 978-0865716957

Into the Woods, by Anna Krien

Anna Krien’s Into The Woods provides a multifaceted investigation into the fraught and highly-contested debate on how best to exploit Tasmania’s precious forestry endowment. With a novelist’s skill, she describes the key personalities, conflicts and factual grey areas of a controversial policy area, making Into The Woods a thought provoking book that provides no easy answers.

Anna Krien is a Melbourne based journalist who has published in The Monthly, The Age and The Big Issue, amongst other publications. Her first book, with its rather Bambiesque title, Into The Woods, follows a style of journalism made famous by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The author immerses herself in her subject matter, body and soul, and reports back at intimate length. This is not a facts and figures journalism, gleaned from picking over reports, official investigations and inquiries. Here the journalist to some degree also becomes the subject: personal prejudices, doubts, failings and misgivings are all candidly disclosed. These admissions of the writer’s fallibility goes someway to giving the over all work a greater feeling of honesty.

Journalistic works of this type (the other great recent example if Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man), do not pontificate from on high, but rather crawl through the mud to bring a more realistic picture. Complexity, contrary views and the general clamour of differing voices that make up contentious issues are all given an airing. The book format, with its hundreds of pages, makes this type of writing possible, where time and patience are needed to tease out ideas and explore various intellectual avenues.

It seems pretty clear from the opening pages of Into The Woods that Anna Krien is by and large sympathetic to the activists that are trying to conserve Tasmania’s forests and stop the loggers. Nonetheless, Krien soon gets fairly impatient with the campaigning style and doggedness of the activists, especially when she is confronted with a pub full of knockabout men who are sympathetic to the loggers and hostile to the ‘greenies’. She decides that it’s the activists who need to be out in the pubs talking to the enemy, learning a few things, and not sitting up a tree.

Into The Woods does attempt to look at the big picture, despite its author’s obvious biases. Krien does a fascinating job of interviewing activists, leading politicians, scientists, forestry officials and loggers, trying to get a true picture of just how fragile Tasmania’s ecology has become due to the demands of its economy: logging and wood chipping. The picture that emerges is of a state that is divided down the middle between conservationists and loggers, with neither giving way. You get the picture of a state that simply doesn’t know how to function outside of this dichotomy.

If we’re to believe former Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon’s last minute call to activist and garden show host Peter Cundall, two weeks before he died of lung cancer, urging Cundall to never give up the fight against the big business interests that he claimed ran the state, then Tasmania is a plutocracy run by powerful money interests. During that phone call Bacon told Cundall that there was nothing politicians could do to stop huge companies like Gunns. The politicians were simply the hired staff at a lavish party where they served Tasmania’s precious resources on a platter to the greedy and all powerful corporations.

There’s much to commend in Anna Krien’s finely written book. Her intimate attention to detail and well rounded portraits make for fascinating reading. Krien has the novelist’s gift for pacing, timing, description and evocative use of language, making Into The Woods a must-read.

Into The Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, by Anna Krien. Published by Black Inc., 2010. ISBN: 9781863954877

No Impact Man, by Colin Beavan

Colin Beavan felt guilty at talking tough on the environment, but found his actions wanting. To live up to his professed values, he started an experiment where he and his family would dramatically reduce their carbon footprint. The results were a mixture of mundane work, disillusionment, enlightenment and unexpected joys.

No Impact Man is like one of those novelty books where the author sets himself up some sort of challenge for a period of time and then turns the experience into a book. Colin Beavan, an author of history books, but with no real background in environmentalism, had long experienced pangs of guilt at his urban New York lifestyle. Worse still, he felt like a hypocrite of sorts. Ever ready to angrily criticise or get on his high horse about environmental issues, when Beavan looked at his own personal impact on the environment, he found he was all talk and no action.

To try and get his values in sync with his real life, he set himself and his family the task of dramatically reducing their impact on the environment, hence the book’s title. This was done in stages, ultimately culminating in turning off the electricity entirely in his family’s one bedroom New York unit. The electricity-less lifestyle didn’t last entirely. When his daughter vomited all over her bedding, Beavan couldn’t face having to hand wash the sheets again in the bath and opted to use his apartment building’s washing machines. Reading by candle light could be fun, but washing clothes in the bath was closer to absolute drudgery.

The good things Beavan discovered while reducing his carbon footprint included losing weight by walking up the stairs to his apartment, enjoying buying fresh food and meeting people at his local farmer’s market, more time spent talking to his family and a feeling of being a useful member of his community while doing volunteer work.

There is, however, a threshold. There is a stage where reducing your environmental impact becomes just too difficult, impractical and onerous. Beavan heroically tried to generate solar power from his apartment using a portable solar panel, but through rainy winter days could simply not get enough energy to even power a modest laptop. With the loss of his refrigerator, trips to the farmer’s market had to be stepped up to three times a week to stop food from spoiling.

What’s the take-away after this one year experiment? Most importantly, going without calls on a person’s creativity and ingenuity. Beavan calls it re-inventing your life. What seems impossible at first blush soon turns out, with a bit of tweaking, to be achievable. New habits soon get formed and entrenched. There is more labour involved – more cooking, shopping, cleaning, walking up stairs and cycling. But this type of work turns out to be not so bad at all. Beavan finds relaxation in kneading bread, talking to the farmers at the markets and riding his daughter, Isabella, around town on his bike made specially from 100 per cent recycled materials.

It also becomes clear to Beavan that as a society everything works against the urban inner city dweller who wants to reduce his or her carbon impact. Everything is organised around disposable bags and energy derived from fossil fuels. Try taking in your own jars or muslin bags to shops to save wastage, and funny looks can be expected. Or attempt to run your own apartment on renewable energy. You don’t have a chance. There simply are no options but fossil fuels.

It took me a while to get into this book. Beavan would describe boring aspects from his day to day life, interspersed with factoids about the environment that he’d picked up from surfing Google or books he’d read. But his earnestness grew on me. There’s a faint melancholy in Beavan’s character that emerges as the book comes to its close. No Impact Man shows a family making a genuine attempt to see what it would be like to live with much less. The results are mixed. There’s good and bad. But it seems clear that the bad could be greatly improved with the effort made to find creative solutions. That, and a concerted effort as a society to make improvements collectively.

Beavan himself frequently turns to the world’s great religions, like Judaism and Buddhism, for answers on how to live. In many ways, he’s a quester for the most ethical way to live. No Impact Man turns out to be no quickie, gimmicky environmental book, but a spur to trying different things in your life, no matter how unusual it may seem to others, in order to re-create your own life into a happier, more ethical existence.

No Impact Man: Saving the Planet One Family at a Time, by Colin Beavan. Published by Piatkus Books. ISBN: 9780749953201

Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World, by Michael C. Rupert

It was former Shell geoscientist M. King Hubbert (1903-1989) who launched his theory of Peak Oil in 1956, at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas. He predicted that oil production in the United States would peak by the early seventies, then inexorably decline. He was proven right. Since then, a number of other energy industry insiders have added to their name to the Peak Oil argument. In 2005, energy investment banker Matthew Simons published the controversial Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, which argued that Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves were close to peaking.

One of the most interesting aspects of the peak oil theory is that its strongest proponents are from the industry itself. Generally, it’s agreed that half of the world’s oil endowment of two trillion barrels has been used. At the current rate of extraction, the world has enough oil to last about 35 years.

On the other hand, if you’re a cornucopian, you’ll believe that technology is just waiting in the wings with the answer. That, or there are massive new reserves just about to be found. Yet even the most optimistic energy analysts, such as Canadian author Peter Tertzakian, suggest that the only way forward is a massive conservation effort, helped by advances in technology.

Where does this leave the world and its economy? Basically falling off a cliff, and perhaps sooner than we think. We are now at a stage that every new spurt of global economic activity creates a demand that raises the price of oil. Yet once oil prices increase, demand falls back, causing what experts in the peak oil movement call a corrugated peak.

Michael C. Ruppert is a journalist who has studied energy and economics, and his short 2009 book Confronting Collapse is his contribution to the debate. It’s written in an urgent, opinionated, and I hate to say, arrogant manner. Ruppert spends a lot of time noting the accuracy of his previous predictions, and even takes time to compare himself to famous historical figures. The ramshackle nature of Confronting Collapse, and its hubris, works against it. For those who have read a lot about peak oil, you may feel you have ‘been there, done that’ with this book. For novices wanting to explore peak oil, there are plenty substantial books available. Here is my recommended list:

• The Long Emergency, by Howard James Kunstler (2005)
  
• Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, by Peter Maass (2009)
  
• The Party’s Over, by Richard Heinberg (2003)
  
• The Last Oil Shock: A Survivial Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man, by David Strahan (2007)
  
• Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin (2009)
  
• The End of Energy Obesity, by Peter Tertzakian (2009)
  

Confronting Collapse has its interesting aspects. The sections that deal with how money is tied to the amount of cheap oil the world has at its fingertips is instructive. But over all this book is too angry without being inspired, too self-congratulatory without enough new insights.

Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World, by Michael C. Ruppert. Published by Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN: 978-1603582643

Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell

Gavin Maxwell’s memoir about his time spent in a remote part of Scotland, Ring of Bright Water, provides much that is interesting, especially the second part that describes his relationship with two fascinating pet otters. However, the memoir is somewhat marred by Maxwell’s over done writing style. Animal welfare questions also uncomfortably nag the reader’s conscience.

Ring of Bright Water by naturalist Gavin Maxwell was a multi-million seller hit in its day. Basically a memoir or autobiography, the book describes in mellifluous prose Maxwell’s time living in the West Highlands of Scotland at an area he called Camusfearna. The book is divided into two parts. The first part describes the wildlife of Camusfearna, where Maxwell resided on and off, in relative isolation.

The second part of the memoir is more interesting, and describes Maxwell’s adoption of an otter cub from Iraq called Mijbil. After Mijbil is killed, in rather brutal circumstances, Maxwell becomes otter obsessed and procures another pet otter, this time from Africa, whose name is Edal.

The first part of Ring of Bright Water is fairly dull and pedestrian, unless you’re fond of flowery prose. Maxwell has a tendency to overwrite, which overshadows the environmental subject matter he is supposed to be describing. There are too many unnecessary adjectives and grand allusions in the writing which bogs it down somewhat. Samuel Johnson’s suggestion to writers to cut out what they are particularly proud of comes to mind. Hence some readers may get frustrated with Maxwell’s prolixity. Maxwell’s personality sits plonk in the middle of the book, and sometimes you want less author and more first hand observations.

The second part of the book is far more engaging, as Maxwell draws particularly vivid portraits of his two pet otters, with their engaging personalities. Mijbil and Edal are almost like two little people, with their love of playing and inquisitive minds.

Overall, I had ambivalent feelings about Ring of Bright Water. The transportation of animals such long distances (in Mijbil’s case, from Iraq, in very harrowing circumstances), merely to keep them as pets, seems to raise ethical questions. Mijbil was brutally killed when Maxwell left him in rather dubious care for two weeks while he took time off in London to write. In one part of the book Maxwell even buys a lemur from Harrods, until it is no longer practical to keep the animal in his London apartment. You have to wonder what Maxwell was thinking. You’d expect a naturalist to have more common sense about such things.

Ring of Bright Water was made into a movie in 1969, which it seems certain must be entertaining, if it concentrates on the relationship between humans and otters. As for the book, it’s hard to get past Gavin Maxwell’s slightly creepy and disconnected personality. He died fairly young, the result of an eighty cigarette-a-day habit (he even kept a packet of cigarettes near the toilet).

This review is obviously not a glowing one. Ring of Bright Water has its insights and interests, but not quite enough to make it a brilliant book.

Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell. Published by Little Toller Books. ISBN: 978-0-9562545-0-4

Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey

Dian Fossey’s memoir of her 18 years spent studying and tracking gorilla groups in the mountain forests of Africa is by turns funny, amusing and tragic. Her lively portraits of such gorilla personalities as Coco, Beethoven and Digit make clear how close these primates are to humans, and the ethical dilemma that presents for their treatment.

Dian Fossey was brutally murdered in 1985, her attacker or attackers splitting her skull with a machete, the type commonly used by poachers. She was found in the bedroom of her cabin in Virunga Mountains, Rwanda, and had apparently tried to load her pistol during the attack. To this day her killer or killers have not been found.

While Fossey worked primarily as a zoologist in the mountain forests of Rwanda, she was also involved in strenuous and time consuming anti-poaching activities. While it was illegal to poach gorillas in the Virunga mountains, this law was barely enacted by local authorities, who would pretty much turn a blind eye. Fossey single handedly took it upon herself to police the poachers and confiscate their traps. Speculation abounds as to whether she was murdered by the poachers, or if the Rwandian authorities had got sick of her presence and determination to protect the gorillas from human intervention – either for tourist purposes, or poaching them to ship them off to European zoos.

Fossey described her type of conservation as ‘active’. The meaning is pretty clear. She was a hands-on practitioner who believed 100 per cent in enforcing the law and making those who broke it pay the penalty. She dismissively characterised ‘theoretical’ conservation as the type that ticked all the boxes, but didn’t do the hard work of enforcement. Theoretical conservation was all motherhood statements, while active conservation meant risk taking and putting oneself on the line to make positive outcomes happen, even when this unsettled the status quo or threatened the interests of a powerful few.

Eighteen Years Following and Making Contact with the Gorillas

Gorillas in the Mist is Dian Fossey’s memoir covering her 18 years of closely following and making contact with gorilla groups in the Rwandian mountain forests. Fossey first started her work in the late 1960s, and was still actively involved in field work up to her death in 1985. This was hard, unglamorous work that demanded a certain level of fitness and fortitude (one is amazed at Fossey’s nicotine addiction, and how she managed to track gorillas through such tough terrain with her worsening emphysema). The weather was frequently damp, and Fossey in one section of the book describes a typical day of waking up and having to put on wet clothes and then scythe her way through dense mountain vegetation to follow the gorillas.

Fossey’s style if often light and cheerful, and she is fond of making jokes. When describing the gorilla’s habit of eating their own dung (perhaps, it is speculated, in order to get vitamin B12 which is fermented in the stomach), she called such fare “instantly warmed TV dinners”. The breeziness of the narrative, and her uncomplaining attitude to hardships, is occasionally interrupted by passages of terrible grief and trauma. When one of the gorillas, Digit, is killed by poachers, Fossey recorded her feelings in this deeply moving passage:

“There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one’s being. As I listened to Ian’s news all of Digit’s life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an isolated part of myself.”

There would be many more gorilla deaths due to the activities of the poachers. The reason so many gorillas die is that, when the poachers try to kidnap one of the younger gorillas, all the family members fight to the death to protect them. Fossey had many of these gorillas buried outside her cabin, where she would eventually also be laid to rest.

A Social History of the Mountain Gorillas

The most extraordinary thing about Gorillas in the Mist is that it presents a social history of the various gorilla groups that Fossey studied and the family groupings within those groups. Fossey named all of the gorillas she followed, also describing in minute detail their personalities and the strategies they used to survive and thrive in those groups. As you read about the many different gorillas and their interactions – great gorilla personalities like Digit, Macho, Uncle Bert, Beethoven, Effie, Peanuts and Coco – you almost start to merge the gorillas into human personalities. Hence Gorillas in the Mist almost reads like the history of a group of people. Of course Fossey gives lots of other zoological information that she learns about the gorillas, like dietary and mating habits, but overall the book concerns itself with the personalities and politics of the gorilla groups.

The reader comes away from Gorillas in the Mist with a deep respect for Dian Fossey. She must certainly have been part nut case to take on the hard and physically demanding work of gorilla tracking. Only a person totally obsessed could put up with the conditions, non-existent pay and constant battling with the poachers. But as Fossey always told her students, their pay was the privilege of working with the gorillas. Nor was Fossey some airy headed idealist. She knew the poverty of the Rwandian people, how over populated and hard pressed for land they were, and that conservation of the gorilla population was the last of their pressing problems.

Gorillas in the Mist is a unique journey into the mountain forests of Africa to meet a gorilla society, and experience their struggles and joys. It also raises many complex questions about the ethical treatment of animals and human responsibility for natural conservation.

Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey. Published by Phoenix. ISBN: 9-780753-811412

A Spring Without Bees, by Michael Schacker

In recent years honey bees has been dieing off at an alarming rate. In the United States, bee keepers claim the increase in this annual die off rate to be 30 per cent. The phenomenon has been wide spread also in Europe, especially France, where research is most thorough into possible reasons why. For some reason or other, countries like Australia and New Zealand have not experienced this problem.

The strange disappearance of the bees has been labelled Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD (I know, another acronym to keep up with.) Bee colonies usually have some annual die off. Their numbers are typically killed off by disease and mites (the varroa mite, for example, which attaches itself to the abdomen of the bee and infects the bee with various diseases). Making the problem even more perilous for the bees is the fact that they have a low immunity, making them doubly vulnerable.

When bees die in this manner, they usually expire at the front of the hive, leaving a pile of bee corpses. With Colony Collapse Disorder, the result is different. Very few dead bodies are found at the front of the hive, and no adult bees are found within the hive. Unhatched broods are still found in the hives, and honey is still left behind. Adding to the strangeness of the scene, it takes weeks before predators like wax moths and hive beetles move in to start looting the abandoned honey. Typically these predators are quick to start eating the free honey. If these hungry predators were holding off, then this was a sure sign that something was wrong with the honey itself. The bees surely must have been sick.

Is Imidacloprid, Commonly Known as IMD, to Blame?

Enter the French beekeepers, who since 1994 have noticed that there has been a problem. After much science and research, the French started to point the finger at the insecticide IMD (imidacloprid), which is widely used in the US. Once the French called for a ban and restrictions on the use of IMD, they found that, after a few years (it takes time for the IMD to be flushed out of the ecosystem), the bees returned. Interestingly, Australia and New Zealand, the two countries that did not experience CCD, have stringent rules when it comes to the use of IMD. (Also of note, organic bees did not suffer CCD).

The studies found that even minuscule amounts of IMD (a few parts per billion), could disrupt the nervous system of the bees, making them unable to forage and basically think and act as bees should. Here is the Schacker on the subject:

“The French researchers got all the way down to less than one part per billion with their detector, and found that as little as a few parts per billion in the nectar or feed syrup could make the honey bee groggy, impairing the bee’s short-term memory in smell and theoretically blocking normal foraging.”

As mentioned above, IMD is used widely in the US, even extensively on suburban lawns and golf courses (the book cites alarming studies showing high cancer rates for golf course attendants).

Weaknesses in the Second Part of A Spring Without Bees

The second part of A Spring Without Bees turns into the usual call to arms, giving action plans and ways to help get rid of IMD on a personal level. Michael Schacker takes as certain that IMD is the culprit for Colony Collapse Disorder, yet the science on the subject, as described in the book, does not strike me as conclusive. This seems to be a major fault with the book: Schacker jumps too quickly to the conclusion that IMD is the culprit. While the research on IMD is certainly persuasive, it’s not really conclusive. More work needs to be done.

Any argument against excessive use of chemicals and toxins in our environment is a no-brainer, yet this shouldn’t be wound up with an argument stating that IMD is certainly the reason for Colony Collapse Disorder. We need to know the truth.

For the novice reader on all things bees, the book also could have been made more interesting by including a more detailed history of the bee and their ecological role. A Spring Without Bees offered lots of fascinating snippets of bee facts that could have happily been expanded upon.

As it stands, A Spring Without Bees works like a fascinating detective story that reaches its conclusions too soon.

A Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has Endangered Our Food Supply, by Michael Schacker. Foreword by Bill McKibben. Published by The Lyons Press. ISBN: 978-1-59921-432-0

The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, is considered one of the first books that brought the phenomenon of global warming to a larger audience. First published in 1989, this edition was updated by the author in 2003 to include further developments in the science and the landmark IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Assessment Reports.

It could be argued that, above all else, Bill McKibben’s greatest skills are as a communicator. While writing on complex topics like climate science and sustainable economies, and philosophical questions like the meaning of nature in a high-tech world, McKibben always writes in a tone that is engaging. He also employs also elegant analogies and metaphors that get his message across.

The End of Nature, as you would expect, is pretty much for the converted. It seems there are two camps when it comes to the science, and by extension, the politics of climate change. There are those who believe in the primacy of the economy over nature. To these people who consider themselves to be economic realists, nature is almost a supine thing that can be molded to their desire and exploited ad infinitum. No meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions can be countenanced, as this would ‘trash’ the economy for no good reason. For these economic realists, who do accept that anthropogenic (human) induced global warming is happening, their answer is that technology will allow us to easily adapt.

On the other hand, there is the camp that believes that the environment must always come first, as the economy simply cannot exist without it. To the honest environmentalist, this really means a reduction in living standards as we use less energy. (Personally, as the reader may have guessed, I belong to this second camp).

The End of Nature argues that the environment, no matter what political agreements are reached for a reduction in emissions, has changed irrevocably. Moreover, human activity has so changed the environment that we have now seen an end of nature as we know it.

McKibben highlights our determination to completely re-wire nature by discussing the freakish inventions of bio-technology. He says a line has been crossed with the genes of differing species being mixed. Writes McKibben:
‘A University of Pennsylvania professor managed to insert human growth genes into the fetus of a mouse. When it was born, the mouse grew twice as fast and to twice the size of any other mouse ever. Since it passed the gene on to its offspring, it made forever moot the question “Are you mouse or man?” It was both, and neither.’

The End of Nature is for the most part an engaging and thought provoking meditation on the deleterious effect human economic activity is having on the environment, and how humans have selfishly and thoughtlessly changed their environment without a thought for the consequences of their actions. Part One of the book is the strongest, dealing as it does directly with the science of climate change, and communicating all the vital facts in a most accessible way.

However, the book tends to drift in its second half, becoming too introspective and philosophical. This lets the book down, as the reader wonders what McKibben is really saying, besides writing what reads like an elegy. McKibben’s later books, such as Deep Economy and Eaarth, are more cohesive and consistently informative. The End of Nature should perhaps more properly be read as a pamphlet or essay on human thoughtlessness.
The End of Nature: Humanity, Climate Change and the Natural World, by Bill McKibben. Published by Bloomsbury. ISBN: 0-7475-6186-9