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Books that might help save the world

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    Books that might help save the world

    I'm almost done reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, a beautiful and inspiring book that I now want everyone in the world to read. Here's a review that sums it up well - and I've only just realised through reading that review that the book was first published in 2015, but only in the past year or two has the pandemic pushed it into becoming widely read. Which is a very good thing.

    #2
    On Time and Water by Andre Snær Magnason is "a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future", says the blurb. And it is indeed an absolutely beautifully written and absorbing book, although the hope in the face of an uncertain future is strictly provisional - that is, action has to be immediate and radical, especially with regard to the melting glaciers and the acidification of the oceans.

    One of the most enlightening passages (for me, at least) is when he outlines the complacency born of talking the wrong way about targets, and how apparently small numbers relating to temperature change and ph levels in the ocean lead to us thinking that things can't possibly be so serious that we really have to pay a lot of attention. But he describes very well how those stats will reach a tipping point where it will no longer be 'just' a case of a more severe hurricane season, and some extra flooding and landslides here and there, which we can continue to ignore as long as they're not directly affecting us. Once that tipping point is reached, the hell of climate change will be suddenly and dramatically unleashed as the entire eco system collapses across the entire planet, and there will be no going back.

    Depressingly, this book was really hard to get hold of. Probably not on a pile in Waterstone's near you next to Prince fucking Harry.

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      #3
      I've added both of these to my shopping list (as I'll be in the UK later in the year, I might invest in physical copies of them). Seeing that the latter was inspired by a now-extinct Icelandic glacier, and having been down in Argentina's Parque Nacional Los Glaciares back in April looking at several enormous glaciers that were quite a bit more enormous as recently as ten years ago, really tugs at my heartstrings.

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        #4
        I've just finished After Geoengineering by Holly Jean Buck, an interesting exploration of geoengineering ideas and their possible impacts, and the changes required in society that will be required to make anything work – the necessity is clearly to go beyond net zero and start bringing CO2 levels down. The book has a bit of an odd format in that Buck occasionally drops in these bits of mini-fiction, speculative short stories to illustrate what the world might be like with some of these things implemented, but these seem to peter out about halfway through the book – I personally think it would have been better to have had them in every chapter or not at all. Nevertheless, some interesting ideas, although I'm not sure I've been left feeling any more positive for the future having read it. The ideas are out there, but the biggest concern is still what (and perhaps more pertinently who) needs to change to get things moving properly in the right direction.

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