Reading Review

Books arrived Tuesday, and since I'm under pressure to choose something to add to a Composition class, by, um, tomorrow, I've been skimming fast among the top 3: The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet by Christian Schwagerl, The Human Age by Diane Ackerman and Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince.

The first, the Schwagerl book, seemed like my most likely candidate.  I fast-read through five chapters, see-sawing back and forth, my criterion being how this might work with a new population of college students, at a place I'm just starting.  This requires lots of imagination about how our class discussions might go, guesswork about what background they will have, what issues will touch them off, all that stuff (planning a new class isn't that different from designing a fantasy role-playing campaign...Firefly just now, though I'm still partial to old D&D).

And so there I was, reading along.  The book contains lots of useful topics—the IPCC, Rachel Carson (though he downplays her importance—2 strikes right there, tampering with someone else's saints), the Montreal Protocol, cynobacteria and the shift to an oxygen atmosphere, the Theia theory of the origin of the moon (though he doesn't present it as a theory), people I’m reading about in other texts just now, like Edward Suess and Vladimir Vernadsky, Yevgeny Shepelev, who I didn’t know, the importance of Biosphere 2, Paul Salophek and his Out of Eden Walk, a swift survey of human expansion and evolution, mentions Alexander von Humboldt and Teilhard de Chardin…ok, things there I could work with in class, though not an extensive look at any of these in the text.

Schwagerl makes some intriguing claims, such as, “Sustainability ideas come prepackaged with a set of imperatives. The Anthropocene idea works differently, but in a complementary way. It exposes us all and asks for responsibility. It invites commitment and responsible behavior instead of demanding it” (xi), and, “The Anthropocene is more than the sum of the parts of environmental havoc. It can be the arena in which humanity decides to wisely integrate into the planet’s workings, enriching itself by its actions as a result” (xii).  There, I have some doubts...crucial doubts.  His can be could even be shifted to ought, and I'd nod along--as a general goal, but I don't see us making wise decisions, or even understanding the problems in a way that makes wise decisions possible.  Hmm...

Schwagerl continues, with anecdotes about Paul Crutzen--the patron genius for his book, colorful anecdotes like Crutzen's blurting out the need to rename the Holocene at a major conference, and the sober scientists gossiping back and forth this about this outburst.  Drama, action, at the heart of science.  Schwagerl goes on to claim that “Rare individuals sometimes change the course of human history on a large scale….But can ordinary human beings also alter the course of Earth’s history?...Yes, they can!” (3).  The exclamation point itself becomes a warning.  Schwagerl sandwiched this "Yes, they can!" between tales of Paul Crutzen and Thomas Midgley, the creator of freon, as examples of great benefit and destruction from an individual.  But that crucial involvement of one genius seems more likely with the personal constellations of lyric poetry, or, say, the achievements of Tolkien in blending his linguistics with his interest in developing an English mythology.  I'm not convinced that the same is true with science in the sense of what it notices and measures, that one and only one individual will ever notice a process of the world, however differently it might be framed.

Later, it turns out that this is key to Schwagerl's look at population, that population numbers aren’t the problem--with “an apocalyptic vision, you would have to see each newborn baby as an additional burden, instead of congratulating the parents” (77), because any one of those scorned, consuming billions could be the next genius who will save us all.  And increasingly, I find authors don't even seem disturbed by the assumption that there will be 10 billion of us by 2050.  Really?  Business as usual?

Indeed, Schwagerl will point out that “The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries represent a time of incredible expansion of the human comfort zone, certainly for those who have the means and have never suffered the acute violence of war or the slow violence of poverty” (32).  True enough.  Though so much suffering for those who do suffer war and poverty, which to me seems like a shadow that touches all of us, all the time, the specter that haunts our comfort zone.  Not to mention the thousands of other species we will push into extinction during this glorious century.

Schwagerl mentions in passing that “Wild nature no longer exists on land or out at sea” (37), he talks about ocean acidification, and the coming extinction of coral, but without any PH details or any real angst, he mentions the rise of CO2 concentrations--but can I share this with students, as if these are worth no more than a flicker of our attention?

The book has a not-teachable chapter about the geologic rules for declaring a new era, and then Chapter 5.  Useful when he points out that “Doomsday thinking prevents us from imagining a long-term future” (73); he criticizes short-term thinking, the epitome of American approaches; he adds that “If everyone followed the old American Dream, with its predilection for big cars, monoculture and enormous quantities of waste, it would result in a massive and long-lasting cultural and ecological impoverishment. what kind of dream is it that becomes a nightmare for everyone trying to live it?” (82).  All fine.  

Schwagerl asserts that “We need positive stories that guide the way ahead” (76).  Yes.  But then he adds, “Even if climate change turns out to be worse than scientists at the IPCC fear, it will not lead to …the collapse of civilization” (74)--and that is horrifically misleading.  Perhaps it's because the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report wasn't out when his book was published, but if we do push worse than these fears, what we recognize as civilization has no guarantee of lasting into the next century.  He adds,

For me, the Anthropocene is like a vantage point rediscovered: It creates the prospect of a deep future, of changes for the better. If the Anthropocene consisted only of devastation and environmental destruction, we would need to fight against it and actively prevent it from happening….Rather than defining humanity as the destroyer of nature, the Anthropocene casts people in an affirmative, long-term role (72)

Have you seen the Windows 10 ad? “a more human way to do”--

  
(See also "Microsoft's first Windows 10 ad is all about smiling babies".)  The book has that same optimistic assertion, this technological city upon the hill, without the path to lead us there. Schwagerl again:  “What our collective actions lack is long-term rationality or responsibility ‘to all posterity’” (78).  Yes, his whole book turns on us changing this. Uh-huh. Will Schwagerl be watching the Republican debates?

Toward the end of the book, Schwagerl criticizes Elizabeth Kolbert's claim that we shouldn't ever say 'good' and Anthropocene together.  Schwagerl thinks we will all step up and be wise and consider the 500-year consequences of our actions, that there is, can be, will be, the Good Anthropocene.  

Let's fall back on that key bit of Missouri stubbornness--Show Me first, before I jump into your circus ring and watch the elephants and tigers and polar bears dance.  Oh, wait, they'll all be extinct...

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The second book I'm looking at, The Human Age by Diane Ackerman, didn't even get me that angry.  It's colorful—there's a a long starting chapter on “Apps for Apes,” orangutans in Toronto with tablets, and their partial engagement, to show how we “blur the line…between natural and unnatural” (7).

  

  http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/city_hall/2012/10/03/toronto_zoo_conservation_authority_nixes_selling_or_turning_zoo_over_to_new_operators/orangutans_at_torontozoo.jpeg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpeg 

But this is a long way to go to assert that our relation to nature has shifted.  There are interesting stats, like “We and our domestic animals now make up 90 percent of all the mammalian biomass on Earth; in the year 1000, we and our animals were only 2 percent” (11).  I can probably work that into a bar conversation sometime, probably not the cans of Busch Light venue, but maybe the Stone IPA talks.  

More Ackerman:  “We are not the same apes flaking tools on the savanna, toting gemlike embers, and stringing a few words together like precious shells. It’s even hard to imagine our mental fantasia from that perspective” (12).    Well, no. I’m halfway through Robinson’s Shaman, in which he imagines just that. And he will keep doing that for another 200 pages.

Of other life in the solar system? Um, we have some places to go look, and specific plans to do that. But Ackerman says this: “We are such a lonely species” (15-6). If we are lonely, it’s by choice: Dog, cat, blue jay, squirrel, possum, raccoon, spider, ticks, mosquitoes, maples, hedge roses, honeysuckle, turtle, chicory, mulberry, goldfish, vulture, goldenrod, cedars, slugs, flies, lichen, moss, mushrooms, grasses, fox, butterfly, E.coli, yeast, cows, lilies, starling, geese, tomato…
  

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I ran back to my Jeep to get the third book, Adventures in the Anthropocene, return the banana peel that's going home to compost, and to stoke up on peanuts, my lunch-when-I forget-the-protein-bar, in these days when I'm resolutely not buying the day-old pastries at Lakota, even as I drool every time I pass the basket of them, just waiting there full of sugar and fat and everything happy.

This book starts off with a Geological Timescale and a map. Good so far.  I wasn't excited about the bland chapter titles: Oceans, Farmlands, Atmosphere, etc., but it turns out, this is swell. Each chapter starts with an italicized several pages of fairly tight overview of conditions/problems, and then launches off into her own quest, people she meets.  The book has 20 pages of endnotes and a nice index (Schwagerl doesn't have an index, which is important in class to steer research projects, giving students both a slightly narrowed scope, some connection between their projects, but which will also open out their choices).  And so the winner:

Adventures in the Anthropocene, which I plan to pair with Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.  

But now, different folks at MACC tell me I can't add any books to the course.  Email arbitration is out till Monday.  Sigh.  Will we be going back to "Once More to the Lake" for our insights?

later, bob