Summer Science Reading
July 30, 2009 – 7:32 pmI wanted to share with my AFN Friends some book recommendations I have, based on reading I have been doing in preparation for the March on Sacramento to Oppose Eco-tyranny. I thought Capt. Freedom may want to add them to the book list, and some of you might enjoy these reads:
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl: Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America’s great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of “black blizzards” that were like a biblical plague: “Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains” in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren’t suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan’s interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of “dust pneumonia” when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan’s powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers’ minds.
Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health!: As Berlau writes, “America . . . is still mighty prosperous, but environmentalism is putting us on the brink of danger as well. As technology after technology that our grandparents put in place is being banned, and new technologies never even come to market, we risk a public-health disaster. Environmentalists have promoted all sorts of doomsday scenarios about population explosions and massive cancer crises from pesticides that have been shown to be false. But now, because we have done away with so many useful products based on those scares, we are in danger of an old-fashion doomsday returning, because we’ve lost what protected us from the wrath of nature. Indeed, as we will see throughout this book, public health hazards caused by environmental policies are already on the scene.”
The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? : Ward holds the Gaia Hypothesis, and the thinking behind it, responsible for encouraging a set of fairy-tale assumptions about the earth, and he’d like his new book, due out this spring, to help puncture them. He hopes not only to shake the philosophical underpinnings of environmentalism, but to reshape our understanding of our relationship with nature, and of life’s ultimate sustainability on this planet and beyond,
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny: Evolution meets game theory in this upbeat follow-up to Wright’s much-praised The Moral Animal. Arguing against intellectual heavyweights such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Franz Boas, Wright contends optimistically that history progresses in a predictable direction and points toward a certain end: a world of increasing human cooperation where greed and hatred have outlived their usefulness. This thesis is elaborated by way of something Wright calls “non-zero-sumness,” which in game theory means a kind of win-win situation. The non-zero-sum dynamic, Wright says, is the driving force that has shaped history from the very beginnings of life, giving rise to increasing social complexity, technological innovation and, eventually, the Internet. From Polynesian chiefdoms and North America’s Shoshone culture to the depths of the Mongol Empire, Wright plunders world history for evidence to show that the so-called Information Age is simply part of a long-term trend. Globalization, he points out, has been around since Assyrian traders opened for business in the second millennium B.C. Even the newfangled phenomenon of “narrowcasting” was anticipated, he claims, when the costs of print publishing dropped in the 15th century and spawned a flurry of niche-oriented publications. Occasionally, Wright’s use of modish terminology can seem glib: feudal societies benefited from a “fractal” structure of nested polities, world culture has always been “fault-tolerant” and today’s societies are like a “giant multicultural brain.” Despite the game-theory jargon, however, this book sends an important message that, as human beings make moral progress, history, in its broadest outlines, is getting better all the time.
If you are going to fight ECO-TYRANNY, then these are pretty good weapons to have in your arsenal!
3 Responses to “Summer Science Reading”
The dust bowl was not man-made.
I did some research on dust storms for another web site and discovered the extraordinary truth: The 1930s suffered from a thousand-year drought. It was almost certainly caused by a seriously nasty El Nino that didn’t permit ANY moisture to get inland for years.
This is really new science, discovered this decade. Scientists checked ice core samples in glaciers and Arctic ice. They also checked sequences of tree rings in live trees and the remains of trees buried for centuries. They discovered that NO drought of this magnitude happened to the Great Plains since the Vikings were sacking villages in Europe.
Pioneers did stir up some dust with their farming, and did experience normal droughts before and after the 1930s, but nothing on the scale of the Dust Bowl. Ocean currents bat storm systems around like cats with mice.
Humans have little or no effect on temporary fluctuations in climate. Neither global warming nor Dust Bowl blame games turned out to be true.
http://www.helium.com/items/1332339-how-do-dust-storms-form
Here’s a sample:
“The rain stayed away, month after month, year after year, kept out as I said above by the dust storms themselves. The “black blizzards” reflected sunlight back into space. No evaporation could take place, hence no clouds could form. When conditions are right, dust storms feed on themselves. They absorb heat and remain dry. What had been set off, perhaps, by lack of erosion control, had become self-generating, and would not ease until prevailing weather patterns shifted in the 1940s.
“Historians had assumed for years that the dust storms started and grew worse as a result of the growth of farming in land that had formerly been grassland. They thought what had happened in the Middle East was happening all over again in America. As a result of straight line plowing before planting and after harvesting, heavy topsoil no longer could stay in place in strong prairie winds. The prairie grass that used to do the job was gone. Farmers had yet to learn good soil management practices. They simply had assumed that practices that worked well enough back East would work fine out West.
“However, puzzled researchers in the field of historical meteorology recently noted that the drought in the Great Plaines in the 1950s stayed in the South and didn’t spread north, unlike the one during the Dust Bowl years. These dry cycles occur roughly every 20 years on the Great Plaines. They also noted that the Fifties drought wasn’t nearly as severe and didn’t last for years with little or no rain. None of the other previous and subsequent droughts noted in records in that region suffered from the same widespread devastation, either. They were much more similar to the drought of the 1950s. What was so special about the 1930s? Could all that horror really been nature’s response merely to poor farming practices? If so, one would think that the same kind of devastation would’ve hit the Great Plaines earlier, say around the turn of the century. But it didn’t.”
By Sally Morem on Aug 3, 2009
Oh, BTW, I LOVE “Non-Zero.” It’s a wonderful book on historical self-organization processes involving societies around the world, permitting them to grow in complexity and power.
Loaded with good ammo for people fighting statism.
By Sally Morem on Aug 3, 2009
“The Worst Hard Time” would be a highly relevant book today, given the legacy of US policy regarding forest fire prevention and the resulting over-abundance of ‘climax forest’ in the West, and what risk that poses. Add to that the enormous over-growth of desert metropolises like Las Vegas and Phoenix, and a real witches’ brew of very possible calamaties are hiding in plain sight.
Non-ideological, common-sense statesmanship and stewardship is wanting; a book like this could be the catalyst for a sane discussion that might lead to positive action.
Thank you for the fine summaries of the salient points of these books.
By ssgconway on Aug 12, 2009