The Heartbeat of Trees: Peter Wohlleben returns to the surprisingly mysterious, often strange world of trees

The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond With Forests and Nature

By Peter Wohllenben

Greystone Books; 2021

Do trees have heartbeats? That certainly sounds like the sort of question that would intrigue and inspire The Hidden Life of Trees author Peter Wholleben. And indeed he devotes a chapter of his latest book to the subject, in addition to taking his title from it. 

Trees do not, of course, have hearts, and thus don't have literal heartbeats. But, Wholleben points out, what blood is to people, water is to trees, and thus they need something that performs a pumping function similar to the heart. How exactly they pump water throughout their huge bodies is, somewhat surprisingly, still a mystery,. But Wohllenben points, as he so often does, to new research, this bit from a team of international scientists who noticed that a particular tree hung its branches lower at night. Further investigation of more trees discovered that their branches similarly changed positions every three to four hours. Could they be doing this in order to pump water throughout their bodies? Did the scientists discover the heartbeat of trees?

If so, it would make a certain amount of sense that a tree's "heart" beats only once ever few hours, while human beings' hearts beat somewhere between 60 and100 times a minute; it would be one more illustration of the vast difference in the way trees and humans experience the passage of time. Trees are much, much slower in every respect from human beings, from how long it takes them to react to stimuli to how long their lifespans are.

Readers of Wohlleben's previous books will find that Heartbeat is very much more of the same, and will likely be pleased with the discovery, seeing how well-received his earlier books were. As with Secret Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals, each chapter is more or less standalone, a complete short, incredibly readable essay of its own, to the extent that a reader can easily pick it up and set it down at their own rate, and almost pick any chapter at random to read, and read the chapters of the book in any order, really.

Each of these generally begins with a question or observation—Why is the forest green, for example—and then Whollenben tackles it, in the process calling on personal anecdotes from his own life among trees as a forester and modern research about the nature of plants and trees. Some passages of the book build upon one another, as in the early chapters where he takes each of our six senses in turn and discusses how they relate to the forest, or later when he recounts various trips to endangered forests where activists are trying to preserve them. 

As with his previous works, Heartbeat of Trees challenges the way we think about trees, offering many new insights that make it difficult to just walk by them on the street without thinking of them as rather dynamic and incredibly strange living things ever again. 

As for the climate crisis, it haunts the background of many sections of the book, and comes to the fore on a chapter on climate change, in which he reiterates forests power to cool the climate and discusses the folly of thinking of wood as a carbon neutral fuel source. He also notes that we need to start thinking more seriously about the world as an ecosystem in which we are a part, rather than the traditional separation we do where we think of the environment as something apart from us.

"The realization that we are still a part of this wonderful system and that we function according to the same rules as all other species is, thank goodness, gradually making headway," he concludes his introduction. "And it's only when it comes to the fore that conversation can be effective—that is to say, when we realize that what we are conserving is not just other forms of life but, first and foremost, ourselves." 

David Williams' Our Angry Eden and the two meanings of taking care of creation

Our Angry Eden: Faith & Hope on a Hotter, Harsher Planet

By David Williams

Broadleaf Books; 2021

The word "care" has several meanings, as author and Presbyterian pastor David Williams notes in his new book, Our Angry Eden. He was inspired to write it, he says, after attending a gathering at his church on "creation care," the idea that we as human beings need to protect the environment because it is God's creation, and that he gifted it to us and commanded us to do so in the first stories of the Bible.

But to take care of creation can have another meaning, too. As Williams writes:

We need to take "care" of God's creation in the way that we take "care" when we find ourselves bobbing precariously on a surfboard with a great white shark moving lazily in the murky shadows beneath. We need to take "care" of it in the way that we take "care" when we teeter on the ledge of a precipice.

We have the power to do enormous damage to the Earth itself but, in the long run, the Earth can and will survive us, and it can certainly survive without us should we succeed in rendering it uninhabitable to human life.

"Do we think creation cares?" Williams asks. "It does not...Creation would continue as if nothing had happened. After a hundred million years, there'd be no trace of us at all."

And as for God, well, God may care about us far more deeply than his creation does, but, Williams writes, "God also allows us to reap the harvest we have sown, no matter what that harvest might be." 

As severe as the words in Williams' introduction may be, his is not a climate book that revels in doomism, but it is stark in its appraisal of how much trouble we're in and, at times, evokes the sort of old-fashioned fear of God that used to be such a staple of Christian sermons, particularly in centuries past. Given the pressures we've put on the Earth, and the damage we've done to it, we probably should be afraid of the future we're creating for ourselves. Certainly afraid enough to change our behavior.

Williams writes like a person who is used to writing strong sermons or homilies, as he's quite adept at telling stories that begin as personal anecdotes and then connect to larger issues and broader themes. He does this throughout the book, which can therefore have the feel of a themed collection of sermons at times.

After his efforts to try and reframe the idea of creation care as not just something worth doing because the environment is fragile, but urgently needed because we are more fragile still, Williams reviews the state of the world, many of the hows and whys that got us into the current climate crisis and, ultimately, suggests ways to face it, particularly ways to do so as Christians.

Although it is not necessary to be a person of faith to read, enjoy and learn from Our Angry Eden, much of the book is specific to the Christian faith, and will prove most relevant to those with a background in Christianity. For example, Williams writes on how caring for climate refugees connects to Biblical edicts to care for strangers. And  how the concept of keeping holy the Sabbath can be extended into a worldview that is beneficial to the Earth. Or how Jesus' proverb of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's connects to our responsibilities as citizens in our current republic, the United States of America.

There are also passages that deal with arguments more likely to arise within Christian communities than without, as when he tackles the concept of the rapture (which he calls un-Christian) or argues for becoming vegetarian in a way that evokes faith as well as the more familiar arguments for doing so. 

The book ends with something of an action plan labeled "Nine Ways Forward," offering nine positive, concrete steps we can take to take care of creation, meaning to protect our world, while we also take care of creation, meaning trying to guarantee a continued place of safety on our rapidly changing world.  

God is mentioned repeatedly throughout these steps, but it's well worth noting that these aren't necessarily religious ways forward, but ones that anyone, regardless of faith background, can engage in.

Ecology meets anomalistics—and cryptozoology the climate crisis—in Greening The Paranormal

Greening The Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience

Edited by Jack Hunter

August Night Press; 2019

In his introduction to the essay collection Greening The Paranormal, editor Jack Hunter explains that the motivation behind the project wasn't merely that the subjects of what he calls anomalistics (that is, the paranormal) and ecology are both interesting subjects, or that the ways they intersect with one another are interesting. 

Rather, those with an interest in the paranormal represent a large and perhaps untapped source of positive activism for addressing various ecological crises.

Belief in the paranormal is "remarkably common in the Western world," Hunter writes, noting a survey that suggests 75.9 % of the U.S. population holds "some form of paranormal belief", while only 53% are afraid of global warming or climate change. 

"Based on these figures it would appear that there are more paranormal believers in the US than people worried about the damage we have inflicted on the global ecosystem," Hunter writes, before asking, "What if the paranormal demographic could also be tapped into for climate change mitigation?"*

So there's that, but there's also, the fact that "approaches emerging from the study of (and engagement with) the supernatural may ultimately help us reconnect with the natural, and in so doing develop innovative approaches to confronting the eco-crisis," and "for the essential task of contributing towards a much broader—necessary—change of perspective concerning our relationship to the living planet." 

Perhaps the best example of this comes in a passage about animism he writes, and the granting of legal personhood status to certain ecosystems, like Whanganui River in New Zealand, the first river to be granted legal personhood. Whether or not we as individuals subscribe to animistic beliefs, it seems pretty clear that if we treated animals, plants and all elements of the natural world as if they had a degree of sentience, we would inevitably treat the world more kindly.  

While his lengthy introduction is perhaps the most compelling chapter in the book, the collection that follows it is an interesting, if curious, one. It ranges so widely that it can be difficult to find throughlines, with "the paranormal" being such an awfully broad topic. I found myself wishing that Hunter's introductory essay, sizable though it is, was the entirety of the book. Or that Hunter, or perhaps some other author like him, would engage in a book-length argument aimed at convincing those three-fourths of Americans who believe in some aspect of the paranormal to start taking action regarding climate change.

Instead, that chapter is followed by sixteen essays, covering subjects as diverse as various Native American spiritual beliefs and worldviews, psychedelic experiences, the concept of soul birds and, most oddly to my eye, a bit of literary criticism focused on predators of humanity in Whitley Strieber's early writing and Communion. 

Of the essays beyond Hunter's, the one I was most interested in was Susan Marsh's "Cryptozoology in a Changing World," as cryptozoology is the aspect of the paranormal/anomalistics which I am personally most interested in (and certainly the one I've devoted the most reading to). 

It was during all of the international coverage of the Brazilian wildfires of 2019, the ones that choked Rio de Janeiro with smoke and turned the skies in Brazil that unsettling, apocalyptic shade that the thought occurred to me that there is a particularly compelling narrative regarding cryptozoology and species loss due to the climate crisis. That is, if we are losing species at such an alarming rate that we may actually be in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, what does that say about the safety of particularly large animals that are apparently so rare that they may not even exist at all?

Among the many intriguing cryptids, those animals thought to perhaps exist but not yet proven to do so that cryptozoologists spend their time chasing, is a giant ground sloth thought to perhaps still live somewhere in the Amazon jungle, and to have inspired indigenous people's stories of the giant monster Mapinguari. If there really is such an undiscovered animal in the Amazon, how would the wildfires there, in addition to the regular, steady rate of deforestation, affect it, or other South American cryptids, like giant anacondas, giant monkeys or De Loys' ape? 

Or, to take perhaps the most famous cryptid for an example, if Bigfoot really is real—and I personally don't think it is—then what are the chances it survives the climate crisis? If there really were a small breeding population of  large apes living in North America, surely these extremely rare animals would be at great risk of going extinct from various extreme environmental pressures before they can be discovered by science. (What a terrible irony would be if scientists did find that there really was such an animal as Bigfoot, but that they went extinct in, say, 2008).  

Marsh's essay takes a different approach to this particular intersection, though. Rather than focusing on how tiny populations of cryptids are at even greater danger than species robust enough to be known to definitively exist, she discusses how ever-increasing human populations and habitat erosion can lead to crytpids becoming more rare...or more frequently seen.

She cites examples of expeditions searching for the Almas and Orang Pendek—hairy hominids rumored to live in Russia and Sumatra, respectively—and how sightings of them have decreased in areas where they were once quite rich. 

In contrast, however, the United States' answer to the yeti-like creatures, the aforementioned Bigfoot, have only increased as our populations have grown. "So, could Bigfoot, Sasquatch and their ilk be growing bolder as they encounter more and more humans in their natural habitats?" 

Marsh notes that the world's other most famous cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster, has been seen more and more as development increased around its supposed habitat, not less and less.  She then cites two of cryptozoology's favorite examples, the okapi and the coelacanth, as animals who were only officially discovered by science once Western "civilization" started to encroach on previously wilder, less-explored regions. 

For cryptozoologists, perhaps there is therefore a silver-lining to the gray clouds of smoke emanating from Western wildfires: Maybe the last of the Bigfoot won't die undiscovered as the planet warms and their habitat buns, but come stumbling out of the fire and into the spotlight of science? 

Concern for animals that  may not actually even exist may seem like misplaced concern, given the urgency of the climate crisis and the mass extinction crisis, but then, concern is concern. A world that's wilder, cleaner and cooler, a world more likely to support Bigfoot, lake monsters and giant Brazilian ground sloths is a world much more likely to support all the animals that we know definitely do exist...including humanity. 

*It is here perhaps worth recalling what Gary Gardner said about faith communities and how they are so well-positioned to effect major, positive changes when it comes to addressing the ecological crises in his book The Earth Cries Out, reviewed in the previous post. Hunter too spends some time talking about organized religion's posture toward environmentalism.                                                                                           

Dressing and keeping the garden: Creation care in Reforesting Faith and The Earth Cries Out

Carpenter-turned-doctor Matthew Sleeth writes in his Reforesting Faith (WaterBrook; 2019) about an instance where he had volunteered to plant trees at his conservative church, and one of the pastors told him that he had "the theology of  a tree hugger." "This was not meant as a compliment," Sleeth writes. 

While the pastor was likely drawing some sort of distinction between conservative values and progressive ones as represented by concern for the environment, it certainly implied that God himself isn't a tree hugger or, as Sleeth put it, "My first reaction to the pastor's comment was, 'Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe God doesn't care about trees.'"

It would be awfully bizarre if God didn't care about trees, of course, as he did create them, right? Nevertheless, the encounter sent Sleeth to seek out his Bible—and I should perhaps here note that Sleeth and his church believe that "Scripture is the inspired, inerrant Word of God"—and start reading, cover to cover, pausing to underline everything the Bible had to say about trees. The result was this book, so obviously the Bible has a lot to say on the subject.

Reforesting Faith is essentially a brisk re-reading of the story of the Bible, from God planting the garden of Eden during Genesis' creation stories, with two important trees at their center, to Jesus' death on a cross made from a tree, pausing to note when and where trees appear, and linger on their meaning.

That Sleeth was able to produce an entire book (even a relatively short one, at under 200 pages) on the subject is evidence to how many trees there are in the story of the Bible, even if Sleeth is pretty generous in his definition of a "tree," including as he does tree-adjacent symbols like bushes, branches, walking sticks, fruit or seed; indeed, as Sleeth writes, "Every significant theological event in the Bible is marked by a tree."

What does this mean? 

Well, for one thing, it means that if Sleeth was prepared all those years ago, he probably could have shut down that pastor who made the tree hugger comment pretty quickly and thoroughly. God obviously does care about trees, and the writers of the Bible—although, again, Sleeth would say the ultimate author, via divine inspiration, was God himself—constantly employed them as plot-points and symbols.

For another, it makes a pretty strong argument that Christians like Sleeth probably should be tree huggers. Forgetting for a moment the absolute ecological necessity trees are (providing oxygen and holding our atmosphere together in a livable configuration) and the many other benefits they provide humanity, of varying degrees of importance (holding soil together, breaking storms, providing food, giving shade, being aesthetically pleasing, etc), they should hold an additional, theological value for Christians. 

Anyone can pause under a tree and appreciate, say, the cool of its shade, the way it sways or seems to whisper in a slight breeze, or the beauty of its intricate construction. And anyone can marvel at the unusual slow time scale that trees exist on, outliving humans by decades or centuries, and contemplate what that says about us and our place in the world. 

But for Christians, they can also be a tangible, almost ever-present signal to stop and consider the two trees of Eden, the olive branch the dove brought back to Noah to let him know the flood was abating, the oak tree God's messengers first met Abraham over before initiating the covenant, the grove Abraham planted in Beersheba, the burning bush God spoke to Moses out of, and on and on, until the story Christians read in the Bible reaches its climax, and Jesus retreats to olive groves to pray fervently, and is ultimately nailed to a tree.

"God's original plan was for humanity to dress and keep trees," Sleeth concludes his book, "For those of us who claim the name of Christ, we ought to take a long, hard look at how well we are fulfilling our role as God's stewards." (Here the author is referring to the second creation story in Genesis, where in Genesis 2:15 "the Lord God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress and keep it."). 

If pastors are derisively dismissing congregants who plant trees as tree huggers, then the answer would appear to be "Not great." Hopefully Sleeth's book gets into the right hands then, and can change some minds. Christians wield an incredible amount of social and political power in the world in general and America and particular, and it's hard to think of many things that could effect greater and more rapid good for the world if that power were to be applied for planting and protecting trees.

Gary Gardner notes the political power of Christian communities, much of it unused when it comes to the environmental crisis, in his example-filled, blueprint-like The Earth Cries Out (Orbis; 2021). 

"People of faith bring a set of infrastructural, social, financial, political, and, of course, moral and spiritual, tools to the sustainability challenges of our time," he writes, before listing the many virtues of faith communities, from meeting regularly and being highly motivated to bearing moral authority to controlling "meaningful amounts of investment capital" .and managing land and buildings "that are potential sustainability showcases." 

"Few institutions at the global level have such a broad and powerful tool set," he writes, "Of course, these asserts are seldom utilized to their fullest potential; people of faith are arguably punching well below their weight on the critical issues of our day." 

To extend the metaphor, The Earth Cries Out offers coaching on how throw better, more effective punches. 

Gardner begins his discussion with "signs of the times," a phrase that was "Jesus' terms for societal markings of moral importance." These involve the facts that, if you're reading this blog,  you're likely already well aware of, like the rapidly warming planet caused by runaway carbon dioxide emissions and the sixth extinction ("This unraveling of the fabric of life is nothing less than the decimation of billons of years of God's creative work," as Gardner memorably refers to it). 

So what can faith communities do about the state of the earth, which is in its threatened state in large part because, as Gardner puts it, humanity has corrupted the dominion we were given over God's creation into our domination of it...? 

The chapters that follow discuss various sustainability challenges—energy, land, food—as well as work being done by some faith groups to address them, and often times quite specific examples of efforts, efforts that an engaged and committed church or faith community can replicate.

Many of these actions may be familiar to many readers, including smart divestment (particularly of fossil fuel industry) and reinvestment, solar panel installation, creating community gardens and green spaces (the latter of which can serve dual, environmental as well as spiritual functions), patronizing particularly sustainable and just business models, and so on. 

These may be practices that individuals are already committed to in their personal lives, but Gardner discusses them on the scaled-up level of a parish, congregation or other faith community, where the impact is several orders of magnitude greater than that  personal level. 

Though grounded in the author's Catholic faith, the book is filled with examples that aren't limited to a single denomination, or even a single religion, but strives to be inclusive of people of faith in general. Given the enormity of the crises facing us at this point in history, faith is probably going to be a pretty important component in what is needed to fix the megaproblems before us, regardless of the intricacies of how one worships (or if one worships at all). 

If one does so, though, then The Earth Cries Out offers plenty of strategies to bring to one's fellow faithful. 

Fight, fight, fight!: Michael E. Mann takes on all comers in The New Climate War

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

By Michael E. Mann

PublicAffaris; 2021

Michael E. Mann is a scientist, author and climate activist who rose to some degree of prominence—infamy, in some circles—for his part in producing the so-called "hockey stick" graph, a 1999 graph showing the sharp, sudden and then steady increase in temperatures that accompanied the industrial revolution in a compelling visual. That is, it was shaped like a hockey stick, being relatively flat for a long time and then curving dramatically upward. 

Given his years in the field, he's a veteran of the climate war, or, I suppose, a veteran in what he would now term the old climate war, as his new book heralds the commencement of a new climate war. It's relatively late in the book—page 231—that he defines the old climate war as a war on the science itself, in the form of outright denialism of global warming and a climate crisis of any kind, and the new climate war as the war on action to do anything about actually solving the climate crisis.

The war metaphor runs through the entirety of the book. "We are in a war," Mann writes, "but before we engage, we must understand the mind of the enemy," which he defines as "the forces of denial and delay."  He talks of a four-point battle plan*, he reviews the war so far, he names various factions of enemies and their tactics, and he even addresses his continual talk of war: "The surest way to lose a war is to refuse to recognize you're in one in the first place."

It is an apt metaphor for Mann, as it fits the pugilistic tone of the book. In fact, despite his warnings of the enemy seeking to drive wedges into the climate movement wherever they see the smallest cleavage—say, for example, purity tests, like activists attacking climate scientists for flying in airplanes to get to conferences to give speeches, or the fight over carbon pricing, wherein some faction allow perfect to be the enemy of good—he spends an awful lot of time on engaging in internecine warfare himself. 

Perhaps because Mann has been so deeply entrenched in the climate wars himself for so long, he has opinions and experiences with almost every element of it, and so he has opinions on everything. He doesn't hesitate to share these, and even though he warns of the dangers of climate activists fighting among themselves over relatively small matters, which only helps the forces of delay, he engages in quite a bit of seeming score-settling in the book, reliving Twitter battles in which he quotes his own tweets and quotes since-deleted tweets or tweets that he notes have a high likelihood of having come from bots. 

He also attacks his fellow activists, not necessarily in the harshest terms, but a surprising amount of real estate seems devoted to criticizing other climate activists, usually on the grounds that they are doing it wrong, engaging in, for example, "doomism" (on the part of Vox's David Roberts in some tweets, for example) or overshooting in their calls for systemic change (Naomi Klein's identifying capitalism as a major problem in need of being addressed, for example).

Entire chapters are devoted to the need for the members of the climate movement not to fight among themselves, but, well, Mann does an awful lot of relitigating of minor friendly fire incidents in those chapters and some that follow. 

One hopes that Mann doesn't lose too much of his audience in these sections, or distract from his own messaging. The more compelling parts of the book include those on the idea of deflection campaigns, in which corporations move the onus of action from themselves to the individual**, often quite effectively (Among the examples are the famous "crying Indian" anti-littering ad that deflected the responsibility for litter from those companies that produce all the disposable packaging to consumers who don't dispose of it properly, or the gun lobby's "guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogan). 

So too are the sections on what he calls "the non-solution solution," like attempts to geo-engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change, and his arguments against "doomism", in the chapter "The Truth is Bad Enough." Though that chapter too involves keeping some of his old Twitter fights going, it also effectively argues that there's no need to exaggerate the crisis we're in, which has the risk of paralyzing people with fear—as the title of the chapter indicates, no exaggeration is needed to paint a scary, hopefully action-motivating image of where we're at as a planet. 

Mann seems to love alliteration when discussing the forces of inaction, the enemy armies in the climate wars, or, what he often terms "inactivists." His book details the transition from the old climate war to the new one:

The inactivists have been forced into retreat from "hard" climate denials to "softer denial: downplaying, deflecting, dividing, delaying, and despair-mongering. These are the multiple fronts of the new climate war. Any plan for victory requires recognizing and defeating the tactics now being used by inactivists as they continue to wage war.

That might seem like a victory, what with the enemy retreating metaphor, but we're a long way from a cessation of all hostilities. Still, Mann provides a hopeful note in his final chapter, "Meeting the Challenge":

Despite the challenges detailed in this book, I am cautiously optimistic—that is to say, neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful—about the prospects for tackling the climate crisis in the years ahead. The reason for that optimism is a confluence of developments, a "perfect storm," if you will, of eye-opening events that are helping to prepare us for the task ahead. First, there have been a series of unprecedented, extreme weather disasters that have vivified the climate-change threat. Second, a global pandemic has now taught us key lessons about vulnerability and risk. And finally, we've seen the reawakening of environmental activism, and , in particular, a popular uprising by children across the world that has framed climate change as the defining challenge of our time.

I certainly hope that's enough. If you were to read just one book about the climate crisis this year, I don't think I'd recommend this one, if only because of Mann's tendency to get sidetracked by his personal history and his own war stories (Jelmers Mommers' How Are We Going To Explain This?, reviewed in the previous post, is probably a better candidate). But The New Climate War has plenty of redeeming qualities too and heck, who says you only have to read just one book about the climate crisis this year...?

*If you're curious, the plan is: 1.) "Disregard the doomsayers", 2.) "A child will lead them", 3.) "Educate, educate, educate" and 4.) "Changing the system requires systemic change"

**I found this passage  from page 61 particularly well-put:

There are plenty of lifestyle changes that should be encouraged, many of which make us happier and healthier, save us money, and decrease our environmental footprint...But consumer choice doesn't buld high-speed railways, fund research and development in renewable energy, or place a price on carbon emissions. Any real solution must involve both individual action and systemic change....So there is a delicate middle ground—which we must seek out—that encourages personal responsibility and individual action while continuing to use all of the lever arms of democracy (including voting!) to pressure politicians to support climate-friendly governmental policies.

That's the question: Jelmer Mommers asks How Are We Going To Explain This?

How Are We Going To Explain This?: Our Future on a Hot Earth

By Jelmer Mommers
Scribner; 2020

It's a good thing we all know not to judge books by their covers, or else I would be tempted to judge Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers' How Are We Going To Explain This? rather harshly. It's not that the image of a baby crawling around in a radiation suit that adorns it is too alarmist—one really can't be too alarmist about an urgent threat to all life on Earth as we know it—but that there's something almost flip about the image, which not even the worst-case scenarios would make a reality. It therefore looks like a joke, and because the climate crisis Mommers writes about is no laughing matter, it seems almost inappropriate, an overcorrection to the alarmism. 

It doesn't really fit the tone of the book though, once again proving the value of that cover-judging adage: How Are We Going To Explain This? might have a poor cover, but it's a pretty great book. In fact, Mommers' book is pretty much an ideal one on the subject. It's sharply, succinctly and thoroughly explains the climate crisis, how exactly we as a planet and as species got to this point, how deep the shit we are in actually is*, and what we can do about it in engaging, readable prose. And it's less than 175 pages.

Five years in the making, the book was a bestseller in Mommers' home country of the Netherlands, and is now available to U.S. audiences in a translation by Laura Vroomen and Anna Asbury. It's remarkably up to date, with a lot of discussion of the cornonavirus pandemic, and what that has revealed about our society, things that may be quite relevant to confronting the climate crisis, given the similarity of the two.

Indeed, the question of the appropriate metaphor for our necessary response to the climate crisis might be answered by looking to the covid crisis. The New Deal, the U.S. mobilization during World War II, The Marshall Plan, the moon shot—each of these have been suggested historical analogies for how we should think about what we need to do to save the world, although each has problematic elements, or to fall apart at some point (Something Naomi Klein discussed in her On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal). 

But what about coronavirus?

Writes Mommers:

Suddenly governments demonstrated their ability to listen to scientists, free up cash, and take the lead. Even while the scientific facts on COVID-19 were much less robust than those on climate changed, politicians decided to act. The responsible ones among them acted with precisely the "better safe than sorry" mentality that we need so as to stop the habitability of the earth from shrinking further...

Budgetary rules were let go of, central banks rushed in to help, and money was made available to the researchers who needed it most. The speed with which testing capacity an intensive care capacity were ramped up reminded many of wartime. But it was peacetime, and we were learning something about our capacity for collective action. 

Remember, Mommers was watching the pandemic unfold from the Netherlands, so he perhaps had better examples of responsible governments leaping into action to save their populaces than we saw here in America during much of the past year. Still, for all of those noisy individuals who flout the efficacy of masks and the seriousness of the disease, far more Americans took action to slow the spread of the virus. We can probably expect the same from the same players when it comes to combatting climate change; the important thing is to keep those noisy individuals out of the positions of power like, oh, say, President of the United States of America, going forward. 

The book is divided into three parts: What's the Problem?, Where Are We Headed? and What Can We Do? The first part goes all the way back to the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000  years ago and the advent of agriculture, although Mommers moves fleetly through history, noting how humanity and the climate have interacted to the past, and paying special attention to how humanity thought of nature, which, for too long now, was something we thought of as separate from ourselves, rather than something we were ae part of ("History also shows us that the idea of man as an independent and superior being, elevated above all other creatures, is a relatively recent invention, not an immutable fact," Mommers writes, hopefully).

The second part imagines two separate future scenarios, one in which the world has warmed 2.6-degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution (i.e. "hothouse earth"), and one in which the world's warming has successfully been kept to 1.6-degrees Celsius (Here Mommers' book echoes a conceit explored at some length in Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac's The Future We Choose). 

In truth, neither of those exact scenarios is the most likely. Chances are, there will ultimately end up being some amalgamation of the two, and we will end up  falling somewhere between them...although there's also a chance we end up in a world far worse than what is usually presented as the bad option, should various feedback loops and cascading crises exacerbate warming more quickly than expected. 

The third and final part focuses on what we can do, and though you've likely heard most of what we can do collectively and as individuals before, Mommers presents it rather elegantly, and details some interesting actions some are taking beyond the most often cited, like divestment campaigns and lawyers taking legal actions against fossil fuel companies and governments (with varying degrees of success). 

Mommers doesn't diminish the enormity of the undertaking at all—something he refers to as The Great Turn—but also elevates the power of small changes, particularly how one person making a small change can influence others to make that same small change. There is, therefore, a magnifying effect to every little thing we do, whether it's eating less (or no) meat, choosing trains over planes or buying an electric vehicle. 

Whether enough people make those small changes, and whether or not governments ever make the big changes, is sometimes a cause for hopefulness...and sometimes a cause for hopelessness, depending on the day. As frank as Mommers can be, however, I like the relatively upbeat note he strikes near the end of the book:

But then I remind myself that we don't know how this story ends. The behavior of CO2 particles is predictable, that of people is not.

Also unpredictable? The advent of the coronavirus as a pandemic that would radically alter daily life almost everywhere in the world. The pandemic taught us, Mommers writes, that the future is unpredictable and that we're all vulnerable. It also gave us a new example of how an urgent and deadly threat that could inspire collective action for the greater good. 

*Mommers' actual phrasing was this: "The truth of the matter is, we're in unbelievably deep shit. Mankind has never experienced the warmer climate we're heading for. Local droughts, local flooding, local extreme weather conditions—we're used to all that, but nothing in history has prepared us for worldwide climate disurptiton, with many consequences that are unpleasant in themselves and disastrous when combined. 

Don't Panic: Reading Douglas Adams' Last Chance To See 30 years later

Last Chance To See

By Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

Harmony Books; 1990

In 1985 Observer Colour Magazine sent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, zoologist Mark Carwardine and a photographer to Madagascar in search of the elusive aye-aye for an article. I never read that article, but I am guessing it was a pretty inspired idea and the trip went well for all involved, as Adams and Carwardine continued their partnership well beyond that initial collaboration, soon embarking on a quest of sorts using that same template: The pair would pick out one of the world's most endangered animals, and then take a trip to see if they could find it in the wild. They ended up spending several years on the project.

The result of all that travel was the 1990 book Last Chance To See...although, like so much of Adams' work, it wasn't just a book. Adams and Carwardine first produced a BBC Radio 4 documentary series of their adventures that ran in 1989. 

Given the particular subject, animals on the verge of extinction, it is perhaps a strange book to read for the first time 31 years after initial publication. The same can be said of many books dealing with science and current events, of course, but the intervening decades mean much of the most salient information in the book might no longer be relevant; some animals that were on the brink might have recovered, some might have actually gone extinct (Indeed, the Yangtze river dolphin and the northern white rhinoceros, both animals that were searched for in the book, are now presumed extinct and functionally extinct, respectively). 

Of course, while one of the goals of Last Chance To See (the book and the radio show, as well as the original Observer article on the aye-aye), was to raise awareness of endangered species, there are certainly pleasures to be had in the reading of the book decades later, regardless of how up-to-date it's statistics on various breeding programs or wild animal counts might be.

The book is, after all, written by Adams, and the very sorts of witty observations on the human condition and comedy sketch-like conversations that punctuate his novels appear liberally throughout the book, which is essentially a first-person travelogue about an odd couple of traveling companions, each chapter devoted to the journey to a particular place to see a particular animal.

"My role, and one for which I was entirety qualified," Adams explained in his introduction, "was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise." That and, of course, to remember it all long enough to write it down afterwards. While the division of labor isn't entirely clear from the book, Adams seems to indicate that Carwardine had to do all of the hard work regarding the organizing of the trips and also the explaining of things to Adams, while Adams took notes and later wrote the book (While they share the author credit on the cover, the book sounds like Adams and is written in first-person; Carwardine does write an epilogue and he took all of the pictures included).

Each chapter chronicles a different trip, with the aye-aye story told extremely briefly in the introduction. From there the pair seek out the Komodo dragon in Indonesia, the northern white rhinoceros in Zaire (with a detour to visit mountain gorillas), the kakapo in New Zealand, the aforementioned Yangtze river dolphin in China (the only animal they completely fail to find in the wild) and the Rodrigues fruit bat in Mauritus (although their ornithologist contacts there quickly convince them to spend less time with the bat and more time with the even rarer birds that they are working to help). 

While rare animals facing the specter of extinction doesn't exactly sound like comedy gold, Adams is a skilled enough humorist to find plenty of material. This is thanks, in large part, to the fact that he writes not only about the animals and their environments, but about people: He writes about himself and Carwardine, and the ways in which they are different from one another and from those they meet, he writes about fellow eco-tourists (quite memorably in the case of a pair of German students who so perfectly fit the stereotype of Gemran students that Adams is embarrassed by their inclusion), he writes about the various conservationists (many of whom qualify as what might charitably referred to as "characters") and he writes a lot about various bureaucrats in government offices and airports.

By constructing the book as a travelogue as much as a book about animals, Adams is able to treat readers to such stories as he and his crew's attempts to buy a condom in rural China, which proves to be only slightly less difficult than finding a river dolphin (The condom was to cover a microphone so they could safely lower it under the water, although no one they kinda sorta spoke to thought that's what it was for). We get to ride in too-small, overcrowded airplanes and dangerously-driven cars on poor roads. We get to marvel at foreign traffic patterns.

Beyond teasing out comedy bits, Adams proves quite adept at finding and communicating various cosmic ironies about life on Earth. Like, for example, that the lemurs were only able to flourish on Madagascar because there were no monkeys present, and thus they could fill the various niches that monkeys filled elsewhere—and then as soon as monkeys, in the form of ape-descended life forms more commonly known as human beings—arrived, we almost immediately imperiled them, doing the work out distant evolutionary ancestors would have done had they been able to take ships and planes to Madagascar. Now, it's up to us monkeys to save them. 

While best-known for his fiction, Adams is quite a skilled non-fiction writer...although there are several passages where I found myself wondering how much he was fictionalizing certain characters and encounters. Some, like the Melbourne-based expert on venomous creatures that is bored silly by venom and venomous creatures and isn't shy about saying so, seems like the sort of character who might have appeared in one of Adams' novels, and his dialogue seems almost too perfect. 

And then there's the kakapo, an animal so ridiculous that I would have been certain Adams had invented it for one of his Hitchhiker's books...were this book not labeled non-fiction. The kakapo is the world's largest parrot, and the only flightless one, although it appears to forget that it can't fly, as, when threatened, it will run up a tree, run off a branch and make an attempt, only to fall back to the ground where it started.

Their method of breeding is similarly complex and nonsensical, and involves the male calling from a "bowl" it makes in the ground to amplify its voice, and then the female having to walk—sometimes for miles—to get to the calling male's bowl. And hopefully he's there when she arrives, or they will have missed their connection. It  is one of those animals that, when one learns about it, one isn't entirely surprised to find out that it's endangered. 

Adams died suddenly in 2001 at the age of 49, and thus didn't have an opportunity to revisit his work on Last Chance To See. However in 2009, 20 years after the broadcast of the radio series, the BBC released a television show by that name, in which actor (and Adams' friend) Stephen Fry and Carwardine revisit many of the animals to see how they are doing.

 Even that series is now over a decade out of date, however. Time moves fast in the world of conversation, but some broad truths don't change, even if some numbers and statistics might. Animals will always be imperiled, it will most often be all our fault and it will  be within our power to save them. 

Here's hoping for more chances to see. 

A forest of stories: Cécile Benoist and Charlotte Gastaut's children's book for all ages tells over a dozen tree tales

Every Tree Has a Story

By Cécile Benoist and Charlotte Gastaut

Downtown Bookworks; 2018

Originally published in France as Un arbe, une historie (A Tree, A Story), this gorgeous oversized children's book is visually quite striking. The bold artwork by Charlotte Gastaut fills each 14-inch-high, 18-inch-long two-page spread with elaborately constructed imagery, dense with design elements and filigree. There is space left on each for the text of the story being illustrated, of course, but writer Cécile Benoist's paragraphs of prose always look secondary...as is wholly appropriate in a picture book.

Which isn't to say those words are without value, of course, just that they can look barely-there embedded as they are with often arresting images. They are, of course, integral, as they explain what exactly we're looking at, the story of which isn't always clear just by the imagery.

There are just over a dozen stories told within, and thee are occasionally broken up with pages devoted to listing special trees of tree-related facts. 

The stories run a rather wide gamut, but among them are simplified and straightforward versions of those featuring well-known tree heroes like Kenya's Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement and America's Julia Butterfly Hill and her two years spent living in Luna. There are also stories of artists like Sam Van Aken, who created a tree of 40 fruits through grafting, and photographer Michael Nichols, who photographed the gigantic President Tree in California's Sequoia National Park. And there are stories that barely have people in them at all, like that of The Great Banyan Tree in Calcutta, India and the Ténéré Tree that was for a long time the only living thing for hundreds of miles in the Ténéré Desert in Niger.

Though the art is quite sophisticated, the book seems to be aimed toward younger readers, as no stories exceeds a half-dozen paragraphs in a corner of a two-page spread, and Benoist pauses to define words and terms like botanist, dowry, canopy, graft and reforesting the land. At least two of the stories have tough subject matter that might prove a bit challenging for some younger readers, though, like "The Golden Spruce and The Lumberjack", which involves crime, death and suggestions of mental illness, and "Eucalyptus Apocalypse", which tells of the clearcutting of Tasmanian forests in the 1970s, illustrated by a picture in which the vaguely airplane-shaped birds that flit through most pages of Gastaut's art are drawn flying while aflame, looks of concern on their simplified faces.

Gastaut uses a quite limited palette in each of her images, generally just three or four colors beyond that black and white that most of the trees and people are rendered in. It's hard to accurately describe the art—and you're really better off just seeking the book out for yourself than listening to me try to do so—but the coloring as well as the rendering are highly stylized and quite distant from the natural browns and greens and organic messiness one might associate with the natural world (By the way, you can see a handful of stories from the book here). Each page is beautiful, but beautiful in an entirely different way than the subject matter as it exits in the real world is beautiful. 

An all-ages book in the best sense of the word, Every Tree Has a Story has as much to offer adults (be it the aesthetic pleasures of the artwork, or suggestions for people and trees to learn more about) as it does the children it was apparently made for. 

We Eat a Lot of Turkey on Thanksgiving.

 As Thanksgiving approaches, I am reminded of this passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2019):

Ninety-six percent of American families gather for a Thanksgiving meal. That is higher than the percentage of Americans who brush their teeth every day, have read a book in the last year, or have ever left the state in which they were born. It is almost certainly the broadest collective action—the largest wave—in which Americans partake.

If Americans had set a goal to eat as many turkeys as possible on one day, it's awfully hard to imagine how we could surpass the forty-six million that are consumed on the third Thursday of November every year. If President Roosevelt had asked us to eat turkeys to support the war effort, if President Kennedy had inspired a moon shot of turkey consumption, I doubt we would have eaten this many. If turkey meals were given out for free on every street corner, I don't believe more than forty-six million would be eaten. Not even if people were paid to eat turkey. If there were a law obligating Americans to have Thanksgiving meals, the number of people celebrating Thanksgiving would drop. 

That is indeed an incredibly high number.  Although the thesis of Foer's book, delineated in the sub-title but actually quite delayed in its revelation, regards eating less animal products for the sake of the climate (specifically, Foer advocates only eating meat at dinner, if one must eat meat), the reason he brings up Thanksgiving is simply because of just how goddam much turkey we eat on that day, and pondering why that is.

He continues:

If you celebrate Thanksgiving—or Christmas, or Passover, or any collective commemoration—do you do so because there are external incentives, like a law or monetary compensation? Because you are spontaneously moved? Or because, like allowing an ambulance to pass or rising when the wave approaches at a baseball game, it is there and it is what you do?

...

How many people actually decide to celebrate Thanksgiving every year? If the possibility of abstaining were built into the culture—as it is for many national secular holidays, like the Fourth of July—would 96 percent really make the same choice? We arrive at the table not because of feelings but because Thanksgiving is on the calendar, and because we've never skipped it before. We do it because we do it. Often, merely participating in an activity produces the feeling that was meant to inspire it in the first place.

His ultimate point in this passage of the book isn't Thanksgiving-related, of course, but focused on the way that collective action works: It needs a structure. "The collective action occurs because the structure encourages it," he writes. "[O]ur amorphous, un-urgent emotions about Thanksgiving need a scaffolding."

What Foer is ultimately pondering is the scaffolding that could encourage addressing climate change, what architecture needs torn down, and what architecture needs erected. Just as the impending holiday reminded me of this passage about how incredible Americans' collective action regarding the consumption of turkey dinners on a particular day is, though, it also makes for a good example of why Foer chooses the vegan-before-dinner strategy for reducing meat consumption (and thus climate change). 

In one of the "Dispute With The Soul" sections of the book, in which he essentially argues with himself before the reader, he writes of the efficacy of this strategy:

It would be both disingenuous and counterproductive to pretend that eating only plant-based foods before dinner won't require some adjusting. But I bet that if most people think back over their favorite meals of the past few years—the meals that brought them the most culinary and social pleasure, that meant the most culturally or religiously—virtually all of them would be dinners.

Like, for example, Thanksgiving dinner. 

This particular Thanksgiving is different than past ones for many Americans, however, as this one will be occurring in the midst of a viral pandemic, and gathering indoors in large groups to share a meal is a very risky practice. Unlike the Thanksgivings that Foer was writing about, then, this is a year when many Americans will actually have to make a decision regarding whether or not to celebrate Thanksgiving, and, if they choose to do so, how they will do so.

Hopefully many will choose not to do so at all, or at least to do so differently than in years past—one would hope, for example, that there will be fewer people in attendance, as people choose to eat with their immediate rather than extended families, and that there will be fewer people traveling by plane or train or bus to get to celebrations out of town. 

I'd highly recommend Foer's book, which is full of thoughtful framing of ways to think about the climate crisis, and ways to address it, and shows real, genuine struggle on the part of the author to attempt to do what is right, even though it is extremely difficult for him to do so. 

But limiting the amount of animal products is the most direct and easiest thing everyone can do—we don't get to vote in elections, we don't decide whether or not to have a child, or fly on airplanes often, let alone daily, but we will all be eating a meal again shortly, and thus have an opportunity to make some small decision that will have some impact on the climate. And we don't necessarily all have to decide on an all-or-nothing course of action, like going vegan or vegetarian or even following Foer's suggestion of going vegan before dinner, we can, as he tells himself, focus on the meal before us.

God Is Green: Sandra L. Richter's Stewards of Eden makes the argument for Christian environmentalism

Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters 
By Sandra L. Richter
InterVarsity Press; February 2020

One might expect that the most ardent believers in God would also be the most committed and dedicated environmentalists. After all, if you truly believed that all of existence—the universe, the Earth and every living thing on it—were the work of a benevolent creator, wouldn't you also devote yourself to the care of that creation, prioritizing its protection alongside the other priorities of your faith?

And yet we know that is not the case. In fact, here in the United States at least, it often seems that the opposite is true, that the way we have been gradually sorting ourselves throughout the last few decades has made it seem that, in general, the most religious among us (or, at least, the most performatively religious among us) are Republican and conservative, while the most environmentally conscious among us are Democratic and liberal*, and never the twain shall meet.

There are plenty of reasons for this, I suppose (I've been working my way through Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, and while it doesn't address this specific topic, it does explain how and why we divide ourselves into political teams, and how the beliefs of one team quickly become seen as anathema to the other). But "Because religious people are hypocrites" isn't the answer, although certainly many of them are (and not, I should say, because they are religious people, but because they are people, period).

One of the reasons that Sandra L. Richter, a teacher, scholar and author of 2008's The Epic of Eden, identifies for that disconnect is a matter of theology, the too-widespread belief that God's creation is "bound only for destruction." If the world is going to end any day now, something Christians have believed since Jesus was still walking the Earth, then why fret overmuch about how inhospitable to human life the climate will be in a few more decades, or if a species or two or three thousand go extinct? During the creation story of Genesis, God gave humanity dominion over the Earth, right? Therefore, it's ours to do with as we please.

Not only is that an extremely dangerous way to run a planet—or anything else, for that matter—but scripture pretty explicitly warns against it**, and the dominion philosophy itself is a matter of interpretation, one that believers have probably leaned into over the centuries because it's the most convenient interpretation.

Richter's book looks to passages of scripture to reveal different messages in sharp contrast to the dominion philosophy, and things that seem like far more modern concerns than what an Iron Age civilization might have codified into their spiritual laws, like sustainable agriculture and the care for domestic and wild animals. None of her interpretations are exactly a stretch, either. If it comes as a shock that the Bible lays out the proper way to practice animal agriculture, well, that's probably because Christians tend to ignore large swathes of their own Bible, particularly the Old Testament, generally only turning to books like Leviticus or Deuteronomy to cherry-pick passages they can use to justify discriminating against the LGBTQ community.

Richter starts at the beginning—of the Bible, and of the world. Though we traditionally gravitate to the terms "be fruitful and multiply" and "dominion" in the two creation stories, Richter offers the alternatives from Genesis 2:15: "Then Yahweh Elohim took the human and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to guard it."*** Though it is mostly simply a matter of connotation, it's amazing what the shift from having dominion over something to tending, guarding or shepherding it can have.

In the following chapters—each of which, I should note, is fairly short and extremely readable, regardless of your familiarity with the Bible—Richter takes a passage from scripture, expands upon it to explain what it meant and how it would have been applied in Biblical times, and then brings up a modern "case study" in which it applies.

So, for example, after the opening chapter on the creation narrative and humanity's place in the world and in God's plan, she discusses the covenant between God and Israel as a landlord/renter agreement (that is, we might live on Earth and have a special place on it in God's plan, but it's his, not ours); that God ordered that both the land and beasts of burden be given periods of rest  (during the seventh year and the seventh day, respectively); that God prescribed sustainable methods for gathering wild birds and bird eggs and forbade the "environmental terrorism" of burning the crops and cutting down the fruit trees of enemy nations; the importance of caring for the widows and orphans of society; and, finally, what the covenant means today, after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and how we should live our lives.

Some of this will seem trivial from afar—such as, say, reading a review of the book on a blog—but Richter's arguments are certainly compelling. These Old Testament laws are eminently practical as well as encouraging a degree of empathy for other people and other creatures. That is, if you exhaust the land, you won't be able to grow anything out of it. If you work your livestock to death, then you won't have them to help you plow or grind grain. If you take every bird and all the eggs from every next you find, you will soon be out of birds and eggs. If you destroy the food source of an enemy nation, then neither your nor they will have access to that food.

It's certainly strange to think of something that seems so specific and dated as Deuteronomy 25:4, "do not muzzle an ox while he is threshing",  could or should have ramifications today, but if God wanted his people to allow one of their working animals to enjoy mouthfuls of food while producing it, even if that meant nutrition that was ultimately being taken from them and their families, how would God be okay with pigs packed into tiny cages, chickens with their beaks soldered off and the full catalog of nightmares that goes into the production of most meat? (Richter devotes about eight pages to these).

What is most striking about all of these ancient examples is their context. Richter thoroughly describes the day-to-day life of ancient Israeli society, and repeatedly drives home the fact that most people were somewhere in the area of "just getting by"; they were always a tragedy (or even run of bad luck) away from starvation, and, even at best, could expect lean months every year. So God wasn't asking these people to simply inconvenience themselves the slightest bit, like so many of the sacrifices that  our society could be making in the 21st century to improve life on Earth, but he was asking actively hungry people to sacrifice necessary food in order to care for the land, care for the animals and care for one another.

It's not until the last chapters that Richter really gets to the New Testament, at which point the gospels, the epistles and the Book of Revelation are consulted, mostly regarding God's plan for the Earth in the future, and her argument that returning to the original arrangement of Eden, the redemption of that original plan for creation is, in fact, the end goal. That is, God's creation isn't necessarily destined for destruction, and all that really matters are the souls of the faithful, but that humanity, Heaven and Earth are all to be redeemed (You've probably heard the phrase "a new Heaven and a new Earth" before).

Now, I should perhaps clarify that I approached the reading of the book as a believer, and someone with a lifetime of Catholic education and the attendant familiarity with the terminology and the source material (Well, "lifetime" meaning kindergarten through earning my bachelor's degree, the end of my formal education). I'm not entirely sure how this will read to an atheist or agnostic then, but belief doesn't seem to be necessary to read and enjoy it—while Richter is herself a believer, her book works as history and an environmental treatise as much as it does an articulation for Christian-driven environmentalism.

It is well-written and easy to read though, so I don't think a non-believer reading because of their prior interest in the environment would necessarily be repelled by it or find it overly confusing, but the intended audience is clearly a Christian one. After the end of the book, there's a "Resources For the Responsive Christian" appendix, listing 17 ways to "take action" on "environmental stewardship,'  most of which can be practiced by anyone (In fact, if you're already concerned about the environment, I imagine you already practice many of these things).

To oversimplify, a truly Christian response to the environmental crisis seems to start with a simple matter of reframing, of thinking of ourselves not as the lords over creation, but as its shepherds, and as thinking of ourselves not as the owners of the world, but as renters living on God's world.

But it's Richter's book, so I should give her the last word:

The introduction of this book asked the question: Can a Christian be an environmentalist? My answer is, how could a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve, redeemed and transformed by the second Adam to live eternally in the resurrected Eden, be anything else?

If you're a Christian and aren't convinced of that, I would highly recommend the book that comes between Richter's question and her final words.



*Here's how Richter puts it:

Why has the church, historically the moral compass of our society, gotten so lost on this topic?

On reason is politics. Not kingdom politics, but American and international politics. I think that most would concur that the traditional political allies of the church are not the traditional political allies of environmental concern. If you are pro-life, it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. If you are a patriot, you supposedly cannot also be a conservationist. Or to be more forthright: in the United States, if you are an environmentalists, it is assumed that you are a Democrat--and Democrats, supposedly, are not pro-life. If you are a Republican , it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. In other words, somehow environmental advocacy has been pigeonholed into a particular political profile and has become guilty by association. But of course, Christians are first the citizens of heaven, and therefore our alliances and our value system are not defined by American politics.

**Regarding predictions of the end of the world, I always think of Mark 13:32: "But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." The context is clearly that of "it could be any day now, so be ready," but Jesus quite literally says no one knows. Given that he said that millennia ago, I think the safest philosophy is that it could be any day now, or it could be another couple millennia. So the best bet is to not render the world uninhabitable and continue down any paths that will kill us all off before that. 


***The only Bible in my apartment is The New American Bible with a 1987 copyright I was requited to purchase for an introduction to the Bible class in college in 1997 or so. Its version of the line is "The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it." Regarding the verbs of what Adam/the man/humanity is meant to do in the garden, Richter looks to the original Hebrew words, and explains them in her notes. 

Degrees of separation: The architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement on the two worlds of 2050

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis 
By Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Alfred A. Knopf; February 2020

The world is either going to meet the goals set forth in the United Nations' 2015 Paris Agreement, or it is not. Which way things go in the next 30 years—whether we're able to keep the planet's warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius or if we exceed that—will determine which of two drastically different worlds we'll be living on in 2050.

Laying out and detailing those two worlds is the premise of The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, co-authors who know the Paris Agreement inside and out. They should; after all, as the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and her senior policy advisor, they helped create it (or, as the cover refers to the pair, they're the "architects" of the agreement).

They label the two worlds as the "World We Are Creating" and the "World We Must Create," and devote a chapter to speculating about each.

The former, in which the world made no more progress on reducing emissions beyond what was achieved by 2015, is on a path to being more than three degrees warmer by 2100. In 2050, it's already an absolute nightmare, and it's hard to imagine a scarier dystopia in any depressing sci-fi or scary horror movie without resorting to fantasy elements involving, I don't know, zombies or the monsters of the Book of Revelation being added on top of the climate-driven hazards.

People will need to wear masks when they leave their homes, for protection from air pollution and surface ozone levels. Over 2 billion people will live in the hottest parts of the world, where temperatures can reach 140 degrees as many as 45 days of the year, which is the point at which the human body can't survive exposure for very long .

The world will be consumed by conflicts over resources, between the rich and everyone else within a country's borders, and between countries themselves, although most countries' armies will have become "highly militarized border patrols," attempting to keep out climate refugees. "Natural" disasters like hurricanes, torrential rain, forest fires and catastrophic flooding will be common place.

The future of humanity is so uncertain that suicide is common, and there are dark arguments being made about such things as whether what relatively few resources are left should be enjoyed now by the current generation, as it may be one of the last, or if attempts should still be made to conserve them for the future.

Here in the United States, it's the coasts, where rising sea levels swallow up cities, and the southwest, where it's becoming uninhabitably hot, which suffer first and the most, but the interior of the country will be subject to flooding, infrastructure collapse, food insecurity and disease. Conflict with Mexico will be at an all-time high, as thousands of people from South America try to migrate into the more livable U.S., away from the burning equator.

Those are just some highlights; they go on for bout a dozen pages.

The other world of 2050, the one we must create, is obviously a far better alternative. Having successfully halved emissions every decade since 2020, we'll be on a path towards a world that is no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

Cities will be getting greener and greener, with trees and plants everywhere, from rooftops to what used to be parking lots and parking garages. Cars will be rarer than ever, and those that are around will be electric—the only people who will ever get behind the wheel of one with an internal combustion engine will be hobbyist who pay for the privilege to do so at special tracks. Those who lost jobs in the fossil fuel industry have been retrained  and now have good paying jobs working on building a train system in the United States, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing newer, greener buildings. Vegetarianism is now common, and "most young children cannot believe we used to kill any animals for food. Thanks to greater connectivity, "more people work from home, allowing for more flexibility and more time to call their own."

This world won't be completely perfect. Sea levels will still rise, animal species will still be lost, the world will still be warmer than it should be. But the very worst damage will be mitigated. (Remember, even if we magically stopped using all fossil fuels and stopped factory farming overnight, the world would continue to warm because of all the emissions we've already pumped into the atmosphere. Metaphorically, the climate crisis isn't a light switch, that can be turned on or off, but more like a train, that must rather gradually slow before coming to a stop.)

I'm not going to lie; parts of the "World We Must Create" chapter struck me as somewhat pie-in-the-sky, and not just the part about children growing up in a world in which a diet of meat seems alien to them. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also imagine that private car-ownership will become a thing of the past, with people getting around in  cooperatively-owned self-driving electric car an and neighbors voluntarily forming food purchase groups and taking turns securing and delivering groceries.

While many of the elements they suggest will be part of the second, livable world seem perfectly suited to politically liberal urban environments, I have a hard time imagining them taking hold in some of the places I've lived in, and some of the places my family still live in. I mean, Seattle, New York City, almost any sizable city in California? Sure. Columbus or Cleveland? Sure, perhaps—I would hope. But places like Ashtabula, Conneaut or Mentor, Ohio? Erie, Pennsylvania? I'm sorry, I just can't see it.

Of course, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac have an answer to my inability to imagine their better world taking hold everywhere (Even, I suppose, in the small-ish, rust belt cities I've lived most of my life in.) Following the two worlds section of their book comes sections detailing three mindsets and then ten actions. One of those three mindsets is one they call "Stubborn Optimism," an intentional reprogramming of cynicism like my own and the "learned mindset of hopelessness."

Using neuroscience techniques of changing your thoughts to change your thinking familiar to me from behavior therapy, this chapter was a particularly helpful one, suggesting ways to "reprogram" yourself so that you can face the existential threat of climate change without crumpling into a fetal position. There's a nice passage where they write that when your mind tells you this, think that, covering many possibilities (For example, when your mind tells you it's too late to make a difference, "remember that every fraction of a degree of extra warming makes a big difference" and thus doing anything to reduce emissions helps; when your mind tells you it's impossible for a country to abandon fossil fuels entirely, know that Costa Rica has already done so; and so on).

As for the ten actions, these are each rather broad, general actions that can be tackled individually or collectively, at a variety of scales; some involve changing the way one thinks, others taking concrete steps in the physical world: Let go of the old world; face your grief but hold a vision for the future; defend the truth; see yourself as a citizen, not a consumer; move beyond fossil fuels; reforest the Earth; invest in a clean economy; use technology responsibly; build gender equality; engage in politics.

Throughout their book—which at just under 170 pages is an easy, quick read that shouldn't take more than a sitting or three to fly through—they continually refer back to their own experiences in negotiating the Paris Agreement, something that seemed impossible after the failure of the previous attempt to work out a global climate agreement in Copenhagen, as well as sharing anecdotes featuring familiar figures of inspiration: The Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, John F. Kennedy and so on.

Beyond the dramatic binary between the two potential Earths of 2050 and the mindsets and strategies to achieve the far preferable one, The Future We Choose reads a bit like a blueprint for a climate movement and a bit like a self-help book, albeit a self-help book in which one helps one self help the planet, and, by doing so, oneself...and everyone else.


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As talk of a Green New Deal spread, there has been discussion of the best historical analogy to compare it to, the consensus seemingly being President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933-1939 programs, projects, reforms and regulations, imperfect an analogy as it may be

This is something I've puzzled over myself, and am therefore always interested in hearing what others think on the matter. I mentioned in the earlier post on Naomi Klein's On Fire, wherein she took up and explored the fitness of various historical analogies. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also touch on the subject in their book, offering a few more possibilities:

"Because climate change is unlike any other challenge that humanity has had to face, we have no template for the kind of political, economic, and societal transformation needed now--but there are a range of extraordinary examples we can learn from. Movements of civil disobedience from the early twentieth-century suffragettes to Gandhi's drive for Indian independence to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 1960s civil right movement to the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia—to name just a few—are all inspirational insofar as they mobilized vast numbers of people to champion their causes. An open, inclusive narrative and a sense of working collectively to change history for the better took them further than they ever imagined possible. As Nelson Mandela said, "It always seems impossible until it is done." 

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Published in February, the book was obviously written before the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and the precise ways it would change our lives could be known, but reading and re-reading it during this long spring, there were a couple of things I found particularly noteworthy, things that may have jumped out at you while you were reading this post.

For example, the idea that wearing face masks when leaving one's home could become not only commonplace but necessary in the future. They wrote:

"You think about some countries in Asia, where out of consideration sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any.
...
When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford)."

Apparently, homemade cloth ones just won't cut it in the nightmare world of +3-degree warming in 2050.

The other, positive world of 2050 also reminded me of this spring's lockdowns, however, particularly the mention of people working from home more often, which has the benefit of reducing emissions associated with commuting to and from work, and the increase in flexibility and free time (although, as so many of us have learned these past few months, there can also be some drawbacks to working exclusively from home, particularly regarding child care.)

Repeatedly the book brings up the possibility of new—or, as we've all since learned to call them, novel—diseases, something that should cause more palpable, tangible anxiety now that we're suffering through a pandemic.

There are multiple ways in which environmental degradation can and will lead to disease outbreaks, from deforestation and increased human/wild animal interaction exposing people to denser populations leading to easier transmission.

Then there's this, from the chapter on "The World We Are Creating":

"Melting permafrost is also releasing ancient microbes that today's humans have never been exposed to—and as a result have no resistance to. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in inhabitable areas and temperatures continue to rise." 

Truly, there is no worry that the climate crisis can't exacerbate.