Environment
There are two major aspects of the environment that are arguably likely to persist into the longer-range future and affect the human condition – environmental damage and the possibility of significant climate change. Some knowledge of each is important in any conversation about the longer-range human condition.
The Two-Mile Time Machine : Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future — 2000
The ‘two-mile time machine’ is a two-mile ice core from Greenland that provides insights into the earth’s climate over the last 100,000 years. Alley does a nice job of using everyday examples to illustrate what we know about climate and how we know it. The ice core is only one way of knowing about climate and Alley brings in other ways to solidify the evidence. He gives a nice description of the thermohaline circulation (THC) – which is much in the climate news these days – and its instabilities. The most sobering parts of the book are that we are in an anomalously ‘quiet’ climatic period compared with the rest of the climatic evidence and, historically, things can change dramatically (by 10 degrees C) very quickly (in a year or two). This is a well-nuanced exposition of those possibilities and a good exposition of what we know and what we don’t know about the likelihood of significant climate change.
Learn more (Princeton University Press)
Natural Capitalism — 1999
This book argues for an overhaul of capitalism to include the full costs of the use of natural resources. This notion alone (that others have argued as well) is important in thinking about the longer-range human condition. What makes this book particularly useful is its reasonably comprehensive look at means not only for including the costs of natural resource use, but means for reducing natural resource use. The four central strategies of ‘natural capitalism’ are radical resource productivity, biomimicry, service and flow economy, and investing in natural capital. The book looks at radical resource productivity in a wide variety of arenas including wheeled vehicles, buildings, production processes, water systems, and agriculture. Biomimicry (see the “Wild Card” category below) is the concept of emulating nature’s “life-temperature, low-pressure, solar-powered assembly techniques” as a means of improving the efficiency of natural resource use. A service and flow economy – as opposed to an economy of goods and purchases – would have the products owned by the producer and leased as services to customers. Instead of owning a washing machine, for example, the customer would lease it and it would be up to the company to maintain it. This would give producers much greater incentives to make products that lasted a long time, needed little maintenance, and could easily be disassembled and recycled when their useful life was up.
The book also addresses some of the cultural problems in implementing a natural capitalism scheme on a large scale. One of the most interesting examples in the book is the city of Curitiba, Brazil. Facing the usual developing world problems of limited resources and explosive population growth, it has become a model city by “implementing hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple, homegrown, people-centered, initiatives harnessing market mechanisms, common sense, and local skills.” [italics in the original] In all, this book is a useful compendium of the feasibility of moving to a significantly more sustainable future.
Learn more (Little, Brown and Co.)
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: General Synthesis— 2005
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was called for by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000. It represents the work of more than 2000 authors and reviewers worldwide. It’s three main conclusions are: 1) Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, 2) the changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services, and 3) the degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century. The authors also present some scenarios in which that degradation could be reversed, but caution that those scenarios involve significant changes in policies, institutions, and practices that are not currently under way. This is as current and comprehensive a look at the earth’s ecosystems as is available today.
Learn more (Island Press)
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