Environmental Book Reviews (Round 2)

Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution
By Heather Rogers

While reviewing recently published environmental literature, this book really looked like it had potential. The author argues that the problems in the environmental movement have little to do with technological shortcomings or lack of will among voters. Instead, the environmental movement has been unsuccessful because it has been pulled into the same old economic system that it should be trying to reform. This can be seen in modern environmentalism’s new-found materialism. The author’s introduction provides an example by talking about the increasingly common re-usable shopping bags. I am going to go a step further and post this article on buying green televisions. While I obviously have respect for the authors of that article, it seems to have never occurred to them that a person can live a fulfilling (and very sustainable) life with no television at all.

Overall, the book was well researched and clear in it’s writing. However, my biggest critique seemed to be that the information gathered by the author was not used to it’s full potential. The author seemed to build up an interesting series of arguments only to stop short of applying all of this information to the big picture. This was especially strange because clearly the author had opinions in this area. One example is this excerpt: “Capitalism’s market imperatives, which have remained mind-bogglingly unchallenged in the pall of economic collapse dictate that profitability comes first.” This quote is surprising because it seems to have been casually mentioned as a well established fact in the middle of an otherwise bland chapter on green automobiles.

Despite falling short of being truly ground-breaking, this would be an excellent read for someone who is just getting introduced into environmentalism and trying to live a more sustainable life. It provides a unique prospective on many different aspects of sustainability.

Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization
By Richard Manning

With some books, it takes a few chapters to figure out the author’s bias and motivation for writing. It’s refreshing that you know what you are in for by the time you finish this book’s title.

The first portion of this book lays out the history of agriculture with a strong bias against the effects of sedentism and grain production. While doing this, the author selectively picks facts from the archaeological record and ignores any that might support other conclusions. Reading his arguments, this book reminds you that with a big enough data set, you can pretty much argue any conclusion. Additionally, the author insists on connecting trends in ancient agriculture to modern agriculture. Although interesting for the sake of argument, these connections are generally weak and require more data to be convincing.

This books gets interesting once the author moves beyond more ancient history and begins to discuss the worlds food culture in the last 100 years. There is an especially interesting section on the historical roots of America’s obsession with food. This section alone makes the book worth reading.