Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction, page 10

Reviewing The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg, BC Canada, New Society Publishers, 2011.

I have never understood why mainstream economic theory ignored the impact of a huge population. Even as that impact has grown, classical economists continue to use outmoded theories of macroeconomics, ignore effects of the flow of capital, and refuse to acknowledge that there could be a limit to the resources so many billions of people use or need—like water. Isn’t that a requirement for life? Like air. Will they be selling clean air next?

Heinberg makes the case that we have seen the end of growth because it is doing us more harm than good. It is not a panacea for jobs and well-being. The nations that now have stable populations have an excellent opportunity to implement policies that will insure quality in living, find relief from the rat race, and enable the growth of knowledge and innovation within Earth’s limits.

In reviewing this paradigm-changing book, the most useful review I could write would be to provide a simple list of short quotes from the experts whose reviews appear in Heinberg’s book:

[He presents] “...the big three drivers of inevitable crisis—resource constraints, environmental impacts, and financial system overload...one integrated systemic problem...” Paul Gilding

“Our coming shift from quantity of consumption to quality of life is the great challenge of our generation...” John Fullerton

“The end of conventional economic growth would be a shattering turn of events—but the book makes a persuasive case...” Lester Brown

“...the beginning of a new era or progress without growth.” Herman Daly

“...analysis of the reality of ecological limits...very readable...paying attention to nuance and counterarguments.” Leslie E. Christian

“Heinberg has masterfully summarized and updated the case against economics, and its fraudulent scorecard—GDP...we all can still grow in wisdom and ...knowledge...as we transition to the Solar Age. Hazel Henderson

“...crammed full of ideas, information and perspective...for the perplexed...” James Gustave Speth

“...the sooner we have this critically needed conversation...the better...” Annie Leonard

“...clears away many...mistaken assumptions...” Bill McKibben

[He tells us that] “...the expectation of unending growth dominates public policy—and how ephemeral that goal is likely to prove.” Michael Klare

Review and Impact of Lester Brown's work

Eco-Economy: Building An Economy For the Earth, New York, W. W. Norton, 2001 and Plan B:Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.

Our world view is changing, thanks in large part to these books. Everyday I encounter new voices in the social media that understand Lester Brown and the solutions presented by him and the several other authors, each with his own slant on the same problem.

We are capable of pulling back. We are not lemmings, each one of millions running desperately into the sea to relieve the stress of overcrowding or desperate to find relief from thirst. Not yet. At least not all of us.

Still, many of us are hungry or desperate, and some of us need to get busy using less, being more efficient and awakening to the crisis already affecting too many humans and too much life on this beautiful Eden, Earth.

Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute gave us the first warnings year after year with real data. And the 2001 book Eco-Economy gave us a reliable guide to the policies needed to secure the future.

Recent books echo Brown’s 2003 Plan B. Some refine the detailed options, but all agree on the ever more desperate need for the world view that requires an ecologically honest cost/benefit analysis. We still tout economic growth as a panacea for all our economic ills when in fact it is costing us and the Earth far more than it is worth.

The solutions outlined by Brown should be blatantly obvious: Our resource base must be analyzed in relationship to projected population growth. Our barriers to family planning need to be removed. Ecology and efficiency must trump short-term economic gain. Protecting our remaining world resources like water and forests is now urgent, as is the upgrading of our cities.

We can do this, as Plan B and Eco-Economy and other recent books make crystal clear. The solutions have been studied and refined since the 1970’s. It’s not magic, just political will and corporate greed that stand in our way. People in developed countries need to use less. We need to shift the tax and subsidy codes; get off fossil fuels, coal and plastic; increase efficiency in electrical grids and automobiles; and redo urban transport. (I have a vivid childhood memory of the rails being torn up in Oakland, California.)

The media can help, as can the wealthy and writers of fiction. Brown tells the tale of soap operas successfully illustrating how individuals can make a huge difference. Fiction can be a powerful paradigm changer.

We cannot buy our way out of overusing the planet, nor the lemming-like desperation of overcrowding that threatens human populations throughout the world. We’re all in this together.

Review of Creation Revisited by P. W. Atkins

Oxford, W. H. Freeman , 1992

Author of a widely used 1978 text in physical chemistry, P.W.Atkins treats the lay reader with marvelous English in describing the wonder he sees in all that was learned at that time—about time, space, the origin of the universe, dimensionality, and why mathematics works.

His understanding of complex systems and their emergence from chaos drive his thesis that we can understand creation and will, eventually, describe its beginning in terms so accurate that our religious concepts will no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, this kind of presumption has driven the recent split between science and people of institutional faith, so that the honest, invaluable approach of science—which leaves all conditions open to additional evidence and testing—is lost, as is the awe scientists feel for the complexity they find in nature.

Since this book was published, there has been a growing awareness of the several sources of unpredictability in complex systems. Ilya Prigogine called the choices at chemical bifurcation points “irreducible randomness.” Unpredictable phenomena may arise when many agents interact in nonlinear ways, which is nearly everything, from our bodies to electrical grids.

Atkins, however, neglects the concept of mind as the unpredictable emergent activity of our extremely complex brain with its 86 billion neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections. But his most egregious error is his failure to recognize the difference between science and religion. As Jeffrey Lockridge puts it so eloquently in Grasshopper Dreaming, science explores and suggests how things work, while religion invests in questions that ask why things are as they are, including the universe and our lives. What is our purpose or reason for being, the meaning of life itself? Science doesn’t ask those questions.

Review of "Post-Growth Economics: A Paradigm Shift in Progress" by Dr. Samuel Alexander*

Review of the Working Paper from the Post Carbon Pathways Project
Posted on 3 April 2014

Don’t miss this valuable source of useful options to move beyond growth economics. Alexander's article includes a thoughtful review of current and past thinking about classical and no-growth economics, an extensive list of references, and ten challenging prompts – read these, if nothing else – for anyone and everyone concerned with the global situation and a transition to a more rational future.

*lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and co-director of the Simplicity In

http://archivesofvarok.com/articles/r...

Notes from 'Our Way Out' by Marq De Villiers

Summary of the Steady State portrayed in award-winning fiction in The Archives of Varok: the requirements outlined by De Villiers focus on not overusing the planet's resources and overseeing a fair distribution of its wealth. Mechanisms include taxation and depletion quotas and policies that encourage a constant sustainable population.
http://archivesofvarok.com/What's New

Treasures of Animal Anecdotes and Analysis

In The Human Nature of Birds, Theodore X. Barber (New York, Penguin books, 1994) credits his “illiterate Greek grandparents” with showing him that there is “an intelligence that is deeper than words.”

Such is the intelligence of all creatures who live and reproduce for an average of four million years, until their species’ luck turns their genetic imperatives in new directions. They don’t speak with words as they teach their offspring to survive with the food and shelter that the natural world provides. When their world no longer provides, they reinvent themselves or die out, as will we if we cannot stand the heat.

In the last half of the twentieth century, several authors dared to counter the voices insisting on the Law of Parsimony—that animals are automatons obeying their genes, like some kind of mindless machines. (See Carrigher’s Wild Heritage, reviewed below, for a detailed history.) Now behavior scientists are free to understand and study the power of intelligence and emotions deeper than words. They are careful not to attribute human traits to lives driven by different needs but blessed with talents that may or may not resemble ours. Frans deWaal and Temple Grandin have paved the way to a better understanding of those who have had just as much time to evolve as we have.

This essay is a tribute to the earlier authors who have given us a wealth of anecdotes and observations, daring to describe the world of animals and birds in words that compared our experience with theirs without exaggeration. Some even dared to give us a view of the animal’s world through their eyes, trying with success to tap into their intelligence, deeper than words.

Here are some of those books: The often poetic language of Sally Carrighar gives us a view of one day at the same location through the eyes of very different creatures—Icebound Summer, One Day At Teton Marsh, Wild Heritage, One Day At Beetle Rock.

Victor B. Sheffer in The Year of the Whale, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969, follows of whale calf through each month of the year with added tales and observations.

Robert Stenuit, The Dolphin, Cousin to Man, New York, Bantam, 1968.

Vance Packard in The Human Side of Animals, New York, Dial Press, 1950 describes the observations made in early animal behavior studies, complete with photos in the 1961 Pocket Book edition.

Animals Nobody Loves by Ronald Rood, New York, Bantam, 1971, the way they act and look--eel, vulture, pig, flea, rat...


Have you run across some other early books that don’t indulge in the sin of anthropomorphism?

Reviewing Colin Tudge--Style and Complexity

Oh dear--Last year I discovered THE BIRD by Colin Tudge, and I was hooked. Love his chatty style and verbiage. And talk about complexity! He illustrates it well. First the details, in all their marvelous twists and turns of confusing evidence and theories, the connection of birds to dinosaurs. Then he delves into the definition of species, illustrating with engaging humor that "...when all work is done, omniscience is not in our gift, and nature feels no obligation not to be easily comprehensible."

In short, we care, a lot, about shoving ideas into neat boxes, but nature could care less. Definitions and categories are human crutches, vain attempts at defining paths through life's complexities. Sometimes useful, they are more often mini-prisons for the mind, keeping thought restrained and creativity trapped.

The complex nature of nature is awe-inspiring and humbling. Now what do I do? Colin Tudge has written a lot of books I probably won't be able to put down. See his web site.
Colin TudgeThe Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From & How They Live

Reviewing Wild Heritage, worth another look

Wild Heritage by Sally Carrighar, illus. by Rachel S. Horne, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
In her Foreword to Wild Heritage, Sally Carrigher, author of One Day At Beetle Rock addresses the problem of “anthropomorphism—the attributing of human emotions to animals.” When she was writing in the early 1960’s—and until long after the 1980’s when Frans deWaal began to attribute words of emotion to primates—some ethologists (animal behavior scientists) refused to acknowledge that “human beings behave like the simpler creatures.”

Recent careful studies have now established a large body of knowledge that answers Carrighar’s question, “What similar impulses (if any) move both animals and men?” Wild Heritage is a treasure, summarizing many extensive studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, that confirm the anatomical and biochemical evidence that we are all closely related.

Her section tracing the history of anthropomorphism from Victorian sentimentality to the careful studies of her time is an interesting study in the human growth, maturation if you will, in rational scientific thinking.

Carrigher also offers insights into the concepts of instinct, imprinting, song and play that are still valid today. And her detailed accounts of lemming behavior and animal painting are revealing in what have become clichés.’

The Law of Parsimony—“...denying animals any qualities except those of reflex mechanisms” is dead at last. See also another book attacking that notion: Theodore X. Barber’s The Human Nature of Birds. And, of course, don’t neglect the work of Frans de Waal.Frans de Waal
Sally Carrighar

A Review of The Spirit Level

Social Anxiety Rooted in Inequality?
From Blog 18 by Donald Neeper at http://neeper.net/social-anxiety/
Richard G. WilkinsonA Review of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, updated 2010.

What's going on? There's a feeling that people sense an impending social failure but are unable to identify it. What's causing this stress? As documented in the recent scholarly book, The Spirit Level, we really are much more anxious than we used to be.

Wilkinson and Pickett (W&P) are professors who have studied economics and epidemiology. They quantitatively evaluate many symptoms of social dysfunction, comparing results for 23 developed countries and also comparing data for the 50 states of the U.S. In each case, they correlate the severity of a social problem (e.g. teen births or homicides or obesity) with income inequality. The correlations are independent of the average income or overall wealth of a country. In other words, the greater the disparity in income, the more dysfunction a society has in multiple characteristics, including infant mortality, social mobility, literacy, AIDS, homicide rate, degenerative diseases, teenage births, trust, and status of women.

The authors present extensive arguments to justify inequality as the common factor underlying the other characteristics. For example, public spending on health and education does not correlate with homicide rates, but income inequality does. In a postscript, the authors counter what appears to be politically motivated criticism of the book, including statistical arguments or missing factors such as ethnicity. W&P assert ethnicity is not a factor because the same correlations occur across societies of widely differing cultures. Data from Italy and Finland fall along the same line in the graphs.

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that our need to feel valued and capable implies we crave feedback regarding our worth, but social status causes distress because it carries messages of superiority and inferiority. Greater inequality amplifies the importance of social status.

Both the relatively rich and the relatively poor have relatively better health, less violence, and less anxiety in a country (or state) with less inequality. That is, despite our expectations otherwise, all classes are happier in a society with less inequality.

Obesity occupies a special chapter in Spirit Level. In the U.S., about half the population were overweight and 15 percent were obese in the late 1970s. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and about thirty percent are obese as measured by body mass index, which normalizes the effect that a taller person normally weighs more.

Obesity in the U.S. is more than twelve times greater than that in Japan, which is the least unequal society of the 23 so-called rich countries. In Japan, the basic wages are more equal, with smaller differences between the highly paid and the lower salaries.

Wilkinson and Pickett explain that many people have a strong personal belief in equality and fairness, but these values have remained private, hidden, unshared, inactive because people think their fellows disagree. Instead, political differences reflect beliefs about how to solve the problems, while desire for a safer and more friendly society goes across political lines. Politics have been weakened by the loss of any concept of a better society, a vision of how to get from here to there.

The authors, however, clearly identify corporate power as the elephant in the living room—the biggest determinant of political action. In the U.S., the highest-paid people in corporations received almost 40 times as much as the highest-paid people in the non-profit sector, and 200 times more than the highest-paid generals or cabinet secretaries in the Federal Government. Does that illustrate where our social priorities lie, despite our underlying shared personal belief? B&P suggest that worker ownership of corporations would induce both better satisfaction and better production.

Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that many of the growing social problems are maintained by income inequality, whereby the poor cope with their own poverty and also with the consequences of the poverty of their neighbors, while the rich pay to live separately in residential economic segregation. As the authors say, governments can spend either to prevent social problems or else to deal with the consequences. In the U.S. since 1980, public expenditure on prisons has risen six times as fast as public expenditure on education.

A missing argument.
One key observation seems missing from the excellent presentation of data and observations in The Spirit Level. Almost any enduring symptom (good or bad) of a complex system is maintained by a loop of positive feedback, as outlined in Blog 14 and Blog 16 at http://neeper.net. The search for ways to rectify income inequality must first locate the unchecked positive feedback loops that maintain and increase the inequalities. Often, those loops are what we label "growth." As argued in Blog 16, disallowing political action by corporations would be one powerful step toward equal justice because corporate governance is simply sophisticated bribery.

A Review of Grasshopper Dreaming by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

Grasshopper Dreaming:Reflections on Killing and Loving by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Boston, Skinner House Books, 2002.
There have been no grasshoppers in our yard since First Turkey did them all in 35 years ago. Maybe that's why this title caught my attention. Then its thoughtful consideration of our lives and their meaning caught my soul.

It’s a rare book, only 138 pages long, that becomes a treasure. I marked thirty-five of those pages because they contained quotable quotes.

Jeffrey Lockwood begins by taking us deep into the Wyoming prairie to watch grasshoppers doing nothing, just being, most of their time. Perhaps we should be called “human doings,” not “human beings,” he suggests. Then he leads us seamlessly into observations about complexity and “...what science cannot fathom, nature still manages to exploit.” Before we realize it, he has led us full circle to ask, “What is a grasshopper good for?’ and concludes with the timeless answer: “...we value our children...because of who they are,” not what they do.

As we learn the details of Lockwood’s work as an etymologist, defending farmland against hordes of grasshoppers, he illustrates his dilemma of what it means to kill. “Taking life, like giving life, can be a sacred act.” Sometimes an essential act, if we are to live.

We watch as Lockwood teaches his children about his job killing grasshoppers, while capturing and releasing insects he finds in his house. In either case, he feels that his obligation is to “...mitigate their potential pain.”

The author notes our need to control as we confront nature’s “absolute indifference” to our existence, encourages us to “...contribute to moving human society through this phase of self-destruction”, and ends with a treasure chest of quotable quotes about the complementary nature of science (how we came to be) and religion (Jeffrey A Lockwoodwhy we came to be).