In praise of books & public libraries

All life-supporting systems on Earth are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. That is the single most important fact about our moment in history, not who wins or loses an election, a football game, an automobile race, or a war. Our descendants will not look back and thank us for building more highways, more stadiums, more shopping malls, more subdivisions. They will not thank us for running up the stock market and the national debt. They will blame us for bequeathing to them a hotter, harsher, depleted globe.

Humans have never before faced challenges that are global in scale. These challenges require us to reimagine our place in nature as well as our responsibility toward other species and toward future generations. Fortunately, just at the moment when we need to think globally and long-term, we have developed technology that allows us to monitor, model, and communicate about the whole planet, and to envision the consequences of our actions far into the future. We have created devices that give us access to information, images, news, ideas, music, and other cultural goods from around the planet.

But even in this electronic age, the book still matters. It is a durable, ingenious invention, made from renewable materials, requiring no batteries, no precious metals, no mining or pollution; handled with reasonable care, it can be passed from reader to reader, generation to generation. The book matters also as the most versatile and capacious medium humans have ever devised for telling stories, making arguments, examining history, and storing knowledge. The challenges we face are enormous, complex, and urgent. We will not be able to meet those challenges without the breadth and depth of vision that books provide.

Libraries remain the chief home for books, and they offer entry to all the other records of human thought and imagination. Free public libraries are among America’s prime inventions, along with the Bill of Rights, public schools, national parks, and jazz. A library holds the accumulated discoveries and creations of countless people, and makes these gifts available to anyone who chooses to read or listen or look. In a library, we are reminded of what humans are capable of at our best. It is as though, through all these centuries, in our many languages, we have been writing one vast book—the book of what it means to be human, what it feels like to be alive, what lessons we’ve learned from studying this marvelous world.