Sarah Dry's Reading List

"I really like Katharine Hayhoe as a communicator. She is a climate scientist as well as an evangelical Christian and a Canadian who lives in Texas, so she covers a lot of ground. This book was written on the back of a TED talk she gave that almost four million people have viewed. She is someone who uses all of the channels and mechanisms that she can to get the word out, which I heartily approve of. It’s not a literary book. I would say it’s a how-to manual, in a sense. It could be subtitled ‘how to talk to people about climate change’. One of the things she says that has stayed with me the most is also the simplest, which is that the most important thing any of us can do about climate change is talk about it. In this book, she shows why that’s important and how to go about it. To explain why it’s important, she refers to a classification system put together by two researchers, Tony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, on what they call “ Global Warming’s Six Americas “. Instead of thinking about climate ‘deniers’ and climate ‘believers’, they have done research that divides members of the American public into six groups when it comes to climate change, ranging from alarmed, to concerned, to cautious, to disengaged, to doubtful, to dismissive. That’s a lot of groups. The percentages of people that fall into the groups has been changing, but essentially the people who are alarmed and concerned are growing and people at the other end are dropping. What Katharine Hayhoe says is, ‘Sometimes you have to know when you can’t engage. You’re never going to convince the dismissives, but they’re only 7% of the population, so forget about them. The good news is that 93% of people can be engaged with in some way.’ That’s her starting point, that it’s not about polarization. It’s not about us, or them. It’s about this spectrum. And if we think about moving people along the spectrum, any bit that we can move them along is a good thing. She’s very practical. It’s not about absolutes. It’s about meeting people where they are. Right. And if you’re meeting with members of the Texas Water Development Board, who are politically very conservative, talk about water data, because that’s going to speak to them. Or if your grandmother is a knitter, you can knit a scarf with her that has the warming stripes on it and talk about the warming stripes. It’s really founded on a deep and yet very practical empathy. Ask yourself, ‘What does this person care about?’ and connect with them on that. “The most important thing you can do is talk about climate change” For Hayhoe, I think that’s based on a Christian faith, that to be a good Christian is to evince love and caring for others, and notably others who are poorer and less well off than we are. But of course those values aren’t only held by Christians. So we need to think not just about people in our local communities, but also about the impact that climate change will have globally. But she’s very resolute about keeping it close to home. Part of the reason that people have been paralyzed in terms of how to act on climate change, she suggests, is because it seems abstract and distant. She’s really a genius, I think, at finding points of common values—which are always going to vary, they won’t all be the same—and continuing to find the energy to find those points of contact. That, to me, really is very inspiring. This comes back to the problem with issues that are seen as scientific. Certain people want them to be disposed of by facts. What Hayhoe shows in this book, over and over again, is that facts aren’t enough. They’re not irrelevant. She’s very clear that when it comes to the kinds of conversations you might have with people on this spectrum, you might start with a very brief and factual rebuttal of certain myths and arguments that might be put forward against climate change. But she says not to spend too long on that, and not to get distracted by it. Very quickly, what you need to do next—which is much, much more important—is show what people can do. Give them practical responses that they can take so that they’re not confronted with so-called facts that leave them feeling impotent or angry. The facts are preliminary and necessary, but completely insufficient not just to motivating action, but generating this shared set of values that are necessary to achieve common political will on so many issues. Sometimes you have to know when you’re not the one to make the connection. You have to meet people not just where they are, but where you are. So find out what matters to you: if you love having dinner parties, have people over to dinner and talk to them about where the food has come from, or if you love gardening, connect with other gardeners…In a way, there’s really no excuse for not doing it. It’s a very optimistic vision of engagement, I suppose, but I think we need the example of that kind of optimism because it’s so easy to be paralyzed by a sense of overwhelming pessimism. Katharine Hayhoe is not naive about the challenges we face, both in terms of the physics of climate change and the politics of climate change, the tribalism that confronts us when we try and act. But she has been able to show not just the positive outcomes of this kind of approach, but the scale of the outcomes that you can achieve. She gives the example of someone in Wandsworth, in London, who heard her say that the most important thing you can do is talk about climate change. He sent her an email saying that he had taken that to heart and had recorded the number of conversations he’d had, and the conversations that those conversations had begotten, and it was more than ten thousand. A big part of the impact of this is that we need to keep sharing, we need to keep motivating each other with these good news stories. In a way, what she’s showing is that addressing climate change is partly a communications issue. I have a lot of sympathy with that view. It happens that she’s an excellent climate scientist as well as an excellent communicator and that gives her a kind of authority. But I think if we take seriously what she’s saying, hopefully we’ll need the authority of climate scientists less and less going into the future, and we can all be advocates for our own portion of the planet, as it were. It’s not just the climate scientists who speak on behalf of the planet, it’s potentially each of us."

"Elizabeth Kolbert is good at the telling detail. In this book she’s looking at case studies of what she calls ‘the control of the control of nature’. It’s this weird recursion that she says is a characteristic of the Anthropocene , where our attempts to control nature have given rise to second order problems and unintended consequences. However, it’s too late to do nothing. Now, in order to save elements of nature, we must try to control the effects of previous attempts to control them. The book starts with a case study of the Chicago River, which was reversed in the early part of the 20th century as part of a massive hydro engineering project with repercussions for a large portion of the hydrology of the United States. This had significant ecological consequences that were not foreseen, leading to the introduction of a species of Asian carp to try and deal with aquatic weeds, which in turn led to more unintended consequences. Ironically, the Asian carp were introduced in 1963, which was the year after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , in which she made the case against chemical pesticides and biocides and in favor of biological controls, of which the Asian carp was a prime example. So here was an example where a seemingly natural solution was implemented, which had just as many unintended consequences as these chemical solutions. What I think Kolbert wants us to consider is that the linkages between ecological and human systems are so complex that it’s very hard to know what the effects of our interventions will be. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She uses a lot of examples to show how extremely well-meaning and concerned scientists end up trying to understand, tinker with and manage natural systems using ever more technology and interventions, to save something that we might still think of as natural. One of the most poignant examples she uses is this species of fish that are found in tiny pools in Death Valley National Park. Some of these pools are the size of a swimming pool and they contain these tiny little fish called pupfish. And because these pupfish have been isolated, one pool may contain the only population of a certain species of this fish. As a result of climate change, some of these pools are drying up. There’s this example where a biologist is carrying the total population of one of these pupfish in two buckets, trying to transport it to another pool. Then they create artificial pools, and these scientists are trying to breed the pupfish. But the pupfish only release a single egg at a time, so they’re trying to track these microscopic eggs and coax tiny populations of tiny pupfish to reproduce. Kolbert is the kind of writer who wants to present us with an image and encourage us to consider the meaning of that image for ourselves. She doesn’t tell us precisely how to make sense of this, but she presents it with a wry, slightly detached air. It has a somewhat bloodless feeling to it, and a valid criticism of the book that can be made is that she doesn’t engage with the economic and political causes of a lot of these interventions, and the way that they impact different people in different landscapes differently. But, at the same time, she has a very good eye for the telling case study and the telling detail, revealing the tragic absurdity of the circumstances that we find ourselves in, which is only going to increase. I didn’t feel that when I was reading it. I think that’s because the people who are involved in doing this are so thoughtful and dedicated and passionate and self-aware of the issues, of this paradox of trying to restore nature through technological interventions, that it provokes a sense of respect, both for the professional expertise and care of the people involved and for the complexity of nature. And, I guess, to say that nature is complex and that our interventions have unintended consequences is only the first step. For me, it doesn’t necessarily need to be seen as inducing paralysis if it makes us humbler and more thoughtful. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means acting on the basis of the best information, the most thoughtful deliberation, the best communication about the potential consequences that we can. And remember that doing nothing is also a kind of intervention. They basically take over and eat almost all the native species of fish. They’re also dangerous to human beings because they jump out of the water, and people riding in motorboats collide with them at speed and can be seriously injured. Part of the intervention in that case was trying to get people to eat the carp, on the assumption that the only more voracious eater than an Asian carp is a human being. The problem is that the carp are notoriously hard to prepare, they turn into kind of mush when you try and debone them. Lots of money is now being invested in trying to create tasty Asian carp patties. There’s lots of examples of this happening, like the cane toads in Australia that were introduced in the 1930s to control beetles that were damaging crops and then basically ate everything. They’re also poisonous, so a lot of endemic species ate the cane toads and were poisoned by them."

"In a way, this isn’t an obvious book for best of climate books of 2021 because it’s about a field biologist doing fieldwork in eastern Russia along the Samarga River. What appealed to me about it was how the author—who spent four years tracking these very elusive owls that live along semi-frozen rivers and feed uniquely on fish—was so dogged, obsessive and single-minded in his pursuit of these creatures, in a very extreme and unforgiving habitat, with occasionally very odd and slightly threatening human beings lurking at the edges. It’s a classic quest story in many ways, and compulsively readable. It’s told in a very unembellished way. He’s a good writer, but he’s not trying to convince the reader of anything. He’s simply inviting us to share in his unique obsession with these animals, called Blakiston’s fish owls, which are the largest living owl of their kind. They’re up to two-and-a-half feet tall and their wingspan is more than six feet. So they’re absolutely massive, and they live in these enormous old growth trees along the river. “The facts are preliminary and necessary, but completely insufficient” It’s another version of what we can do. If Under a White Sky is presenting an impossible paradox of how we thread this Anthropocene needle of controlling our attempts at control, this is an impossible quest story. First to find the owls, and then to find ways to save them. Along the way he and his assistants design new ways to trap the owls because no one had ever tried to trap them before. They end up designing this special box that actually sits in the river, and which they stock with fish. They come up with this elaborate system of nets to capture these birds. He ends up becoming quite proficient at trapping them and then has to learn how to tag them using these special battery-powered GPS devices. He then has to recover the devices to get the data, so they have to trap the owls again. It’s a quest against impossible odds, and yet he is successful in achieving his goal, which is to understand the population of these animals, what controls that population and what kind of habitat they need to survive, so that he can help advise on creating a conservation plan. The book is a strange mixture of pessimism and hope. On the one hand, you see that the logging companies—which lease a lot of the prime habitat that these owls live on—are using many of the old growth trees that these owls need to roost in to create bridges across the river. It’s a kind of a lazy man’s bridge: they just knock the trees over. On the other hand, once Slaght realizes the importance of these relatively uncommon old growth trees with big enough holes in which the owls can nest and tells the logging companies about it, they seem to be quite happy to cooperate and make slight adjustments which potentially have a huge impact on preserving these owls’ nesting habitat. There’s a lesson here, which is that one person really can make a difference to our understanding, and that that understanding can enable relatively straightforward interventions that have a disproportionate effect. That’s what I really enjoyed."

"No, I think the book could more accurately be titled, ‘why blowing up a pipeline should potentially be part of the climate activist’s toolkit’. Or perhaps it should be called, ‘how to puncture a tire’. Malm is now a very productive academic in Sweden, who’s written several books on the history of what he calls ‘fossil capitalism’, linking climate change and capitalism. He calls himself an eco-Marxist, so he’s quite open about his political perspective. But he started out his young adult life in climate activism and one of the things that he did as a climate activist was to go around letting the air out of SUV tires. He uses that as an example of the strategic use of violence that he’s advocating. It’s a short book, and it’s a polemical book. It has a lot of rhetorical gambits that don’t necessarily play out. But I chose it because I appreciated Malm’s provocation. The title may be too provocative and not doing his argument any favors, but I feel comfortable recommending it—even though I wouldn’t advocate for a book that was literally telling people how to blow up pipeline—because I think Malm raises some important points. The key point he’s making is that climate protests have only been increasing over the last 25 years, but they haven’t come close to achieving the kinds of actions that are needed to address climate change. He divides these cycles of protest and activism into three phases. It starts in 2006 in Northern Europe—it’s a very Eurocentric book—in the runup to COP15. Then he talks about 2011 and the protests focusing on the Keystone XL pipeline in America. Then, in the summer of 2018, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion emerge. Malm identifies this climate movement as becoming the single most dynamic social movement. But, across the same period of time, he notes that emissions have only continued to increase. So at the first COP, which was in April 1995, carbon dioxide concentration was 363 parts per million. Right now it’s about 412 parts per million. So what have these protests achieved, if emissions seem to only be increasing? Does there need to be another phase beyond peaceful protest? “One person really can make a difference” Then he spends a lot of time shooting down a lot of the arguments that are made by groups like Extinction Rebellion, advocating for nonviolence and pointing to the success of nonviolent protests in the past. These are examples like the abolitionists, the suffragettes, Gandhi, those fighting apartheid. Malm goes through systematically to show that, actually, the threat of violence was central to the success of all of those movements. Now, I don’t have expertise in all these movements, and I don’t know that Malm makes a watertight case. But I think the point that he’s raising is important, which is that given the urgency of the situation and given what’s at stake, we should at least be talking about why we might want to consider the form of violence known as property destruction as part of a range of climate activism. In a funny way, this is similar to when Katharine Hayhoe says, ‘it’s not all or nothing, it’s not you’re against us or you’re with us, it’s about a spectrum of opinion.’ I think Malm is saying that our climate activism has to encompass a range of approaches. And one end of that range should be at least the possibility of targeted violence, he suggests. He says that sabotage can be done ‘softly, even gingerly’. Or even slashing them. Taking an action where it’s extremely unlikely that someone might get hurt and where the violence is focused specifically on property that is part of the fossil fuel infrastructure. So SUVs, but also things like oil refineries and pipelines. Now, it’s not straightforward because a) it’s impossible to ensure that people don’t get hurt, b) that kind of action risks backfiring and could cause public attitudes to turn against activism, and c) the people involved are being asked to risk serious jail sentences, and is it morally justifiable to expect individuals to do that? So there are a lot of good arguments against it. But I think Malm is doing a service by suggesting it’s something we should at least be talking about. I think he wants to suggest that it should be imaginable that we might start to damage property as part of climate activism. He says that right now it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism and he wants to change that. Yes, and I don’t know that I came out of it agreeing with Malm. But I did come out of it thinking about things differently than I had been. He forces us to consider why certain things feel more unthinkable than others. In doing that, he is moving the conversation along. The book doesn’t really engage very substantively with either the history or the contemporary set of issues at play in the Global South. It’s very much focused on Northern Europe, which is fine, but I’m not sure that he is as open about that as he might be. In a way what was most affecting about the book is when he talks about how he felt having taken these actions. So, in addition to letting the air out of the tires, he helped knock down a fence surrounding a power plant. He writes, “for one throbbing mind-expanding moment, we had a slice of the infrastructure wrecking the planet in our hands”. Now, that’s a sense of agency that can feel so lacking in other settings, and in the kind of image of the world that someone like Elizabeth Kolbert presents to us. If we’re thinking about how we motivate each other, and ourselves, to act, it’s worth thinking about where we can get a feeling of agency. Now I’m not advocating that agency should come at the expense of safety or even potentially property, but it would be naive not to take it into account as an important factor. I guess the question is, can we transmute that into the kind of political engagement that might result in changing regulations, and which ultimately needs to happen for large-scale system change to take place?"

"The subtitle of this book is ‘an optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future’. That’s very accurate: it’s optimistic, and it’s a playbook. It reads a bit like a PowerPoint presentation and I mean that in a good way. It’s very clear, it’s very practical, it’s very possiblist. It’s very much focused on the technical rather than the political without being naive about the need for political will. What are the technical possibilities for addressing climate change? Saul Griffith’s answer is that we already have the most important technical solution in front of us and it’s electrification. Basically, it’s very simple: we have to electrify everything and we have to do it as quickly as possible. He uses the language of the moonshot, that we need an equivalent scale of response to that which the United States mounted during the space race, or, to take another example, during World War Two , or when it was funding the Manhattan Project. It sounds like a lot of investment, but it’s not impossible. It’s possible, it just requires a concerted effort. He’s also very careful to link this to jobs creation. So there are a lot of a win-wins—and even some win-win-wins—in this book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The biggest win is that electricity is a much more efficient source of energy than fossil fuels. A lot of heat is wasted burning coal and gas and oil to turn turbines, so energy is wasted along the way. When we use solar and wind power to generate electricity, there’s a much better conversion of energy into a usable form. The central chapter of the book, which is called “Electrify!”, sets out how we can save 42%—almost half—of the energy we use today by electrifying things. This is partly as a result of the increased efficiency of renewable-generated electricity, but it’s also because electric cars are more efficient than cars with engines. I was also really amazed to see how much energy it costs to actually mine and refine fossil fuels. Apparently 11% of the energy that we use is dedicated to getting fossil fuels out of the ground, so we save a lot just by not trying to mine them. Then we should be doing things like electrifying heating in buildings and using LED lights. The emphasis throughout is on large-scale infrastructure changes as well as large-scale personal changes. He says you shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff. Things like the kind of car you drive, installing solar panels on your house, installing a heat pump, those are one-time decisions that are hugely more consequential than the small decisions we make every day about where we set our thermostat. Another message that he gives is not to worry about efficiency. That’s again a win-win. In the 70s, the response to the energy crisis was to try and make people use less energy and be more efficient. He says we don’t need to do that. If we electrify things, we can have it all: we can have new jobs, clean energy, and copious amounts of it. He’s an engineer who’s also studied information technology. That was one of the things that interested me, that in addition to installing many, many more wind turbines and solar panels on both domestic architecture and on very large scales, we need a new kind of energy grid, that operates a bit like the internet. There’s something called grid neutrality, so that everyone can contribute to and draw from the grid in ways that are equivalent. I think that’s a big part of making it more efficient, both from an energy perspective, but also economically. He brings this perspective on networked systems that he gained as an information technology person to the question of the electrical grid, which is quite unique. Yes, it’s “pull up your socks, you’ve done it before.” It is very US-centered, and he’s got lots of examples of how this has worked in the past. He talks about the establishment of the National Parks and Monuments under Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the Civil Rights acts, the founding of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, smoking cessation. We’ve had big challenges in the past, and we’ve risen to meet them. And by ‘we’ he really is saying that we need government level, regulatory support, as well as financial tools. He says that to convert US homes to have the solar panels and heat pumps they’re going to need will cost about $70,000 per home. So, we need financial tools for these kinds of climate interventions equivalent to the mortgages we have for property that will enable households to afford this. To his credit, he’s really good at linking up his technological optimism—that could be almost Silicon Valley boosterism—with his advocacy for massive government support and intervention. He isn’t saying that the marketplace is going to take care of things, even with certain subsidies. He’s saying that we need a generational level of regulatory innovation from the government. In that sense, it’s quite refreshing. Exactly. He’s taking into account the lifetime of the fossil fuel-using objects that we have now. But he’s also quite clear about saying that it has to stop right now. No one can be buying more petrol or diesel cars, and we certainly can’t be building more oil refineries or coal mines. We need to have a scale of solar and wind power that will transform the landscape. He estimates that we’re going to need 15 million acres of solar panels. That’s out of 2.4 billion acres of land in the US, so it’s a tiny percentage, but it’s still a huge area. We’re going to have to learn to live with a very changed landscape, with wind turbines and solar panels all over the place. He says we need to triple current electricity production in the US. These are possible targets and he sets out exactly how we might get there. It’s true. There’s an interesting non-dialogue between these two books. Frankly, I’d rather be in Saul Griffith’s camp because he’s very well informed, and very data driven. He uses a lot of charts to try and bring the reader along with him and says, ‘You can understand this. Once you do, and start tracking things, you can start to see what the low-hanging fruit is in the climate crisis.’ And what he calls clean energy infrastructure—which is essentially electrification—is a real low-hanging fruit. Just as we can go a long way (not all the way) towards saving the fish owls by identifying what they need for their habitat, we can get a long way towards where we need to be by scaling up technologies that we already have. There’s a lot of power in that knowledge if we implement it. Well, the US military uses an ungodly amount of fuel in its jets—at 0.5% it’s a shocking percentage of overall US energy use, especially when you compare it to the 0.7% used transporting children to school or church. That really puts things in perspective. As voters, we do need to be informed so that we can vote in politicians who are likely to pass the kinds of regulations that we need. Over and over the message from people who are working on the front end of climate change—and know better than anyone else the scale of the challenges we face—is how important it is to have hope. Not unfounded hope, but optimism based on smart people working really hard to generate useful data and useful ideas. That’s not to say that there aren’t risks of overreaching the bounds, of overstepping, of unintended consequences. But the risks that we face now from climate change are so great that it’s far past the point of the so-called precautionary principle which has been used in the past to justify inaction."

"Yes, this novel is a bit like a blockbuster movie where you don’t want to know what’s going to happen. This probably should have a spoiler alert. It wasn’t spoiled for me, because I hadn’t read about it beforehand. So I had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space. And the real payoff is that the lives of people in this story are used metaphorically to explore something surprising and fascinating, which is that living trees are not distinct individuals, but exist in an ecosystem in which they communicate directly with each other. That sounds a bit airy-fairy, but he’s actually drawing on interesting empirical research. One of his main characters, Patricia Westerford, is a scientist whose work on the chemical signalling that trees do via their roots is based on that of two real scientists, Diana Beresford-Kroeger and Suzanne Simard. Going back to this question of form, the important thing is that Powers pulls it off. You could come up with a clever, academic exercise of how to write a novel that ‘speaks for the trees’ that would be a disaster to read. Power’s skill as a writer was good enough to carry me along. For me, the revelatory part of it was important because I didn’t see it coming. Then, when it did come, it had earned its power, through the cumulative force of the individual stories. I didn’t find them all equally compelling, but, for the most part, they were compelling enough that I suspended any disbelief and trusted in the narrative. There’s something quite activist in the writing. Powers is making quite an explicit case for caring about nature. I admire it because it’s a high-stakes game. When it’s done in a heavy-handed way, it can feel very sentimental and maudlin, but for me, this novel worked."

"Arctic Dreams is a really seminal book that was published back in 1986. I remember reading it and feeling very moved by his writing. It evoked the austerity of the Far North in a way that was also quite lush, if that doesn’t sound too contradictory. Both Arctic Dreams and Horizon are really long. Lopez gives himself room to spool out ideas in prose that’s just exquisite, but also engaging. Part of his project is to show that the spaces we think of as being empty, such as the icy vast expanses at the poles, are full—not only of nature but also of culture. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of travel, not just to the polar extremes but all over the world. It takes the form of a series of layered reminiscences and retellings. Meaning emerges in recollection and in revisiting. Part of what Lopez wants to say is that we can never come to the end of our knowledge of a place, no matter how often we revisit it. But the implication is also that we can know some places better over time, through the wisdom of accumulated experience. It starts in the third person, but that’s a narrative device. He’s playing with questions like, how do we get close to things, how do we get perspective, and, what can we ever really know? He starts off with a vignette from his own youth. Then the book becomes a first-person memoir, but there’s no strict chronological order. Lopez jumps around in time and place. He’s trying to create the sense, I think, that progress is illusory, that the only way we can approach truth or wisdom is circular or cyclical. In similar terms that Powers eventually allows himself to get to, Lopez engages quite directly with the question of how we are going to steward the planet. What are the answers to the insults that we’ve visited on the planet? He asks, “What act of imagination will it finally require for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?” “What are the answers to the insults that we’ve visited on the planet?” What I like about the book is that it refuses to separate the natural and the social or, as he puts it here, the biological and the cultural. He shows that places we think of as wildernesses are homes for indigenous people from whom we need to learn essential things. The book is really a series of meditations on how can we learn from each other, and from the people whom we haven’t been willing to listen to in the past. He goes all over the place. He goes to the Canadian Arctic, off the coast of Greenland. He goes to the Antarctic. He spends time on Cape Foulweather, the point on the Oregon coast where Captain Cook made his first landfall on the northwest coast of what was then New Albion. He spends time in Australia, in the outback; in Kenya; the Galapagos. You get the sense of a man who’s quite well connected and has this insatiable desire for travel. But it’s a kind of travel that’s very thoughtful. He wants to go to places and listen. That means listening for the echoes of the past as well as the contemporary concerns of the people who live there. He does this all in the mode of landscape writing , but what’s really interesting about him is that he manages to save it from just being a purely aesthetic appreciation of the land. Instead, it’s infused with the question of the moral and ethical implications of our relationships with other people on the planet and even relationships with people in the past and in the future. Those are the kinds of things that we haven’t found a language for, politically, and that’s why a writer like Lopez is so helpful because he can make explicit the question of, ‘How can we think about our obligations to the future?’ And write that down in a way that you can return to and re-consider from a new perspective. It’s a really long book, so it takes time to read. That in itself is a form of disciplined engagement. We should be taking more time to think about these things. It’s a book to savour. It’s not a book to rush."

"You’ve asked me to choose the best books of 2019. I’d say this is more an important book of 2019. It’s important to engage with. I don’t agree with everything that Oreskes is saying, but she’s definitely worth reading and considering. She has become an important figure in climate activism, and because she’s also a historian of science, I am especially interested in what she has to say about the role that history of science can play in this pressing contemporary question of what the proper status of science in society should be. Back in 2010 she co-wrote a book with Erik Conway called Merchants of Doubt . That book demonstrated how various conservative scientists and corporate PR agents deliberately tried to sow doubt about the dangers of tobacco smoke, acid rain and global warming (among other things). Oreskes sees this book, Why Trust Science? as a companion to that. Essentially, why we should mistrust climate deniers is that first book, and then this book is trying to provide a justification for why, on the other hand, we should trust science. Going back to the question of form, this is an admirably clearly written book, but it doesn’t engage the empathy muscles that the other books do. In that sense, I think it will only probably be effective among a smaller subset of people, those who are more conditioned to read a book based on a series of academic lectures. In terms of content, what she’s saying is that there are two reasons we should trust science. One is that scientists study the natural world. The natural world is there to be studied and that’s what scientists do. So, in the same sense that a plumber fixes your plumbing and thinks about plumbing, a scientist thinks about nature and observes nature and, on that basis, can tell us something about nature. “In the same sense that a plumber thinks about plumbing, a scientist thinks about nature” That’s quite an old way of thinking about the trustworthiness of science, but Oreskes adds a novel twist—novel to the philosophy of science in the 20th century, that is—which is that it is the social character of science that provides a warrant for its trustworthiness. The fact that science is a collective activity that depends on open debate and criticism, and relies on tools like peer review and conferences and workshops where differences of opinion are aired, means that it gives us not exactly truth, but our greatest likelihood of truth. One of her key points is that the more diverse our scientific communities are, the more likely they’ll arrive at something closer to truth, because it’s less likely that members of that group will share the same implicit assumptions. The diversity of viewpoints in science that she’s advocating for is largely based on things that are visible, like race and gender. It’s certainly the case that we need more women and more people of different races, religions, classes, et cetera, in science, but I would say that that, in itself, is not sufficient to guard against the risks of unquestioned assumptions. If we rely solely on the visible identity of members, then we risk missing other kinds of implicit assumptions. Which is to say, I guess… No, I don’t. A big part of her emphasis of the value of science as a collective activity is that it produces consensus. Consensus is made by experts who have studied a long time to be good at what they do and are judged to be that way by their peers. But I think consensus can be a source of problems within science as well as strength. This book is written in the context of the climate change crisis, where much emphasis has been placed, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, on the fact there is a scientific consensus and therefore we should act, so I think that explains her approach, but that is also a weakness. It sidesteps the issue, which is that even the existence of scientific consensus hasn’t been enough to motivate societal action. To be clear, and fair to Oreskes, that is not her stated aim in this book. She would agree that opposition to climate science is about values that are larger than, and will not be resolved within, the framework of science but she has nevertheless chosen to focus on the content of science, and the trustworthiness of scientific consensus in this book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The commitment to the power of consensus also makes it harder to admit the risks of consensus, which is that if people are less likely to feel comfortable expressing opinions at the edge of current beliefs, you miss out on important outlying evidence or opinions and this is damaging to the process of science. So there’s a tension there between the diversity of views that you want in science and the consensus output that you’re seeking. So we can see how this book is motivated by the moment in which we find ourselves. Oreskes clearly feels that the stakes are high enough that she wants to pin her colours to the mast of consensus. They’re helpful in that they provide an example of the positive self-criticizing aspect of scientific enquiry. They force her to deepen or extend the argument. In the book, Oreskes also uses examples from the history of science to demonstrate how science is self-correcting in certain ways. She actually argues that they weren’t really examples of proper consensus. But this raises another problem, which is who gets to determine who counts as expert, and what counts as consensus? Though Oreskes points to the ways in which the markers of expert status, such as institutional affiliation and peer-review, are visible to non-experts, much as we would like to, you can never really finish the argument in that way. It’s always about values, which institutions and which processes we trust. Oreskes certainly understands the importance of values. She encourages scientists to be more open about their values, on the understanding that we share more values in common than we realize—even with those who seemingly disagree with us about things like climate change. She mentions the Ten Commandments as part of this seeking for more universal values—though the Ten Commandments are, of course, far from universal. The thing about values is that it’s not enough to say what your values are, it’s about showing what they are. That’s what a novel allows you to do, that’s what the interiority of a novel or a memoir allows you to do, which a lecture doesn’t. So I think that’s why an academic lecture will only convince those who are willing to think with you in analytic terms. That’s a really good point, actually, that the book is inviting its readers to engage with, and think deeply about, the nature of science. That is a really useful intervention on Oreskes’ part: to open up the process of what science actually is. It’s not some mystical thing. It’s done by people like you and me who are fully committed and passionate, for the most part, about what they do. That commitment doesn’t undermine the status of the knowledge that they make. In fact, it shores it up. She was very determined and in that sense sui generis. She’s often held up as a role model for young women and girls, but she was extraordinary and I think we need to make progress to the point where girls and women don’t need to be extraordinary to get to the same place as ordinary men. She was clearly brilliant, but the other thing about Marie Curie is that she was only able to achieve what she did in terms of her status because her husband met an untimely end. He was run over by a horse and carriage and she was therefore able to take over his post at the university. So her life was still very much circumscribed by the constraints of her time and even her accomplishments were only possible because of anomalous circumstance. Hopefully we’re a bit beyond that now."

"I find Greenland fascinating. That’s really what drew me to the book initially, because I have written about a scientist named Willi Dansgaard, who worked with ice cores that were extracted from Greenland in the 20th century. That story is included in Gertner’s book. This book is a history of both the exploration of Greenland, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then it becomes, from the mid-20th century onwards, a story of scientific investigation in Greenland. By the post-war period, the great heroic feats that were once needed to penetrate Greenland have been replaced by the relative ease of travel via airplanes and helicopters and ice tractors. As a result, you get a different kind of—I wouldn’t necessarily want to say heroism—a different kind of concern guiding engagement with Greenland, which is that Greenland can teach us things about our global climate that we desperately need to know. “Gertner shows how hard-earned our knowledge of climate is—and therefore how robust” One of the things that Gertner does really well is show how hard-earned our knowledge of climate is and therefore how robust. He does this not by telling but by showing in engaging prose that there’s a long history to the knowledge that we have about ice and climate from Greenland, and, importantly, how that history is linked with the histories of the people living in Greenland. So our knowledge is hard-earned and therefore trustworthy in a similar sense to the vision of science that Oreskes is arguing for, i.e. that it is done by groups of people. In the early period, Gertner does focus on key, heroic individuals (and the book is illustrated with some wonderful photographs of very handsome explorers in full fur regalia). But later he describes the shift to more collective undertakings. In this way, Gertner ultimately provides a different kind of collective history of knowledge-generation, where the collectivity spans hundreds of years. In the 1950s, Willi Dangaard realized that old ice in Greenland could be used to generate a record of past temperatures. It was an almost magical insight. Dansgaard recognized that oxygen has different isotopic variants that weigh different amounts and that their weight determines what ratio of them is present at a given temperature. Using this knowledge, he realized that it was possible to infer what temperature it was when a particular bit of snow was falling in the past. And because there is a two-mile thick ice sheet sitting on top of Greenland, consisting of snow that has never melted for hundreds of thousands of years, you can use that to generate a record of past temperatures stretching back for an incredibly long time. In Antarctica, they can go back several million years, but the first ice cores that were drilled in Greenland came up with 100,000 year records of past climate. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Gertner tells the story of the drilling. It happened initially at a secret sub-ice encampment called Camp Century that was built by the US military in Greenland when they thought it would be an important staging place in case of World War III . The military initially just wanted to understand the physics of ice and snow. For example: could you build a railway under the ice? How about a nuclear reactor? Turns out the answer is no, because the pressure collapses it incredibly quickly. While they were at Camp Century, the military drilled an initial core to investigate the way the ice behaved under pressure. That core was later obtained by Dansgaard, to do the isotopic research that showed that you could reconstruct past temperature with incredibly fine resolutions. The really stunning revelation was the degree of past climatic variability that the ice revealed. It revealed that the earth’s climate had the potential to change incredibly rapidly, much more rapidly than anyone had ever thought—even by ten degrees within human lifetimes. That discovery happened in the late 1960s and -70s, as did evidence about the effect rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was going to have on warming. So it was very important in the development of our understanding that, a) humans have dramatically altering the composition of important greenhouse gases, and, b) the earth’s climate system is not this stable beast that you can keep poking without it waking up. It’s actually liable to very rapid and violent change. There are other physical traces that also generate this kind of data, with differing degrees of resolution. You can extract similar information from mud at the bottom of the ocean, from sediment that’s been accumulating for millions of years. Stalactites also contain evidence of past, not just temperatures but also climate. There are ways to recapture the numbers of hurricanes, for example. Tree rings can provide very detailed annual records of past conditions, though not on the same time scales. That was one of the first methods that scientists used. Putting all these techniques together has yielded remarkable insights into the past climate of the Earth. Gertner tells us the slice of that story that that is linked to Greenland. By focusing on Greenland, he’s doing a little bit of what I think Lopez and Powers are also enjoining us to do, which is to pay attention to place. Individual places matter. Greenland’s been really important in helping us understand the global climate, but Greenland is also a specific location with a specific set of histories and cultures and experiences of those who have gone there, which has shaped the way our understanding has emerged. By using first-person perspective, Gertner places himself in that narrative, not in a heroic vein but in a personal one. He’s made many trips to the island in the course of writing this book and reporting on it. In that way, he demonstrates the power of a place to influence a person and how that again is essential to generating knowledge. That relationship between an individual and a place often gets completely erased in our conversations about climate change and global warming. We talk about a single number, how the Earth is going to warm by two, three, four, five degrees. That averaging over the globe is very hard to engage with as an individual. What does it even mean? That’s part of the reason these histories are so important, for those of us who can’t go and visit these places, to help us understand the empirical basis of the knowledge that we have and also the biographical or autobiographical basis of that knowledge. It is an amazing place. In a way, Gertner’s book is a testament to the history of obsession that surrounds Greenland."

"Gary Snyder, still going strong at age 89, is often referred to as a member of the Beat Generation, which he was, but his work transcends that association. He’s had a long engagement with Zen Buddhism as well as with the natural world, what he might call ‘the wild.’ It’s a little bit perverse of me to include this little pamphlet of two essays in a roundup of the best books of 2019, because they were first published in 1990, but I guess wanted to make the point that we can learn new things from old writings. It’s my way of pushing back a little against the news cycle. Clearly the publisher thought it was worth doing as well! “How can we be at home with nature? How can we find ways to stop harming nature and live with it?” Snyder is best known as a poet, but he’s a powerful essayist as well. These two essays are irreducible in a way that reminds me of poetry: you can’t extract a simple message from them. He manages to do that with what’s—I don’t want to say simple prose in the sense of simplistic—but it’s not overly poetic. Somehow he manages to combine quite impressionistic accounts of his visits to the Far North, for example, with descriptions of Indian dances and his memories of his own childhood. It coheres without immediately giving you a simple answer to the overarching question, which is, ‘How can we be at home with nature? How can we find ways to stop harming nature and live with it?” He has this line: “Philosophy is a place-based exercise.” He’s again making the case that we need to think in place. There’s a kind of travel memoir in these short essays that look similar to Lopez’s much longer work. He links memories of his first dance with a girl—this really visceral memory of what it felt like to hold a woman’s body for the first time, on the edge of adolescence—with traditional dances of other cultures. He’s trying to use his own experience to leap across time and culture to make deeper connections. And I think what Snyder does really well is demonstrate what it is to be humble in the face of other forms of knowing, without being self-dramatizing in that search. The title of the book and of one of the essays is ‘Tawny Grammar.’ It’s a beautiful phrase. It comes from Henry David Thoreau , who cites a Spanish term for what he calls wild and dusky knowledge, which is ‘grammatica parda.’ Thoreau refers to nature as a mother leopard from whom we humans have been weaned too early. As a result, we’ve lost the tawny grammar that was ours by birthright. It’s a powerful image of a shared heritage, not just among peoples, but among all natural beings, that somehow is still within us and recoverable if only we attend to it."