Are you worried that the next few pages will belabor the grim litany: melting ice caps, the growing ozone hole, rising sea levels, CO2 emissions, vanishing species, and the like? So was I when I began reading for this issue. But among the choristers of concern, I heard many timbres, tempi, and libretti. These books, while agreeing that all signs indicate proximate environmental crises, differ widely in their individual concerns and framing of the issues. Reading any of them is enlightening; read together they elucidate the breadth of our present and the multiplicity of future responses to it.
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times commentator and prognosticator for more than 30 years, presents the most sweeping view in Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution — And How It Can Renew America. To Friedman, economic and environmental health are inextricably entwined: "That is why Bear Stearns and the polar bears both faced extinction at the same time... why Citibank, Iceland's banks, and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted at the same time." He is unsparing in his critique of our "grasshopper" profligacy, arguing that America for several decades has "seemed intent on postponing dealing with every big problem weakening our society," including both economic and environmental matters.
Some of Friedman's harshest criticism is reserved for what he calls the "IBG/YBG" syndrome: "Do whatever you like now because 'I'll be gone' or 'You'll be gone' when the bill comes due." (Isn't it odd that some of those most stridently concerned about the financial burdens we are leaving our grandchildren seem indifferent to the environmental collapse we may also be leaving them?)
But if Friedman makes a powerful case for the dangers we face, particularly as population growth and rising expectations among developing countries exacerbate climate change, he is optimistic that, if we move beyond complacency or simplistic solutions (what he calls "a green hallucination, not a green revolution"), ours can become "the Re-Generation — redefining green and rediscovering, reviving, and regenerating America." If we do so, then "we and the world will not only survive but thrive."
Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a book for those who need hardheaded economic arguments to complement passionate environmental concern. What capitalist could resist Friedman's hyperbolic contention that "there is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit, and we have not yet begun to enlist him in this struggle"?
Behind much of our current discussion is the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, who presciently asked, "What's the good of a fine house if you don't have an acceptable planet to put it on?" Economist Edward Glaeser, in Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, challenges both Thoreau's premises, maintaining that a highly urbanized planet, one filled with skyscrapers and megalopolises, is not only acceptable, but optimal for the human future. He argues that cities, "our greatest invention," make us "richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier." Glaeser marshals data to support each of these points: population density, he claims, closely correlates with increased education and income, as well as with longevity, as well as with decreased energy use. Some of his narrative's villains are Thoreau, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, and the desire for a green environment. While our other writers extol environmentalist Bill McKibben or naturalist E.O. Wilson, Glaeser commends to our attention Henry Ford, Paris's Baron Haussmann, and architect Louis Sullivan. He argues that the resources needed by a scattered suburban car-dependent society, for example, far exceed that of a densely populated urban world — New York City, he reports, may be the most energy-stingy place in the United States.
For homo economicus or homo scientificus, Glaeser's case is often persuasive. Innovation, including the kind needed to deal with climate change, energy consumption, and toxic waste, will almost certainly depend on capable, educated individuals assembling in urban centers and universities. With chapter titles like "Is There Anything Greener than Blacktop?" and calculations that "all of humanity could fit in Texas — each of us with our own personal townhouse," Glaeser takes his contrarianism seriously. Readers who enjoy a reasoned challenge to their views will find Glaeser stimulating, even if they find his vision as repugnant as that of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us offers an even more radical speculation, envisioning a planet without humans. (He spends little time speculating about possible causes of our disappearance, though his new book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, released just as this column was going to press, suggests how we can avoid eliminating ourselves from the terrestrial equation.)
Weisman's vision is multifaceted. He describes the future of the things we left behind, when we are no longer there to maintain them: roads, houses, cities, all giving way to the effects of water, light, geological shifts, corrosion, microbes, and other forces we now keep at bay through constant effort. (Ceramics will probably last the longest, along with some alloys, but structures themselves will fairly rapidly collapse into their components.)
He also imagines the ecosystem's future "if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it." As the plants and animals we have altered and protected give way to more vigorous ancestors and relatives — Chihuahuas to coyotes, roses to "weeds" — what creatures will revive in spectacular numbers?
This leads to the most interesting part of Weisman's analysis: Would the earth be able to repair the damage we have done to it? Could climate change reverse in time to prevent a giant extinction? Will our various pollutants, our plastics, and especially our nuclear waste (which will eventually leak from all power plants and other extracted and refined atomic products) wreak havoc long after we are gone?
Compared to these sweeping macro-analyses of what America, humanity, or the planet as a whole requires, Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder and Mary Pipher's The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture focus on the micro. Louv describes how losing contact with nature is affecting our personal development in childhood and beyond, while Pipher contends that environmental fears and concomitant feelings of hopelessness threaten both children's and adults' mental well-being.
Louv offers "a growing body of research [that] links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature." Children in "green" day care, for example, show both better motor coordination and greater ability to concentrate. Friedman concurs, citing data that "children who connect with nature perform better in school [and] have higher SAT scores." His point, however, is that we need to be exposed to nature to be moved to save it. Here we have a perfect example of the virtuous circle: the more we expose our children to the natural world, the more inspired and able they will be to find strategies and innovations to save it.
While Louv chronicles the forces that are causing children to lose contact with nature — from entertainment technology to narrowed school curricula to overstructured "leisure" activities — he devotes more than half his book to real examples of public, private, academic, civic, and nonprofit programs, here and around the world, that are helping fight "nature deficit disorder" in children. He also demonstrates that children's drive to connect to the natural world needs only the slightest nudge to set it in motion. (I once visited Vermont's Mountain School, where students from across the country come for a semester of farming, animal husbandry, and environmentalism in an area where winter lows average in the single digits, snow falls from October to April, and the nearest city of over 50,000 people is 100 miles away. I asked students from such places as New York and Los Angeles what they missed after several months removed from their homes. "Not a thing" was the universal reply.) If you have time for only one of these books, and you want that book to have an impact on your work as an educator, Louv's should be your choice.
Mary Pipher, on the other hand, speaks to adults who, like many of us, "know enough to be scared" about environmental risks, and who may despair at our national unwillingness to act and the apparent futility of local efforts. She is, of course, concerned for the welfare of the earth, and in fact spends much of the book describing the direct efforts she and fellow Nebraskans have been making to block the Keystone pipeline, with its concomitant risks to water quality, land, and species. But primarily she asks, as she has in another context, how we can "revive ourselves," when hopelessness often seems the most appropriate response to both local and global conditions.
Her answer is rather like Louv's: engagement with nature, but especially engagement together with friends, neighbors, and other like-minded individuals, is the best means of saving our psyches while we try to save the planet. She offers both her own experience as an organizer and her psychological insights at a time when we need to hear both. She also sprinkles her text with the richest collection of exhortations from past and present wisdom. From Black Elk: "The road of the good and the road of difficulties: where they cross, that place is holy." From Vaclav Havel: "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it will turn out."
In fact, the hope that we can avoid a premature departure from a ruined planet is the one chord on which all our choristers can harmonize.