New Books at PEOSTA

Reviewed: NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 64.
Description: Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, dementia, and premature birth, among other ailments. Beth Gardiner travels the world to tell the story of this modern-day plague, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s coal heartland and India’s gasping capital. In a grip-ping narrative that’s alive with powerful voices and personalities, she ex-poses the political decisions and economic forces that have kept so many of us breathing dirty air. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.
Description: In the past quarter-century, the total area of developed land in the United States increased by nearly 50 percent. Such a shift comes with substantial environmental, economic, and social impacts. Conflicts arise over regulation, with advocates concerned about the harm excessive development does to the environment and critics charging that urbanization is a natural shift in the market. The diverse perspectives in this resource strive to address the tough questions that arise from this important issue. (publ.)

Description: Unlike natural disasters, which happen because of the earth’s natural geological processes, environmental catastrophes are devastating events that occur due to humanity’s impact on the environment. These can include nuclear bombings, oil spills, and more recently the extreme weather events brought about by climate change. Wildfires, heat waves, flooding, droughts, and numerous other catastrophic scenarios manifest as a result. Use this volume to inform and alert your readers about this essential topic. With the global impact of environmental catastrophes becoming increasingly pronounced, scientists and politicians alike question what the best course of action may be to slow or even reverse the devastation. With this book, readers will form intelligent opinions that can help shape future action about necessary solutions. (publ.)
Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: TLS 13 Sept. 2019 p. 3.
Description: Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature–issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic–was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. His new book tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history–and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 27 May 2019 p. 83; NYT/BR 13 Oct. 2019 p. 18; TLS 22 Nov. 2019 p. 40; NYRB 27 Feb. 2020 p. 21.
Description: What should I wear? It’s one of the fundamental questions we ask ourselves every day. More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labor, the environment, and intellectual property–and in the last three decades, with the simultaneous unfurling of fast fashion, globalization, and the tech revolution, those abuses have multiplied exponentially, primarily out of view. We are in dire need of an entirely new human-scale model. Bestselling journalist Dana Thomas has traveled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are propelling the industry toward that more positive future by reclaiming traditional craft and launching cutting-edge sustainable technologies to produce better fashion. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Feb. 2019 p. 77; NYT/BR 11 Aug. 2019 p. 8; NYRB 16 Jan. 2020 p. 24.
Description: Hailed by the New York Times as “the father of American conservation,” George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938), the Brooklyn-born son of a banker, looked beyond a burgeoning cityscape and saw a brighter future for the whole country. In this book, John Taliaferro traces the naturalist’s expansive trajectory from his time at Yale through his dozens of expeditions out west, riding alongside General Custer in the Black Hills before Little Big-horn, to the adventures that continued even after he became editor-in-chief of Forest & Stream. Drawing on no less than 40,000 pages of Grinnell’s correspondence and dozens of travel notebooks, Taliaferro highlights a century of critical campaigns, from the protection of the vanishing buffalo and the creation of national parks that defined Theodore Roosevelt’s administration to sensitive ethnographies of Plains Indian tribes and the founding of the Audubon Society and the Boone and Crockett Club. (publ.)
Note: No direct relation to congregational minister Josiah Bushnell Grinnel (1821-1891) for whom the Iowa town of Grinnell is named.

Reviewed: PW 27 May 2019 p. 83; NYT/BR 15 Sept. 2019 p. 11.
Description: As we become a more digital society, the gains that have been made for the environment by moving toward a paperless world with more and more efficient devices will soon be or already have been offset by the number of devices in our lives that are always using energy. But many don’t think about the impact on the environment of the “Internet of things.” Whether it’s a microwave connected to the internet, use of Netflix, or online shopping, these technological advances have created new impacts that the people who are most well-versed in these issues haven’t considered. In this book, Tatiana Schlossberg reveals the complicated, confounding and even infuriating ways that we all participate in a greenhouse gas-intensive economy and society, and how some of the biggest and most consequential areas of unintended emissions and environmental impacts are unknowingly part of our daily activities. She will empower people to make the best choices that they can, while allowing them to draw their own conclusions. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR July 2019 p. 11; NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 64.
Description: Scientists were aware of the impact of air pollution as far back as the seventeenth century. Now, as more of us live in cities, we are closer than ever to pollution sources, and the detrimental impact on the environment and our health has reached crisis point. This book will introduce you to the individuals whose research paved the way to today’s understanding of air pollution, often at their own detriment. The author’s global story examines incidents from London’s Great Smog to Norway’s acid rain; Los Angeles’s traffic problem to wood-burning damage in New Zealand. He argues that the only way to alter the future course of our planet and improve collective global health is for city and national governments to stop ignoring evidence and take action, persuading the public and making polluters bear the full cost of the harm that they do. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 16 Jan. 2020 p. 24; PW 24 June 2019 p. 65.
Description: John Muir, the most famous naturalist in American history, protected Yosemite, co-founded the Sierra Club, and is sometimes called the Father of the National Parks. A poor immigrant, self-taught, individualistic, and skeptical of institutions, his idealistic belief in the spiritual benefits of holistic natural systems led him to a philosophy of preserving wilderness unimpaired. Gifford Pinchot founded the U.S. Forest Service and advised his friend Theodore Roosevelt on environmental policy. Raised in wealth, educated in privilege, and interested in how institutions and community can overcome failures in individual virtue, Pinchot’s pragmatic belief in professional management led him to a philosophy of sustainably conserving natural resources. When these rivaling perspectives meet, what happens? For decades, the story of their relationship has been told as a split between the conservation and preservation philosophies, sparked by a proposal to dam a remote Yosemite valley called Hetch Hetchy. But a decade before that argument, Muir and Pinchot camped together alongside Montana’s jewel-like Lake McDonald, which was at the heart of a region not yet consecrated as Glacier National Park. At stake in 1896 was the new idea that some landscapes should be collectively, permanently owned by a democratic government. Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt, and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 14 June 2019 p. 32.
Description: The pastoral image of Amish communities living simply and in touch with the land strikes a deep chord with many Americans. Environmentalists have lauded the Amish as iconic models for a way of life that is local, self-sufficient, and in harmony with nature. But the Amish themselves do not always embrace their ecological reputation, and critics have long questioned the portrayal of the Amish as models of environmental stewardship. In this book, David L. McConnell and Marilyn D. Loveless examine how this prevailing notion of the environmentally conscious Amish fits with the changing realities of their lives. Drawing on 150 interviews conducted over the course of 7 years, as well as a survey of household resource use among Amish and non-Amish people, they explore how the Amish understand nature in their daily lives and how their actions impact the natural world. (publ.)

Description: This book is about sustainable agriculture and architecture in the past, and the engineering works that supported them, but it also looks to the future. Ancient technologies are what engineers define “intermediate,” which means that they are often simple, low in cost and they depend on local materials. Significantly, they don’t require fossil fuels. There is a lot that we in the West can learn from the past and from developing countries where people still practice traditional agriculture, and there is now broad agreement among many governments, non-government organisations, engineers and agronomists, as well as the United Nations, that intermediate technologies are often the most appropriate way forward in developing countries. The New Green Revolution is looking to traditional knowledge to solve problems of decreasing yields and environmental impoverishment, rather than to technology that is dependent on the diminishing resource of fossil fuels. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 13 Oct. 2019 p. 19.
Description: Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know. Will future generations distinguish between those who didn’t believe in the science of global warming and those who said they accepted the science but failed to change their lives in response? Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves–with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat–and don’t eat–for breakfast. (publ.)

Description: Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, this is, above all, an inspiring story of hope. Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer–proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain–the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade. Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has be-come a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life–all by itself. Personal and inspirational, Isabella Tree’s book is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature, when it is given as much freedom as possible. (publ.)