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Below you'll find information which I strongly feel can benefit you. The books and DVDs give you a solid idea of our own education and expertise apart from what we bring in the areas of marketing, sales, advertising, and public relations.
Reading list (with comments):
Spiral Marketers is focused primarily on those activities that help move our communities through the transition to a steady-state economy. To get a better idea of where our thoughts and energies are, review the book lists
below, which come primarily from Bill Henthorn's reading list on LinkedIn. If you do lots of reading yourself, and you find titles or authors you recognize and are sympathetic to,
or if the comments accompanying the book resonate with you, there's a strong probability you and we can easily work very well together. (However, if you don't recognize titles or authors or find yourself at odds with their positions, then we are not the right business partners or marketing consultants for you.)
You may want to note there's a substantial overlap between economics and the environment, although the two reading lists do not necessarily reflect this overlap. Why? Our economics model depends on continual growth, which in turn depends on more efficient and effective ways to identify and utilize resources. Most of these efficiencies create new environmental problems even when they solve an existing one. The bottom line is simply this: everything comes from nature, but our economics model treats nature as both an exploitable resource and a dumping ground.
You'll also find a list of DVDs.
- This reading list:
Environment / green / natural resources / food and nutrition:
BOOKS:
- Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to save civilization, by Lester R. Brown
- The New Normail: an agenda for responsible living, by David Wann
- Deep Economy: The wealth of communities and the durable future, by Bill McKibben
- The Story of Stuff: How our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health -- and a vision for change, by Annie Leonard
- Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
- Who Turned Out the Lights, by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson
- Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living by Doug Fine
- Green Gone Wrong: How our economy is undermining the environmental revolution, by Heather Rogers
- Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch
- Feeding People is Easy, by Colin Tudge
- Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe, by Maria Rodale
- Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Paul Waldau
- Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
- Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
- The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, by Paul Gilding
- The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival, by Marq de Villiers
- The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer
- The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben
- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock
- Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben
- Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard
- The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life, by Bill McKibben
- Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff, by Fred Pearce
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
- Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It, by Anna Lappe, Bill McKibben
- Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity, by Robert Albritton
- The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race, by Barry Popkin
- The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Brian Fagan
- Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, by Daniel Goleman
- Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, by Marion Nestle
- The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply, by Ken Midkiff, Wendell Berry
- Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves, by Andrew Szasz
- Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America's Drinking Water, by Elizabeth Royte
- When the rivers run dry : water, the defining crisis of the twenty-first century, by Fred Pearce
- Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry by Stacy Malkan
DVDs:
- Food Inc.
- The Future of Food
- Fast Food Nation
- Slow Food Revolution
- We Feed the World
- Killer at Large
- No Impact Man
- Food Matters: You are what you eat
- King Corn
- Fat Head
- Super Size Me
- Fed Up!
- Climate of Change
- Fuel
- Dirt: the movie
- Gasland:
- A River of Waste
- Planet in Peril
- An Inconvenient Truth
- The 11th Hour
- National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World
- Building Green
- Dimming the Sun
- Everything's Cool
- The Age of Stupid
- Plastic Planet
- Cool It
- Other reading list:
Economics / sociology / societal organization:
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to save civilization
by
Lester R. Brown
An interesting book with lots of
details coming from research on
what has been done, what is being
done, and what can be done.
And quick to read if you already
read this kind of stuff:
You will encounter much of the
research in other similar books.
Distilled: US $190 billion a year
(one-third of its military budget)
can turn things around and set us
solidly a new course to a new paradigm.
However focused on the world at large
in eradicating poverty, boosting education,
decreasing population growth, shifting
energy sources, sequestering carbon,
and working to be more resourceful with
what we already have ...
... as a reader in the US (a decided plutocratic society
where the 1% control everything in a wonderful
corporatocratic trend where we seem to be
fighting to avoid fascism), nary a mention
is made of applying these focuses to the US itself,
where we have high rates of poverty, imprisonment,
bankruptcy, homeless, and hunger -- amidst enough
to tend to everyone.
Perhaps the reason is that Brown wrote this for
the Western political leaders and needed to soften
the message a bit. After all, he has a testimonial
from Bill Clinton on the book cover.
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Deep Economy
by
Bill McKibben
McKibben -- always a pleasure to read for his great writing style -- focuses his attention on the fact that we have already passed the limits of the planet's ability to sustain us, on how growth for growth's sake is a bankrupt concept we need to abandon, on how scholarly studies have shown that once an individual's wealth reaches a certain point that "more" does not bring happiness and in fact decreases it, and how we've been isolated to the point where few of us are part of true interdependent communities made of people who help each other ...
And that the return to focusing on communities (through local purchasing) brings benefits to each of us, while also addressing our out-of-control consumer, shop-for-solutions mentality.
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The Story of Stuff
by
Annie Leonard
A solid explanation of the waste and destruction of our current system, filled with examples, of our extraction, production, consumption, and disposal.
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Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by
Donella H. Meadows
, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows
A quick read, but highly focused on the likelihood that globally we're in a state of "overshoot and collapse."
From pages 176-177:
How can a society tell if it's in overshoot [the condition in which the delayed signals from the environment are not yet strong enough to force an end to growth]? Falling resource stocks and rising pollution levels are the first clues. Here are other symptoms:
- Capital resources and labor diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services that were formerly provided without cost by nature (for example, sewage treatment, air purification, water purification, flood control, pest control, restoration of soil nutrients, pollination, or the preservation of species).
- Capital, resources, and labor diverted from final goods production to exploitation of scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources.
- Technologies invented to make use of lower-quality, smaller, more dispersed, less valuable resources, because the higher-value ones are gone.
- Failing natural pollution cleanup mechanisms; rising levels of pollution.
- Capital depreciation exceeding investment, and maintenance deferred, so there is deterioration in capital stocks, especially long-lived infrastructure.
- Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor used by the military or industry to gain access to, secure, and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions.
- Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) postponed in order to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts.
- Debts a rising percentage of annual real output.
- Eroding goals for health and environment.
- Increasing conflicts, especially over sources or sinks.
- Shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford.
- Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.
- Growing chaos in natural systems, with "natural" disasters more frequent and more severe because of less reliance in the environmental system.
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Who Turned Out the Lights
by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson
CAUTION, WARNING, and BE AWARE: From the editors of Public Agenda, whose chairman & co-founder is a powerful marketing and research figure who knows how to manipulate tens of millions for the sole benefit of huge corporate clients and whose honorary board members include Peter G. Peterson, who helps lead the fight to strip people of their financial and political independence and make them serfs to the Top 1%.
This is a public relations plant (a scam) for the oligopoly energy sector. As a copywriter, I recognize their tactics. As a person who reads a lot about the energy / green / environment / climate change arena, I recognize they use biased sources to offer the reader seemingly independent, well-researched and balanced conclusions.
Definitely NOT recommended -- this is a Trojan horse of a presentation.
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Green Gone Wrong: How our economy is undermining the environmental revolution
by Heather Rogers
Organized in six chapters addressing three critical human needs (food, shelter, and transportation), journalist Rogers puts forth a well-researched book giving her thoughts based on visiting various locales around the globe.
For the most part, she finds that those producers who truly engage in non-harmful practices are overwhelmed by the financial and political power of large corporations, along with the corruption (she uses the term “venality”) that ensures green solutions serve the rich and powerful while often harming the environment and destroying communities.
Along with author Fred Pearce (When the Rivers Run Dry, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner), you’ll find Rogers’ writing to be engaging and easy.
Two additional chapters give a summary and hints of the glow on the distant horizon. From all eight chapters, it becomes evident that the pursuit of profits, which is the sole basis of our free market capitalism, is what rots the entire shift to a sustainable, steady-state economy of less consumption and greater meaning.
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Feeding People is Easy
by
Colin Tudge
"The message is that we can feed ourselves to the highest standards both of nutrition and of gastronomy, and do so effectively forever without cruelty to livestock and without wrecking the rest of the world and driving other species to extinction, and create human societies that are truly agreeable, cooperative and at peace, in which all manner of people with all kinds of beliefs and aspirations can be personally fulfilled. The approach is not to replace traditional ways of life and know-how with government-backed, industrialized high tech, but to build upon the traditional crafts: get to know them and understand them, help them along with science of a truly appropriate kind, and practice them in societies that are intended to be agreeable. Craft is what's needed. The present perception of modernity -- all labor performed by machines, controlled from above -- in truth belongs to the nineteenth century. The future lies with "science-assisted craft" -- if, that is, we are to have a tolerable future at all."
-- pages 12-13
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Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe
by
Maria Rodale
A fast read for those already familiar with the need to recognize the externalities imbedded in everything we produce and buy, including food.
Rodale includes a fascinating encapsulated history of how what she calls "chemical farming" came to be, beginning in the days of the alchemists.
I don't know you are aware, but in 8 to 10 years, about 2011 or 2013, our climate imbalance will begin throwing us all so far off balance that we will lose about 30% of our population -- two billion people by the year 2050. Imagine 30% of your LinkedIn connections dead.
We are currently at 140% of the planet's capacity to sustain us as a species. The planet doesn't need saving, and the planet doesn't care if we don't save ourselves.
In short, if we are determined to survive as a species and a civilization, we need to begin making the choices now that transition us to a new social reorganization, one no longer driven by growth for growth's sake.
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Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future
by
Donella H. Meadows
, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows
(The 1990 update to the 1970 Limits to Growth) Encapsulates what has subsequently been expanded, item by item. Yet returns to the World3 computer model used in Limits to Growth.
The long and short of it: It's looking mighty grim for the human species. We simply need a new way to reorder society and a new non-financial value underlying this society. Instead of what does it cost (and thus what is it worth), we need what does it do to contribute to society (and how few resources did it take to do so?).
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The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
by
Paul Gilding
As I discover in writing my own book on decluttering our lives, the essence of our money-based, marketplace society does not deliver those aspects of life that are most important to us.
Gilding spells out a terrifying dystopia that's unfolding right now and will hit full force in less than 10 years. Like us sitting on the tracks while watching a speeding train head toward us, we need to realize we're nearly in the state of crisis that will create great upheaval.
The crisis itself will awaken us to the fact that growth for growth's sake, driven by consumption in order to produce the sales and profits, does not work. We're currently at 140% of the earth's capacity to support us -- in other words, we're already ecologically bankrupt and have the ecological cracks widening in the ground below us.
At first, we'll work on solving the climate crisis by mobilizing in World War II fashion to dramatically reduce CO2. Yet Gilding explains the climate crisis is only a symptom of the greater problem: that the end of market growth, predicted by Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, is happening now.
We need to move to a steady-state economy. Yet, in many ways, without official large corporate or government direction, we are doing so, through supporting local, small businesses including organic farmers, consciously consuming less, being mindful about our disposal and looking to pass it on to others, not acquiring in the first place but seeking what we need temporarily through communities, which themselves have been atrophied but are now regrowing as people recognize what is of real value.
Gilding cites studies showing once people reach $15,000 in annual income (or $60,000 for a family of four), greater income does not boost happiness. Using this as a takeoff point, he envisions a transformative steady-state economy with a more vibrant communities where people work less at jobs for the money because they need less and spend more time engaged in community activities.
There's a lot in this book -- and Gilding himself is highly credible, having worked in top leadership at Greenpeace and as an inner circle to global CEOs. He knows both sides of the story.
Finally, he lets us know: There's no "them" to fix this or get attion going. Using the parallel of passivity in the Netherlands in the years before World War II, he calls for us to take those actions we can now to build this new steady-state economy backed by strong community so WHEN the crisis hits (which it will in 8-10 years), we'll be prepared to weather perhaps 20 to 40 years of global transition.
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The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival
by Marq de Villiers
A great book (and fast 324-page read) which details in its separate chapters quite a bit of science and natural history in its chapters:
- Cosmology
- Plate tectonics and the silliness of huge settlements sitting on proven unstable location (as I sit here writing these notes in San Francisco)
- Ice ages
- Mass extinctions
- Comets and asteroids
- Earthquakes (and tsunamis)
- Volcanoes
- Poisonous emissions and noxious gases
- Tsunamis (and earthquakes)
- Floods
- Hurricanes and tornadoes
- Plagues and pandemics
- Acts of man that makes things worse
Written in 2007, the final chapter on mitigating acts of man through alternative energies is a bit outdated in places, but does echo the basic fact in James Lovell's Gaia, Bill McKibben in his various writings, as well as books which examine the stupidity of the premise of growth as the driver for consumer capitalism:
We don't need to save the planet. The planet in fact doesn't give a fig about humanity. Life will continue -- and has done so under far worse conditions than we could ever possibly deliver -- with or without us. It's simply a matter of choice: whether we want to continue as a species and what we'll do to increase the probability of doing so. Step 1: Instead of seeking continued economic growth (which is impossible in the long run, and clear to anyone who understands compounding), we need to shift to sustainable development, much of which focuses on the steady state society rather than the ever-growing (or recessionary) profit-driven society we find ourselves imbedded in.
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The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by
Peter Singer
This book approaches the consequences of what we eat in an interesting fashion and using an interesting device: three families and their diets (standard American meat and potatoes, conscious omnivores, and vegan) and the ethics of their choices.
In short, although you may have been exposed to industrial food production in its petroleum and chemical use, water, and depletion of the environment through externalizing costs to keep consumer prices low, its inefficiencies in growing, transportation, and final meal preparation, in the challenges of discovering how wholesome your food actually is for the environment, those who work to get it to you, and even the animals who gives their lives for the sake of our eating meat
there’s much in this that isn’t in other books. First, there are no simple answers. Locally grown food may use more energy and resources than distantly transported food. An organic animal farm may keep its animals as confined, stressed, and, in pain as a factory farm. And going vegan means you don’t get vitamin B12 (so where do you get it?).
It might be challenging to read if you’re new to the overlapping issues of food production, safety, animal welfare, resource use. But go ahead anyway and dig in, then supplement your knowledge diet with other books in my reading list here with comments.
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The End of Nature
by
Bill McKibben
From my library, September 1989 first edition ...
Written when McKibben was alarmed that the CO2 had reached 350 parts per million (now his organization 350.org wants to get it back down to 350 parts per million), and fearing a 20 to 40 point rise in the next 20 to 30 years if we start reducing our consumption (now we're at 390) ...
the "end of nature" is the end of the physical living world unmanaged and unmodified by humans. Damming rivers, changing the soil and the atmosphere with discharges, and his fear of biotech and the onslaught of genetically modification so we can have huge, fleshy, headless chickens and other monstrosities. We no longer have nature but something that appears similar to it. The predictability of the seasons and the rain and drought and snow they bring is gone. The farmer and the climatologist can no longer say with certainty what tomorrow will bring based on the past, because we no longer live in the continuity of the past. We've set forth on a new course into uncharted territory.
His central point: we with hubris have long decided that the universe and all in it is here to suit our needs. And he references Genesis (as did Eugene Linden in Affluence and Discontent, also in my reading list here) as laying the foundation for our anthropocentric consumer culture. But he correctly points out the error in our perception: we're merely a part of nature, not the pinnacle of nature. To make his point, he recounts the story of Jim Stolz, who hiked tremendously and found himself in close contact with grizzly bears on several occasions. "When you get that close, you realize you're part of the food chain. When we go into grizzly country we're going into their home. We're the intruders. We're used to being top dog. But in griz country we're part of the food chain" (Stolz quoted on page 172).
In large part, most people in the West do not even have the understanding today of our dire predicament as set forth in this book written 22 years ago.
And like being in grizzly country and not backing away when being snarled at with a huge gaping maw filled with flesh-shedding incisors, the ever-balancing system of the Earth (or Gaia) will balance us out of the system in order to get itself back into balance. There's no emotion here, any more than there is in being mauled, killed, and consumed by a grizzly or great white shark.
The alarms have been flashing red, the sirens shrieking, everywhere the message has been clear for decades. We cannot politic this away through compromise. We cannot science this away with GMO crops that withstand greater heat and drought. We cannot do anything except back away from the snarling grizzly and its warning of danger by changing our ways regarding consumption and the "needs" we have beyond air, water, food, clothing, and shelter (for everything beyond those is truly a want, and a painfully aching consumer want created by the owners of consumer society). Yes, this means psychological pain of loss, the forced abandonment of a false dream, the stopping in our tracks from reaching an earthly paradise where every desire is provided for, for a price.
We're now paying the increasing price known in economics as externalities, a price that came at the time as debt whose interest payments alone are feeding upon themselves and snowballing ourselves. Our system is bankrupt. It's time to find a new path that works.
If 22 years ago, McKibben was alarmed at 350 ppm of CO2, and if 2011 now has 390 ppm (past the point of no return), it's time to face reality and the past due notice.
Nature is about to foreclose on us.
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Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
by
James Lovelock
My copy: from my library (paperback, 1989, Oxford) with a different cover.
Other LinkedIn readers have commented on it being required reading while possibly being outdated ...
Yet, like understanding any area of concern today -- such as economics and cold-hearted financialization and the effects on social justice -- I believe it's important that once you've been exposed to climate change / global warming,
you follow the trail back to see what its earlier thought leaders shared.
One interesting example: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is hailed as a breakthrough work helping to herald the environmental movement and Lovelock gladly acknowledges it, but he then helps provide greater perspective that nature itself produces substances as "poisonous and almost certainly mutagenic and carcinogenic" as DDT, the poison that led to the "silent spring."
In the final Gaian view, we focus on human ecology today, but the Earth and the continuance of life on it -- regardless of the destruction we create -- will go on. Whether homo sapiens will go on is a matter very personal to us as a species. But Gaia doesn't care -- the vacuum created by our absence will be brought back into balance through the interplay of chemistry optimizing the biosphere.
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Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
by
Bill McKibben
Always enjoyable to read Bill McKibben, who's a marvelous writer.
And he adds unique stories in his keen observations of his local Vermont environment and the larger lessons he's gained and now shares.
Because he's been so busy organizing and running 350.org, some of his firsthand accounts of foreign impacts of climate warming are sometimes sparse in details -- and some seem to be taken from the same sources as other books (such as Hot: Living through the next fifty years on earth, also in my reading list).
So I suggest reading both Eaarth and Hot together to supplement each other. Both are equally grim and equally cautiously optimistic.
But the bottom line is this for Eaarth: We have left the Earth and the phase of living that we used to live in, although most of the institutional structures remain dysfunctionally in place. We are essentially a speeding train headed for a grand catastrophe that cannot be avoided now, and all we can do is "mitigate" and "adapt" our ways to lessen the possibility that Homo sapiens does not actually perish.
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Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by
Mark Hertsgaard
Climate change is happening now and will continue for decades to come. Like stopping an aircraft carrier or a heavily laden freight train, the carbon we've already put into the atmosphere will continue to heat us to very uncomfortable, increasingly deadly levels -- even if we don't add another CO2 molecule.
There's lot in this book by a SF Bay Area journalist that I hadn't read in others. Yet it's all accessible in plain language.
The closing lines, quoting Kevin Danaher, cofounder and president of Global Exchange, give a sense of the reality of our situation:
"I believe a certain percentage of humanity will survive the coming collapse."
Yep, you read that quote correctly. A lot of people are still going to die specifically due to climate change. (European heat waves will increase. Killer floods will increase. Katrina-like hurricanes will increase. Water
shortages will increase.)
And a lot of those dying are going to be in "rich" countries. Including in California.
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The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life
by
Bill McKibben
McKibben's a wonderful writer and, even if you're not interested in things environmental, his essays are a delight to read.
If you are interested in things environmental, you can gain even more insight. A number of them go back to the 1980s and 1990s, so you can see where he was in his thinking and the broader population in theirs.
As a writer, I recommend this for its writing.
As someone who loves nature, I also recommend it.
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Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff
by
Fred Pearce
Fred Pearce's latest book is quite revealing, and is the result of his personal travels of 100,000+ globe-trekking miles to track down the sources of stuff in his life.
Nicely sorted into six major sections covering 27 short chapters, each is filled with his firsthand accounts in addition to information from experts and guides as he made his way through some most unglamorous spots across the world:
Part Two: My food
Part Three: My clothes
Part Four: The Chinese Dragon
Part Five: Mines, Metal, and Power
Part Six: Downstream
Part Seven: My species and saving the planet
You'll discover the degree to which markets are not transparent and are mainly oligopolies, consisting of a few major global players, a few regional dominant players, and the zillions of others.
You'll see how certain commodities, such as all cell phones, laptops, desktop computers, and webcams, are made just by two or three Chinese companies, then stamped with brands such as Nokia or iPhone or HP or IBM or Logitech.
You'll see the destruction of metals mining, and how some countries recycle 90%+ of their aluminum (but not the UK or the US).
You'll see how retail buyers for major clothes manufacturers/retailers (Gap, Levis, JC Penney, and others) insist on the low price, which forces contract manufacturers to send their business to the global lowest-cost wage markets -- or lose the contract and go out of business.
You'll also see how many myths, put forward by reputable organizations such as the UN, have not even been verified by them. Example: that Africa is drying up and crop lands are being lost, when in fact they're being reclaimed.
Definite thumbs up and all that to this fast-reading book of 263 pages.
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Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It
by Anna Lappe,
Bill McKibben
She's the daughter of famed Frances Moore Lappe, who authored the widely known Diet for a Small Planet back in the early 1970s, then followed up by coauthoring with Joseph Collins the book World Hunger: twelve myths in 1986.
Since I love reading books and watching documentaries about food production, distribution, and policy in the context of capitalism, economics, and social justice, my mouth watered in anticipation of being served up the hot diet outlined in Ms. Lappe's book.
Having read it ...
... there's a ton of useable and interesting stuff in this book.
If you were to boil it down to a key phrase instead of reading the insightful 250 pages, I believe it would be this:
"Livestock generate 18% of the world's global warming."
The solution? Eat less meat.
If you doubt reducing meat consumption has any effect, consider it from another perspective, which I discovered while studying global water use (you'll find those titles in my reading list, too):
Livestock use a humongous amount of water.
How much?
- A single 2.14-gram slice of pepperoni takes 11 gallons of water to produce
- 16 ounces of beef takes 2500 gallons of water to produce
Compare that to try to save water by taking shorter showers. Phewy on that!
However, the largest use of water is in generating electricity:
48% of the water we use goes to generating electricity.
So, in one fell swoop, by reducing your meat consumption, you reduce global warming and reduce water consumed in making the electricity to power the "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFOs) and everything else.
Sure beats taking shorter showers.
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Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity
by Robert Albritton
ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WITH ECONOMIC BACKGROUNDS ...
Allbritton puts forth a very interesting thesis well worth the investment of time and quite illuminating in a Marxist view of capitalist food production.
He builds his argument using Marx's idea of capitalism, then focuses on food within our current (and broken)
capitalism system:
"to demonstrate the way capitalism works, not only because food provides a crossroads for global/local, rural/urban, biological/cultural, ecological and economic interests. Faced with the global dangers of our era, we must open our minds to radical alternatives that bring economics and ethics into closer contact; that will place significant advances in democracy, sustainability and social justice on the agenda; and that advance international cooperation to deal effectively with truly global problems.
(page 211)
There are three basic problems with our food system:
- The global distribution of food is radically unjust ...
- Much of the food produced and the means of producing it is not healthful for consumers or producers ...
- Our food system is environmentally destructive primarily because it uses up non-renewable resources, pollutes the planet and promotes global warming.
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The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race
by Barry Popkin
Popkin is an economist and nutrition professor with decades of first-hand experience and longitudinal studies that show that today 1.6 billion people are overweight (vs. 0.800 billion people undernourished) out of 6.8 billion people total. Within the 1.6 billion overweight are the rapidly growing obese . . .
. . . whereas before the greater concern was hunger.
So what? Rising diabetes and the onslaught of killer diseases it brings: heart disease, asthma, a variety of cancers ...
Like an ecologist focusing on the rising waters of a lake, Popkins focuses on the body as an efficient energy storage entity following genetic instructions laid down in our pre-homo sapiens days:
Drink only water. You as being are constantly burning energy foraging for food. Food energy is scarce: convert and save all unused bits as fat.
Fruit juices came about during Florida orange freezes: it became a way to economically salvage a ruined crop.
Our sugary sodas Coca-Cola and Pepsi began as patent medicines (aka snake oil), not as occasional beverages.
Our serving portions have grown tremendously, while our social infrastructure has withered: busy families with parents gone, everyone eating factory foods, kids managed by TVs and games, and playgrounds too far away or across dangerous streets.
As in any reasonable analysis, no one factor can be said to be responsible. Not fast foods. Not portion sizes. Not sedentary lifestyles, nor technology, TV, or internet.
Well, except ignorance. And this is a tough one, boys and girls.
Most of these 1.6 billion people don't read often and when they do, they follow propaganda-laden mainstream media.
Like the eroding republic called America and its alarming current crisis that will likely seen the end of citizen participation in anything but the political farce called voting (which merely picks preselected candidates) ...
... the answers to the 24% of the world being overweight lies in something few will do, even to keep themselves out of the approaching totalitarianism:
Read and discover the facts. Then act on them.
In this case, it merely means decreasing sugars and fats while increasing movement and exercise. And our transition from our nearly 100-year-old covert soft totalitarianism to our rapidly emerging arrogantly overt financial oligarchy is no different: citizens will not move their butts until the day a military boot kicks it to get it moving.
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The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
by Brian Fagan
Brian Fagan is emeritus professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. This book gives serious commentary on history and how civilizations are at at the mercy of climate.
he's a scholar who gives us a long view of the interaction of climate and human society -- certainly helping balance the skepticism of remaining modern debate between anthropogenic vs. natural-variation arguments.
Early on in this book, I find there's some humor (perhaps a bit dark) on page 57:
"The Chronicle of Novgorod tells us there were 17 years of climate-induced famine during the early 13th century: In 1230 ... 'Some of the common people killed the living and ate them, other cut up dead flesh and corpses and ate them.' "
And toward the end, he discusses the famine in early 20th century China, where they made a certain foul meatball out of ... yep: parts.
YUMMY IN MY TUMMY! I think if we had that happen today, the fast-food corporations will muscle in and shove the common people aside. I can see it now:
FOR A LIMITED TIME, A BUCKET OF FRESH-FROM-THE-MORGUE HUMAN THIGHS (that's a whopping 49 pounds of finger-licking goodness) for ONLY $29.99!! Only at KFC. KFC: Nobody gets you meat this fresh. ("Man, this is good food!")
At times, the reading got a wee bit tough for me, since it gets in abstract concept while throwing around dates ...
But the overall message, as contained in his final chapter, is serious, is real, and it's happening now ... along with our possible steady decline globally.
Now that's cheerfully optimistic, isn't it?
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Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything
by
Daniel Goleman
His book examines consumption in two aspects:
- sustainability (impacts on resources and global warming) and
- toxicity: the intricate web of resources directly and indirectly involved in producing goods and the disposal consequences after we're done with our stuff.
I applaud him for asking readers to stop fooling themselves by believing the illusion of propaganda. (Being a marketer who uses propaganda, I'm guilty as all hell in contributing to the delusion.)
Having studied and written series of articles on electricity use, water use, and renewable energy ...
I'm surprised to find some glaring absences or gaps into Goleman's book, including water use. The vast majority (70-80%) of all water used goes to producing electricity and food production:
- 48% of water used in the US goes to producing electricity (195 billion gallons a day: equal to us draining Lake Erie every 22 months)
- It takes 1854 to 3000 gallons to produce one pound of beef. And there is enormous pollution involved: where does cow poop go? Into your drinking water.
Taking shorter showers doesn't matter.
It's fine to ponder lead poisoning of children and carcinogen consumption.
We already have a growing worldwide water crisis -- and it will be full storm in the US in 20 years. If you're wondering, so what the f***? Stop and take note: No water. No you (no food to eat, water to drink, shower water, etc. etc. ). Get it?
For you interested in water use in food production, check out: www.waterfootprint.org. It's run by a Dutch professor whose book on water is pretty sharp stuff -- ironically dry in parts because of statistics.
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Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health
by
Marion Nestle
Oddly enough, the author's last name is an epithet for crappy, nutrition-free, overpriced, petrochemical food-like substances marketed worldwide under the propagandist illusion of being actual food.
The book itself is fat one with smallish print on each of its 374 pages. I'll let you know the best parts when I'm done and which other books connect to it in theme and content.
The smallish typesize is ruining my eyesight ... taking longer to finish this than I expected.
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The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply
by Ken Midkiff, Wendell Berry
Great book if you want to know the backstory to today's consumer march toward organic foods -- you know, gently massaged broccoli and agriculture that demonstrates its policy on diversity by raising more than one food type. Also, the book contains tons about the filthy mess you and I have been creating and continue to create as we befoul our soil, water, and air so we can have our Mickey Ds or a mouth-watering, grain-fed T-bone steak cooked on the grill in the backyard.
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Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves
by Andrew Szasz
This is an important book for MARKETERS, POLITICAL SCIENTISTS, and SOCIOLOGISTS to read. Yet, I placed it in this category, because of the increasing numbers of people who believe they can protect themselves by buying market solutions and hiding behind gated communities.:
Learn about the long-term trend, beginning in the 1950s Nuclear Age and personal fallout shelters, of increasing self-reliance and fortressing instead of political and community action to solve widespread issues:
- nuclear war: backyard bomb shelters
- urban (crime, decay, etc): suburbs and then as suburbs became dangerous exurbs and then gated communities
- public education: private school enrollment
- bottled water and organic food
NOTE: the private solution of consuming your way to safety is an economically based one and therefore discriminatory: the poor can't afford to move to gated communities, enroll their kids in private schools, or eat higher-priced organic food. Result? Increasing socioeconomic divide between haves and have-nots, as people look out for themselves, and businesses provide the solutions to those with the money.
The book's warning: shopping our safety destablizes society, undermines the strength of our government as corporations gain even more power.
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Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America's Drinking Water
by
Elizabeth Royte
Good easy book so you can answer the deliberately planted public relations question whether bottled water is "better than tap" or not.
Where does bottled water come from?? (Turns out, from only a few places, and it really f***s those places up.)
Why has bottled water grown as a consumption industry? It fits into the larger social picture of fortressing against the dangerous urban environment than began with suburbs, home security, gated communities, and safe rooms.
To learn more about larger social picture, read these (listed above):
- Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves (above)
- The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (in the other reading list: Economics / sociology / societal organization:)
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Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry
by
Stacy Malkan
I came to this book with an interest in understanding how the power structure of our current society continually abuses us for the sake of large self-preserving corporations (whether the abuse is environmental, political, financial, or social), I'd recommend this to anyone (gal or guy) with an interest in understanding how things are in order to effect improvement.
Specifically found the fact that US industries can sell dangerous products to the US while having to modify them for stricter overseas requirements especially revealing as a statement on who we are (rather than who we'd like to be). Kind of like a third-class dumping ground for crud, it seems.
Definitely informative, interesting, and inspiring (especially in the courage and persistence of the women involved and the industry change they put into motion).
Of course, I'm wondering about the chemical soup of unprounceable scary ingredients listed on my deodorant and shampoo and bar soap and shaving cream and toothpaste.
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DVDs on:
Environment / green / natural resources / food and nutrition:
Fat Head
Very humorous, this presents an interesting case by looking at and then refutes the claims put forward in Super Size Me that fast food is to blame for obesity, then shows the source of our near-universal belief in eating less animal fats and cholesterol. Apparently, our focus on more grains and lower fats and cholesterol is based on flawed science known as the Lipid Hypothesis. He eats McDonalds for 28 days, losing weight and lowering his cholesterol.
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Gasland
About the incredible destruction of drinking water by the natural gas industry.
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