Book Review
CHRISTMAS ROUNDUP DECEMBER 2006
by Carol Van Strum
An Inconvenient Truth: The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it, by Al Gore. Rodale, 2006. $21.95 paper.
Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and salvos from an American Iconoclast, by Edward Abbey, edited and with introduction by David Petersen. Milkweed Editions, 2006. $24.95 hardcover.
And three by Carl Hiaasen:
Nature Girl, Knopf, 2006. $25.95 hardcover
Hoot, Knopf, 2004. $8.95 paper
Flush, Knopf, 2005. $16.95 hardcover
"If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a hot season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness."1
Michael Faraday, 1855
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INTRO
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth gives us the sad truth of global warming in a volume any third-grader can understand. This is a book not to keep but to give - or to wear out reading aloud in laundromat or bus station to anyone who'll listen.
And because saving the world can drive you nuts, or seriously impair your health, frequent doses of laugh-out-loud comic relief are recommended for all ages. Edward Abbey and Carl Hiaasen admirably meet this requirement.
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REVIEW
"We have no God-given right to survive. The biosphere doesn't owe us a living," biologist Theo Detrick argues in The Last Gasp, Trevor Hoyle's 1983 science fiction eco-thriller. Runaway global warming, Detrick warns, "cannot be stopped, and won't be stopped, if the world refuses to listen and take heed."
To silence his warnings, Detrick is murdered; some very rich people get richer, and Planet Earth ultimately becomes uninhabitable.2
Twenty-three years after his fictional nightmare of irreversible climate change, not even Hoyle's lurid imagination could have predicted the grim reality documented in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Eerily echoing Hoyle's script, many people still refuse to listen and take heed, and vested interests still attempt to silence the messengers.3
Like its film namesake (just released on DVD, available for $19.95 from Amazon)4, An Inconvenient Truth grew out of the slide show on global warming that Al Gore has been trucking around the world for years. Both film and book complement each other but are separate projects; the book stands alone as a handsome, well-researched volume (despite some serious design flaws such as the lack of an index or even a table of contents).
The bulk of An Inconvenient Truth documents the planetary emergency of its subtitle. In horrifying detail and explicit photographs and charts, Gore presents overwhelming evidence of catastrophic human-generated warming throughout Planet Earth. Page after page graphically depicts the effects of human greed and folly, from swollen, poisoned oceans to vanishing glaciers, melting polar icecaps, and mass extinctions.
Gore devotes only sixteen pages of his 325-page book to remedies for this planetary emergency, and his suggestions, while useful, address only individual actions such as recycling materials and driving less. Surely Gore, having compiled the overwhelming evidence of a dire global emergency, is aware that reversing the juggernaut of climate change will take far more drastic action than individual choices to carpool or buy local produce. The scope of the disaster he documents demands immediate, drastic changes in the entire global economy that can only be accomplished by emergency legislation at national and international levels.
Educating the public to demand such changes, however, is a first step toward such legislation. "I think we need a mass movement in the United States. I think it ought to start at the grass roots," Gore said recently, announcing plans for a massive grass-roots Carbon Freeze movement to pressure legislators in Washington.5 An Inconvenient Truth is a powerful, readily comprehensible tool of public enlightenment for such a campaign.
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Rude, crude, and funny as hell, Edward Abbey's (The Monkey Wrench Gang; Desert Solitaire; etc.) Postcards from Ed provides a refreshing counterpoint to Al Gore's earnest solemnity. This collection of his letters from 1949-1969 is a perfect companion to An Inconvenient Truth. Abbey plunges headlong into areas that Al Gore - ever the politician - tiptoes around if he dares approach at all. Open Postcards to any page and a biting truth leaps out, screaming to be read aloud - or shouted to the rooftops.
Notably, while Gore acknowledges the global population explosion without offering any cure, Abbey from early on pinpoints bluntly the imperative for population control to reduce the devastating impacts of human overcrowding on environment, economy, crime, war, racism, poverty, and morality. A quick skim of the comprehensive index of Postcards from Ed turns up such gems as:
"[A]t least half the trouble between the races is caused by overcrowding, by overpopulation. Or to use terminology more familiar to [Evergreen Review] readers - too many fucking people - and too many people fucking…." (1969)
"The taxation system should be revised to penalize, not reward, those who lay unfair burdens on their neighbors and on posterity by breeding us all into the madhouse….Most people have no business having children anyway. Look around you. Look at them." (1969)
"If we must have more industry in southern Utah, I would suggest that what we need most is some form of light manufacturing: let's say, a nice, clean well-lighted condom factory." (1977)
"All industrial societies have reached the point of diminishing returns. What is needed is not the abolition of industrialism but the moderation of it…and most important, putting limits on human population. We are clearly breeding ourselves into a planetary prison-house. There is, I believe, a direct correlation between human numbers and the value we place on an individual human life." (1977)
Particularly poignant, given Earth's decline since his death, is Abbey's 1984 lament: "If I regret anything, it is my good behavior."
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Certain primitive microbes are known scientifically as extremophiles, because they thrive in extreme environments that would kill all other forms of life. Novelist Carl Hiaasen (Double Whammy; Tourist Season; Sick Puppy; Lucky You, etc.) specializes in human forms of extremophile that thrive in Florida, a cut-throat environment where good behavior has little or no survival value.
Hiaasen's characters typically are ordinary people driven to extreme measures by ruthless land developers, con artists, phony TV preachers, sexual predators, tourist traps, and other exploiters. Honey Santana, of Nature Girl, goes ballistic over telemarketers, and pursues a retaliatory con trick of her own. The result is a madcap chase through the Florida Everglades, and some memorable lessons in natural - and unnatural - history.
More devious and often wiser than their elders, young people fashion ingenious remedies for social and ecological evils in Hiaasen's two books for young adults - of all ages. Hoot features Roy Eberhardt, new boy in town, battered target of local bullies, and accidental defender of a colony of burrowing owls about to be bulldozed by an illegal construction project. Noah, the young hero of Flush, has a little sister ominously named after Edward Abbey, which partly explains why their dad is in prison for sinking a casino boat that illegally dumped raw sewage into the bay. In both books, the kids devise schemes wild and crazy enough to please Edward Abbey himself.
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