A book about the evolution and development of human ingenuity, and how that ingenuity drives a ratcheting up of our standard of living, albeit with periodic retrogressions.
If you've never studied college-level biology, anthropology, or ecology/environmental studies, you'll find this book helpful, although it's written in the style of a class reading assignment. Those already conversant in these subjects will find this book orthodox rehash.
Notes:
* An inauspicious start to the book: on page 2, the author presents readers with a strawman representation of Julian Simon's book The Ultimate Resource. It sounds as if the author read the Wikipedia page on Simon's book, not the book itself.
* If you're a frequent reader of books on the environment and on environmental policy, you've read your fair share of depressing and preachy books. In fact, you get to the point where you already know mostly what the book is going to say. Moreover, nobody wants to read (and certainly not buy) books that preach, depress, and predict calamity. It's a tough genre! I've often wondered if publishing houses literally beg for titles in this genre that somehow hit all the approved notes of environmental orthodoxy, yet aren't so depressing and preachy--in other words a book that actually might sell. This book hits all the orthodoxy, and tries, it really tries, to strike a note of optimism, but it still comes off as depressing and preachy.
* The author claims to stake out centrist ground in the environmental debates between poles she describes as "blithe reassurances of those who assume that technological fixes are always in store" and "frenetic warnings of the doomsayers." However, she's not a centrist in this debate at all: she's an orthodox environmentalist thinker. It just goes to show that no matter the spectrum, everybody likes to place their imagined poles of debate in places such that they appear centrist.
* A noteworthy example of a failure to think on the second order: The author relates the demographic predictions of United Nations (Earth will have ~9 billion people by 2050) without discussing how those numbers actually have been revised downward recently, and that since those revisions, global fertility rates have fallen still further (which means the UN is going to have to revise its revisions downward yet again). So, why are these numbers falling far more than anybody ever expected, and what are the implications? Now that would be an interesting question to explore.
* While somewhat interesting, the chapter on Earth's "habitable zone" doesn't seem relevant to the book's theme or main idea.
* The "oxygen catastrophe" 2.3 billion years ago, which wiped out much of the blue-green algae requiring a low O2 environment.
* Back to the idea that reading this book is like taking an Ecology/Environmental Science 101 course: you get to hear all over again about Darwin's finches [uh, acskually, they are tanagers], plate tectonics, the human/chimp most recent common ancestor, etc. All the basics. I supposed it's useful for readers who don't know the topic at all, but there are better written and more enjoyable books out there, like Frans de Waal's The Ape and the Sushi Master. It's also interesting to see the same examples show up in across the genre: here we also learn about Imo, the famous macaque who started washing potatoes, giving us an example of non-human cultural propagation.
* "Ratchet, hatchet, and pivot" as metaphor. Ratcheting higher with innovation and ingenuity, then the "hatchet comes down" inevitably because we do something bad to the environment or exceed a given region's carrying capacity, then we "pivot" to some other solution or innovation.
* Another question that struck me, repeatedly, as I read: What is it, exactly, that makes something a pleasure to read? Take the topic of the discovery of chemical nitrogen-fixing. This author covers the topic, but in a way that's boring, lifeless, dull. I feel like I'm reading a little plaque pasted next to a diorama in the Museum of Natural History. And yet there's Thomas Hager's book The Alchemy of Air which reads like a goddamn page turner while it teaches everything about the very same topic and more. Both books cover Liebig's law of the minimum, the Haber-Bosch process, the revolution in fertilizer, the historical backdrop of wartime Germany, etc., but one is a pleasure to read, the other is work. Why is this?
* Innovation from the ard plow (or scratch plow) to the moldboard plow which cuts, lifts and turns soil.
* The author has a visibly limited understanding of the socioeconomic repercussions of the Black death in Europe, one of a few instances where she appears to lack genuine mastery of her book's subject matter. Later in the book she'll make basic dietary science errors on the relationship between carbs and obesity.
* At times reading this book you get the feeling of being in a 10th grade earth science class, for example learning about the water cycle on Earth. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
* Perhaps another aspect of what makes reading this book work rather than pleasure is that whenever the author discusses any lifesaving innovation or invention, she also has to obligatorily remind us of how there is always someone, somewhere, who can't take full benefit of it. See for example page 112: in the middle of a discussion of the literally miraculous Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixing process which saved billions of people from starvation, the author decides to lecture: "One only needs to look at a typical farmer in an African country south of the Sahara desert to see the tragedy. Infertile soils, leached of nutrients from centuries of taking more out with each crop than could be replaced, means low yields, poor diets, and families trapped in an everyday existence of scraping together enough food. A few pennies worth of industrially fixed nitrogen would make all the difference, but many farmers cannot afford even that." What, exactly, are readers supposed to do with this? Should we feel bad? Should humans have never invented fixed nitrogen in the first place? Should we thank the author for a parenthetical guilt trip and ask for another?
* Next, our author follows with a discussion of how nitrogen fixing and phosphorus use are ruining our lakes, creating gigantic dead spots in our oceans, and ruining our atmosphere. But wait a minute: if fixed nitrogen and phosphorus are such bad things, then why were we so worried about making sure everyone has equal access to it everywhere? The only thing worse than being lectured and guilt-tripped is being lectured and guilt-tripped with incontinent logic.
* We see similar logical incontinence with the Green Revolution. Here, the syllogism goes something like this:
1) A miraculous improvement in crop yields happens that lessens hunger and produces more food in parts of the world that are often famine-stricken.
2) But this is not necessarily a good thing, because not every farmer can do this.
I've actually written about this type of logic fallacy in the context of cooking healthy food. I call it the "yes, but by proxy" fallacy: because you imagine a hypothetical person who cannot benefit from something, you therefore get to invalidate that something.
* Standard discussion of the development of high yield corn via hybrid seeds, as well as the development of dwarf wheat and its rollout and dominance in world agriculture. Growth of monoculture. She leaves undiscussed the bioethics of GMOs: on what really should be a pressing (and interesting) topic, she offers just a few obligatory sentences about the risks.
* I don't think this author knows the role of carbs in obesity! She thinks people get fat as they switch away from starchy diets to eating more protein and fat. A basic, basic error.
* Back to the "can we please have a less pessimistic environmental genre title please?" idea again. This author's mask of optimism really slips in the final chapter, and she schoolmarmishly begins worryporning and checking all the boxes: too much meat, carbon, cars, oil, obesity, phosphates, nitrous oxide, methane, soil erosion, deforestation... maybe all of this just goes to show that environmental books don't sell and we'll never run out of things to worry about.