Sustainability on the shelves

Part memoir, part manifesto, Attenborough’s ‘witness statement and vision for the future’ chronicles the decline of biodiversity and wilderness over the course of his life and predicts what lies ahead if we do not change course. The grimness of these predictions is followed by a much longer section on Attenborough’s vision for the future, in which he sets out what we must do to halt the destruction we have wrought on our planet. His emphasis is on biodiversity and, according to Attenborough, to save the planet we must ‘rewild the world’. With his characteristic combination of hard truth, wonder, and optimism, Attenborough highlights the possibilities in clean energy, sustainable agriculture, ocean conservation and more. Ultimately, he reminds us, saving the planet is about saving ourselves. ‘With or without us, the wild will return’ (page 218).

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First published in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is now considered a classic of environmental writing. Silent Spring exposed the dangerous impact of uncontrolled pesticide use on both the environment and human health. The agricultural-chemical industry tried first to prevent the book’s publication, then, when that failed, launched a smear campaign against Carson and the book in an attempt to undermine her conclusions. But despite their efforts, the book became a bestseller and Carson became an influential public figure, eventually testifying before the US Senate on the need for pesticide control. She is credited by some with helping to launch the modern environmental movement. While there has been much progress since Silent Spring was first published, much remains to be done on encouraging sustainable agricultural practices and Carson’s work is still relevant today.

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Save the planet using your own plate! As Cassandra Coburn tells us (page 11), ‘Food systems form the single biggest driver of environmental change on the planet’. And just as food production affects the climate, climate change itself affects food production (e.g., via floods, hurricanes, and droughts, which wipe out regional food stocks). Looking at this inter-related system, Coburn considers food at political and personal levels. On the political side, she looks at sustainable farming methods and the politics surrounding food production (e.g., Government measures which incentivise more sustainable methods). On the personal: she shows us how we can apply the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) to our own everyday meal choices.

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A summary of the research and investigation carried out by Bill Gates in the past decade on the causes and effects of climate change.  Gates focuses on what we should do to avoid an environmental disaster and presents arguments from various fields (physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance). Gates’ approach is very much technology driven. In the introduction, he states ‘When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth liveable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary’ (page 14). His focus is on how to make use of the technology we have to cut carbon emissions, and where we need new technologies and innovations to cut them even further. He is realistic about the difficulties of achieving net-zero, but also optimistic about the capabilities of scientists and innovators to meet that challenge.

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This book begins with a story, which ends:

‘Why did nature end, Granny?’

Granny sighed.  ‘We didn’t love it enough,’ she said.  ‘And we forgot that it could give us peace.’

Let’s think of ‘Sustainability’ in a broader context, moving away from the science of climate change to look closely at what we risk losing. This book is a reminder to protect nature, which does much to protect us.  Jones provides a survey of research into the association between nature and our well-being, how ‘contact with the natural world … [affects] the human mind’ (page 20). This book is particularly apt for Worcester, this green oasis in the centre of Oxford. Reading it should remind you to take a walk around our gardens….

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Focusing on how gender equality can help fight the climate crisis, this book draws attention to how the climate crisis creates disparities and how women across the globe suffer from them, despite having done the least to cause the crisis. As well as examining the gendered dynamics in the development of the climate emergency, Karpf profiles some of the female activists fighting the crisis, and presents a ‘green new deal for women’ – a vision of how we could tackle gender inequality and the climate crisis, if we can overcome the forces working against it.

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In this quiet, yet powerful, work, Robin Wall Kimmerer combines her work as a plant scientist with her cultural background as an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to look at what we can learn from plants, and how our attitudes to the environment are shaped by our cultural relationship with it. She argues that a sustainable relationship with nature is based on gratitude and reciprocity. Humans must accept their place as one of many species and learn to coexist with the rest of the natural world, rather than dominate and exploit it.

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In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert looks at human intervention in nature in the shape of geoengineering and technology, both interventions that are destroying the environment, and areas in which developments are sought to try to reverse that destruction. In Kolbert’s own words, this is ‘a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems’ (page 200). It is not an uplifting read, though darkly humorous in its appreciation of the irony underpinning many of the projects she visits, but it raises important questions about our approach to dealing with the problems we’ve created. When is it better to do nothing, and when is it better to do something, anything, and risk unintended consequences?

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Stephen Peake, Professor of Climate Change and Energy at the Open University, provides a guide to the various forms of renewable energy. Looking at technical differences, Peake leads the reader through solar, wind, hydro, biomass, wave, and geothermal energies, and considers how we can achieve a sustainable energy future. He gives us the optimistic news that ‘Globally, the amount of renewable energy we can harvest is many more times greater than our present and utterly wasteful rate of energy consumption’ (page 155). Read this book, which mixes physics and energy policy, to understand how we can transition to clean energy.

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Doughnut Economics is a call to radically rethink the way we teach and think about economics. Raworth argues that rather than focusing on continual growth and GDP, economists need to focus on balance – the balance between the needs of the human population and the needs of the planet. She demonstrates this with a diagram shaped like a doughnut. The ‘essence of the doughnut’, according to Raworth, is a ‘social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below, and an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond. Between the two lies a safe and just space for all’ (page 11). Doughnut Economics is not so much a prescriptive list of policies, as a challenge to think about economies and economics in new ways, and to focus on how we might be able to tackle inequality and environmental destruction through regenerative and redistributive design. She also emphasises the importance of being able to visualise and share these concepts through drawings and diagrams, such as the doughnut.

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What are the implications of climate change for the social contract? How can we achieve a sustainable social contract between the generations? These are just two of the questions Minouche Shafik, Director of the LSE, set outs to answer in her new book. Recognising intergenerational tensions over climate change, Shafik notes that ‘environmental protests by young people around the world are indicative of their frustration with a social contract that they feel is cheating them of their right to a stable and inhabitable planet’ (page 25). Her book outlines the steps toward a more generous social contract, which acknowledges interdependencies and the need for sharing risk collectively.

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Katerina Martina Teaiwa’s work is a multifaceted history of the island of Banaba, and particularly of the phosphate mining which destroyed the island and forced the relocation of its inhabitants to Rabi Island. She tells the story through a variety of sources – records, geology, memory, folklore, images – turning from the traditional ‘eye of God’ approach in social science and integrating her own Banaban family history with the narrative. This book is a reminder of what is at stake when the interests of extractive industries and indigenous minorities come into conflict, a situation that continues to happen all too often throughout the world.

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