Eat a take-out meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper, and you’re soon faced with a bewildering amount of garbage. The United States is the planet’s number-one producer of trash. Each American throws out 4.5 pounds daily. But garbage is also a global problem. Today, the Pacific Ocean contains six times more plastic waste than zooplankton. How did we end up with this much rubbish, and where does it all go? Journalist and filmmaker Heather Rogers answers these questions by taking readers on a grisly and fascinating tour through the underworld of garbage.
Gone Tomorrow excavates the history of rubbish handling from the nineteenth century to the present, pinpointing the roots of today’s waste-addicted society. With a “lively authorial voice,” Rogers draws connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our throwaway lifestyle (New York Press). She also investigates the politics of recycling and the export of trash to poor countries, while offering a potent argument for change.
“A clear-thinking and peppery writer, Rogers presents a galvanizing exposé of how we became the planet’s trash monsters. . . . [Gone Tomorrow] details everything that is wrong with today’s wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators. . . . Rogers exhibits black-belt precision.” —Booklist, starred review
For September, Dick Bennett will present two books: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, and Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich.
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. The term “Anthropocene”– the geologic era we live in now, defined by human intervention in the life of the planet– is gaining popularity. But do people know what it signifies? That out of ignorance and then in denial we have engineered a climate system that is going to war with us perhaps until it destroys us?
Both books were not written for those who already know the possible worst, toward which we are heading, though they offer abundantly rich information for all levels of readers. Rather they seek to prepare advocates of a new way of thinking to help leaders and the public more rapidly and effectively engage in creating a new politics and a new economics.
Wallace-Wells makes so concrete, so specific, so immediate the possible anthropocentric warmed world coming that by the billions the people will clamor for change. His central premise is: When the general public fully understands that the seas will likely rise to be four to eight feet higher by the end of the century, drowning the Maldives, the White House, St. Mark’s Basilica, and the Bengal tiger’s habitat, that half the world is predicted to become so hot that it will cook the human body, that millions of refugees will press on our borders, then THE PEOPLE will demand and the politicians will listen.
Readers of the OMNI CBF books already know this argument. Our job is to help the public get it.
Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History. This book reinforces Wallace-Wells by explaining why US scientists failed to win the struggle for truth and why the public in general remains passive. The book is composed of a series of anecdotes covering the years 1979-1989 when US bipartisan and public support for stopping CO2 was widespread, and change was possible, yet nothing was done, the stories explaining very specifically why (for example, two chapters on silencing James Hansen). The stories are profoundly important to us today because they show us how to cope with the reality presented by W-W and the politics of climate today.
In his final paragraph, Rich writes: “There is one thing that each of us can do….We can call the threats to our future what they are. We can call the villains villains, the heroes heroes, the victims victims [all the actors in this historical tragedy are identified], and ourselves complicit.” Only then, he believes, will the public and our officials take action.
In November, Lolly will present The Fate of Food by Amanda Little.
In this fascinating look at the race to secure the global food supply, environmental journalist and professor Amanda Little tells the defining story of the sustainable food revolution as she weaves together stories from the world’s most creative and controversial innovators on the front lines of food science, agriculture, and climate change.
Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?
Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning journalist, spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to this question. Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin to a remote control organic farm in Shanghai, from Norwegian fish farms to famine-stricken regions of Ethiopia. The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: We must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead. Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the fascinating story of human innovation and explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. She meets small permaculture farmers and “Big Food” executives, botanists studying ancient superfoods and Kenyan farmers growing the country’s first GMO corn. She travels to places that might seem irrelevant to the future of food yet surprisingly play a critical role—a California sewage plant, a U.S. Army research lab, even the inside of a monsoon cloud above Mumbai. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment—and for us? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, climate-resilient food supply become accessible to all?
Throughout her journey, Little finds and shares a deeper understanding of the threats of climate change and encounters a sense of awe and optimism about the lessons of our past and the scope of human ingenuity.
In October, Shelley will present Storming the Walls, by Todd Miller
A well-researched and grim exploration of the connections between climate change and the political hostility toward the refugees it creates.
Journalist and activist Miller (Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, 2014) expands on his earlier focus on U.S.–Mexico border controversies with an alarming catalog of climatological effects on population movements, surveillance, violence, and other current issues. “The theater for future climate battles,” he writes, “will be the world’s ever thickening border zones…vast numbers of people will be on the move, and vast numbers of people will be trained, armed, and paid to stop them.” In eight punchy, discretely themed chapters, the author establishes that the destructive effects of climate change are already manifest and that the U.S. is establishing a violent, heavy-handed pattern of response to it, as seen in the ramping up of border security. Miller visited several locales to witness this bleak transition, including Honduras and the U.S.–Mexico border, and he argues that these developing strife zones, far from representing natural change, are fundamentally class-based phenomena: “In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded.” Ironically, the American military is committed to scientifically based preparation for coming crises, as is private enterprise. Miller also visited security conventions to see how the same corporatized elites who resist climate-change measures like the Paris Agreement will benefit financially from its increasing ill effects. He emphasizes that the harrowing confluence among climate disasters and militarized responses on behalf of elites is already prominent, noting that murders of activists skyrocketed in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, comparable to the use of privatized security to resegregate New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Miller makes a convincing, chilling argument based on an effective synthesis of research, interviews, and personal observation, and the impact is only slightly undercut by an occasionally shrill or pedantic tone.
A galvanizing forecast of global warming’s endgame and a powerful indictment of America’s current stance.
Presenter: Richard Billingsley will present on ORBIT. August is a split program, Dick Bennett will present McKibben’s new book Falter in the second half of our program.
ORBIT’s purpose: To form a grassroots movement to promote commuter rail in all its forms. So why passenger rail and why now? We have both need and opportunity. In terms of need, traffic will become much worse in the coming years. Even now more people are pouring into NWA adding to a population of over 600,000 spread over a large distance. Traffic congestion is increasing. Look at traffic in Austin, Texas, for what traffic congestion will be like in our medium term future.
Opportunity – Arkansans voted to increase the minimum wage. Arkansans giving themselves a raise means increased spending and more local sales tax revenue. Medical marijuana and gaming will increase sales tax revenue. Plus in Washington the Democrat controlled House wants to work with President Trump to invest $1 trillion in infrastructure. All this plus new technologies for rail and bus systems, means we can get an affordable and sustainable mass transit system. Dealing with growth now is simpler and cheaper than waiting until we are as large as the Dallas metroplex. Building this system now is the difference between spending $20 million a mile and $100 million a mile building new rail lines. Doing this now opens up many possibilities that we haven’t thought about yet. It means we can have a very complete rail and mass transit system for less money.
We can’t ignore other means of mass transit. In fact, supporting transit buses is vital to making commuter rail work. Once we move people from one end, or one side, of NWA to another they still need a ride to work, or the shops, or to medical appointments. As a practical matter the first move we need to make is to expand our bus service throughout NWA. Airport shuttle bus anyone?
ORBT is a citizen/community-based advocacy group for bringing energy efficient, intentional small business growth, environmentally friendly, mass transportation to Northwest Arkansas. Goal: To combat traffic congestion and climate change while helping make America energy independent.
Falter: Has the Human Games Begun to Play Itself Out? By Bill McKibben, presenter Dick Bennett
“An Opening Note on Hope”
McKibben was bleak in his 1989 book The End of Nature, and he was bleaker in 2009’s Eaarth. The passing years have vindicated his earlier gloom and justify naming our era the Anthropocene. In Falter, the false optimism of such books as Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker is exposed. For “the way power and wealth are currently distributed on our planet” by capitalism has failed to cope and is “uniquely ill –prepared to cope with the emerging challenges.”
Yet “resistance to these dangers is at least possible,” as his own life has demonstrated. We do “have the tools to stand up to entrenched power” of fossil fuel capitalism. Anyway, “a writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty,” and “engagement, not despair.”
In the Epilogue, he attacks the idea by a handful of the 1% and their misguided followers of preparing to move to another planet. One inch of earth is more hospitable to life than all of Mars or Jupiter.
We are wrecking the earth, “killing vast numbers of ourselves and wiping out entire swaths of other life.” “But we can also not do that.” We can put solar panels on every building, we can replace ourselves by robots or not. He suspects we will not make the choices to “accept with grace our humanity.” “…we are faltering now, and the human game has…begun to play itself out.” “But we could make those [human] choices. We have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless, and we have the fundamental idea of human solidarity”
The clue to unlock this huge project is in his definition of “the human game—the sum total of culture and commerce and politics; of religion and sport and social life; of dance and music; of dinner and art and cancer and sex and Instagram; of love and loss; of everything that comprises the experience of our species” (8). The book is Bill McKibben’s compendiously rich celebration of our species, warts and all, and simultaneously its requiem.
But I am watching what I am writing: wrangling over McKibben’s plusses and minuses, when his deepest point about our future is: “…we are faltering now; and the human game has indeed begun to play itself out. That’s what the relentless rise in temperature tells us.” But we could end our planetary experience not, as do our leaders reckless for growth and power, but “lightly, carefully, gracefully” (Eaarth 212)—with solar panels on all roofs, nonviolently, and our idea of human solidarity and love.
I recommend the purchase and reading of McKibben’s guidebooks to the Anthropocene. He calls to us all urgently to be engaged.
June 2, 2019
Gary Kahanak as presenter for April 7, with Bright Future, How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow by Goldstein and Qvist, January 2019..
The first book to offer a proven, fast, inexpensive, practical way to cut greenhouse gas emissions and prevent catastrophic climate change.
As climate change quickly approaches a series of turning points that guarantee disastrous outcomes, a solution is hiding in plain sight. Several countries have already replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources, and done so rapidly, in one to two decades. By following their methods, we could decarbonize the global economy by midcentury, replacing fossil fuels even while world energy use continues to rise. But so far we have lacked the courage to really try.
In this clear-sighted and compelling book, Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist explain how clean energy quickly replaced fossil fuels in such places as Sweden, France, South Korea, and Ontario. Their people enjoyed prosperity and growing energy use in harmony with the natural environment. They didn’t do this through personal sacrifice, nor through 100 percent renewables, but by using them in combination with an energy source the Swedes call kärnkraft, hundreds of times safer and cleaner than coal.
Clearly written and beautifully illustrated, yet footnoted with extensive technical references, Goldstein and Qvist’s book will provide a new touchstone in discussions of climate change. It could spark a shift in world energy policy that, in the words of Steven Pinker’s foreword, literally saves the world.
Ed Hejtmanek May 5, presenting Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution by Peter Klamus, 2017.
Life on 1/10th the fossil fuels turns out to be awesome.
We all want to be happy. Yet as we consume ever more in a frantic bid for happiness, global warming worsens.
Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, the author, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process.
Being the Change explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a satisfying and appropriate response to global warming.
Part one exposes our interconnected predicament: overpopulation, global warming, industrial agriculture, growth-addicted economics, a sold-out political system, and a mindset of separation from nature. It also includes a readable but authoritative overview of climate science. Part two offers a response at once obvious and unprecedented: mindfully opting out of this broken system and aligning our daily lives with the biosphere.
The core message is deeply optimistic: living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better.
Peter Kalmus is an atmospheric scientist at Caltech / Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He lives in suburban Altadena, California with his wife and two children on 1/10th the fossil fuels of the average American. Peter speaks purely on his own behalf, not on behalf of NASA or Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Price of Thirst, by Karen Piper, presenter Joyce Murray.
“There’s Money in Thirst,” reads a headline in the New York Times. The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so “we’re all aware that it has a price.” But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world’s population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirst—one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations.In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges are being diverted to a private water treatment plant, fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated privatization of water resources destroyed by our military is further destabilizing the volatile region. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns.The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.”
February 3, 2019
Steve Boss: I will discuss the scientific findings of the IPCC 1.5-degree report. Historically, IPCC reports have underestimated the trajectory of climate change – that is, the magnitude and pace of climate change. The 2018 report continues that trend.
January 6, 2019
Climate Smart Agriculture: Experiments over Arkansas Rice Fields
Kosana Suvočarev, PhD
Agricultural production often leaves negative impacts on the environment. In addition, climate change brings harsh conditions to both agricultural crops and natural landscapes. With the environmental degradation, as a result, we all lose the security of food, soil, water and air quality. The future of agriculture requires less impact to the natural resources and more resilience to the new environment. The aim is to do climate-smart agriculture!
Kosana Suvočarev, PhD, from University of Arkansas will give insights into research ideas and results from Arkansas rice farms. Her interests in agriculture, environment, atmospheric science and outreach will be combined into a presentation on some local issues of global importance.
interests in agriculture, environment, atmospheric science and outreach will be combined into a presentation on some local issues of global importance.