Russia

Book review – Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources

7-minute read

When it comes to environmental issues, certain topics steal the limelight, with climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss being prominent examples. However, humans have only so much time and energy available, meaning that other, potentially more pressing problems might not get the attention they deserve. Resource depletion, specifically all the materials we dig up from the Earth’s crust, has always struck me as one of them. It is easy to underestimate just how thoroughly dependent modern civilization is on a vast range of very basic substances. As we continue to extract these at ever-accelerating rates, competition and conflict seem inevitable. Guessing by the title of this book, Australian business journalist Geoff Hiscock seems to think so too. Yet this book was not quite what I was expecting.

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Book review – The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945

7-minute read

Something happened to the world sometime after 1945. Something that included the end of World War II and post-war recovery, but was far more fundamental than that.

Humanity went into overdrive.

In my reading on the Anthropocene, this book and this phrase keep cropping up. The Great Acceleration gives a bird’s-eye view of the environmental history of our world since the 1950s. A period when multiple factors—technological, medical, and demographical—converged to propel the human species onto a trajectory of unprecedented growth.

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Book review – Owls of the Eastern Ice: The Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl

6-minute read

Some encounters change the course of your life. For young American Peace Corps volunteer Jonathan C. Slaght, it was a chance sighting of a rare owl in the Russian Far East that turned him onto the path of wildlife conservation. Hidden behind the conservation plans and the data there are amazing personal stories that are not often told. Owls of the Eastern Ice is a spellbinding memoir of determination and obsession with safeguarding the future of this bird of prey that firmly hooked its talons in me and did not let go.

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Book review – Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North

Cold Rush is one of those books that invites a facepalm and a groan of: “humans… sigh”. The Arctic turns out to be particularly sensitive to climate change – the extent of sea ice cover has been hitting record-lows in the last decade, polar bears are moving into new areas as their habitat disappears, Greenland’s glaciers are melting in record-tempo, and scientists are publicly worrying we will see the North Pole free of ice within decades. You would think that we would be concerned. Instead, the nations around the Arctic rub their hands in glee: “Look at all these business opportunities: new shipping routes, newly accessible oil, gas, and mineral reserves… oh boy, we are going to make so much money!”

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Book review – Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World

If the will of the people can put a loose cannon like Donald Trump in charge of the USA, or lead to the ongoing car crash that is the Brexit, asking whether democracy can work seems like a timely question. But to think that our times signify an unprecedented crisis is to ignore its long history. Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies James Miller here provides an excellent introduction to the long and spotty track record of democratic governance, showing that it continues to be an ongoing experiment.

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Book review – Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change

The subtitle of this book could also be reworded as a question. How, indeed, do nations cope with crises such as war? With Upheaval, geography professor Jared Diamond puts forward a rather unorthodox suggestion for answering this question. Psychologists and specifically crisis therapists have gained a lot of insight into how individuals deal with and overcome crises in their personal lives. Taking a list of twelve factors that influence this, Upheaval is both a thought experiment and a piece of comparative history that tries to apply this framework to six nations that went through a crisis.

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