Books in Brief, May-June 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai

Life After Fossil Fuels

Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis by Richard Heinberg. New Society. 2009. 200 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

Momentum is growing to combat climate change, but the use of fossil fuels continues to rise, reports Post Carbon Institute scholar Richard A. Heinberg.

He warns that, in the next few decades, supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas will run low. Societies will have to expend more resources on extracting the remaining supplies, and quality of life will deteriorate. Over time, economic catastrophe and political anarchy may befall much of the industrialized world.

Only with proactive effort now to reduce energy consumption and limit further growth of cities and mass industry can we avert this future. More fundamentally, governments must measure economic growth in terms of human welfare and environmental stability rather than GDP.

These efforts require near-term sacrifices, while their payoff will not bear fruit until later in the future. Implementation thus defies conventional political thinking, which fixates on imminent risks and opportunities. As actual oil shortages and coal price increases become manifest, however, policy makers might rethink strategies they would not consider now.

Designing Isn’t Just For Designers

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown. HarperCollins. 2009. 260 pages. Paperback. $27.99.

Design executive Tim Brown attributes many of the boldest innovations in business today to “design thinking,” a radical product-development strategy that “pulls design out of the studio” and channels the creativity of everyone in a company or organization, from the CEO down to the entry-level employee.

Brown describes the design-thinking process and the principles that underlie it: shifting thinking from “problem” to “project”; working in small teams, rather than large groups; supplementing incremental innovation with evolutionary innovation that extends beyond a company’s traditional base and takes it in new directions; people from different disciplines joining forces; creating stories to share ideas; and empathizing with real people, so as to create products and services that will improve their lives.

The Palm Pilot, the Wii, and Netflix all were born of design thinking, according to Brown. It’s catching on in hospitals, universities, NGOs, and businesses of every industry. He is hopeful that, as design thinking continues to spread, it will help industries and organizations of all kinds to resolve a much wider range of problems than they had ever thought possible.

Change By Design offers inspirational reading for entrepreneurs and designers in many fields of industry.

The Nature of the Cosmos

Cosmic Conversations: Dialogues on the Nature of the Universe and the Search for Reality by Stephan Martin. New Page Books. 2010. 287 pages. Paperback. $16.99.

We humans have been trying to understand the cosmos since prehistory and will keep inquiring well into the future, according to astronomer Stephan Martin. He presents interviews with 20 thinkers, each of whom speaks about the cosmos, but from a spiritual rather than a scientific or materialistic standpoint.

• Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies cosmologist, finds deep truths about the cosmos within the languages of the Hopi, Navajo, and other indigenous peoples. English, he says, is embedded with Newtonian perceptions of reality. Researchers now know that the universe does not conform to Newton. English does not have the words to describe it, but many indigenous peoples’ languages do.

• Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, notes that the universe has been evolving since its inception. She adds that the evolution may be accelerating, and that we are active participants: We can either self-destruct or ascend and become a universal species.

• Media activist Duane Elgin speculates that the universe is regenerating and recreating itself anew at astonishingly rapid speeds. Our purpose, he says, is to keep evolving with it by growing progressively in self-knowledge.

Other interviewees include astronaut Edgar Mitchell; Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain; and the Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World.

In Cosmic Conversations, scholars of any field might find material relevant to their concerns.

Trading Freedom for Economic Security

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer. Portfolio. 2010. 221 pages. $26.95.

The free-market economic system of Europe and North America could be undone by a new rival, called state capitalism, warns political consultant Ian Bremmer.

State capitalism is the economic system of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other politically authoritarian countries. In each, the government owns various companies and uses the markets to create wealth that it can direct as it deems best-suited for maximizing the state’s power and the leadership’s chances of survival.

Bremmer tracks the rise of state capitalism out of the ruins of the Soviet command economy and its present-day potential to unseat free markets and take control of the global financial system. The 2008 recession has emboldened state capitalism’s proponents, since they can claim a degree of stability that the U.S. economy lacks. Free markets might withstand the challenge, but only if they successfully reform themselves to guard against future meltdowns and crises.

Readers will find in The End of the Free Market a thought-provoking critique of the existing economic system and its future.

Low-Cost, Low-Risk Space Flight

Lightcraft Flight Handbook LTI-20 by Leik Myrabo and John S. Lewis. Apogee. 2009. 284 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

Jet airplanes and rocket-propelled spacecraft are profligate fossil-fuel burners and carbon-dioxide emitters, according to aerospace engineer Leik Myrabo and planetary-sciences professor John S. Lewis. They look forward to the debut — possibly by 2025 — of carbon-free “lightcraft.”

These up-and-comers, the authors explain, wouldn’t use rocket boosters or combustion engines. Instead, they would run on electromagnetic waves beamed to them from remote satellite power stations.

The lightcraft will not only be cleaner, but also immensely cheaper. Average consumers might finally be able to afford to travel to space. National and international space programs could ferry personnel and supplies continuously to bases on the Moon or to space stations in near-Earth orbit.

Non-space flight will be easier, too, the authors explain. These lightcraft will be fast enough to fly passengers from one hemisphere to another in under an hour.

Myrabo and Lewis describe the state of lightcraft technology and detail how, with further development, it could evolve into the components of lightcraft spaceplanes.

Engineers and astronomers will enjoy this book, as will many nonscientist readers — provided that they are so excited by the prospect of cheap space flight that they are not daunted by many pages of technical jargon.

Charting the Pathways of Disaster

Mega Disasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe by Florin Diacu. Princeton University Press. 2010. 195 pages. $24.95.

It is possible to mathematically predict the directions in which stars, planets, and other objects in space will travel, but can we also predict how things will unfold on Earth? Yes, in many cases, argues mathematician Florin Diacu.

Real-life systems are often unpredictable and hard to calculate, he notes. We can, however, recognize many dangers before they happen and avert them if we watch for the common warning signs. He cites examples of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, stock market crashes, and other particularly consequential phenomena.

Mega Disasters offers a highly readable cross-disciplinary perspective on tsunamis, pandemics, climate change, and financial collapses.

Connecting Wildlife, Habitats, and People

Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser. Metropolitan. 2009. 400 pages. $28.50.

In just one century, we could undo hundreds of millions of years of natural evolutionary processes, according to ecologist Caroline Fraser. She warns that the loss of ecosystems to growing human populations and rampant development could wipe out half the world’s animal and plant species by 2100.

Rewilding might stop this massive extinction before it happens, she argues. Rewilding consists of preserving and expanding key habitat areas; linking them with “corridors,” or intersecting patches of land; then mobilizing local people to participate in caring for these ecosystems.

Conservationists now agree that rescuing isolated patches of earth is not enough. It is also necessary to save the greater system of which individual lands are just parcels.

Fraser shares examples of successful rewilding in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. She sees a bright future ahead for it. The establishment and maintenance of corridors and reserves is an engine of job creation. Plus, these projects might mitigate climate change by stabilizing forests and sequestering carbon dioxide.

A Renewable-Energy Vision

Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice by Gal Luft and Anne Korin. Booksurge. 2009. 138 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Current oil-consumption rates will require four new Saudi Arabias before the century is finished, according to the co-directors of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Potomac, Maryland.

Gal Luft and Anne Korin, in their new book Turning Oil into Salt, rate the odds of finding such bonanzas as virtually nonexistent. Instead, they hope that societies will embrace electric-powered transportation.

Supply issues aside, the switch to electric would advance global democracy, according to the authors. Oil dependence forced the United States to forge alliances with brutal dictatorships and support them while they oppressed their peoples. An oil-free United States could press these dictatorships to reform.

But energy independence will not happen, the authors conclude, until car designers develop electric cars with wide ranges and affordable batteries. The authors offer reasons for hope, such as promising outcomes from tests of several new batteries, potential for methanol and algae-based biofuels to provide cheap power, and the possibility of a scaled transition via plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Turning Oil into Salt provides a balanced overview of where electric car technology stands now and where it might head. This is a worthwhile book for car enthusiasts, environmentalists, policy makers, and anyone who looks forward to a post-fossil-fuel world.

Are Humans Headed for Extinction?

The Vanishing of a Species? A Look at Modern Man’s Predicament by a Geologist by Peter Gretener. Qualitas. 2010. 280 pages. $19.95.

In the 1970s, geologist Peter Gretener believed strongly that the human race would go extinct if it did not dramatically readjust its ways of living. He wrote a manuscript explaining why, but he died before he could publish it.

In 2009, his son, Nick Gretener, discovered the manuscript and found that “much of what had been put down some 30 years ago rings as true today as when it was written, perhaps even more so given the current economic turmoil.”

Nick Gretener had the text published as The Vanishing of a Species. His father’s words — untouched except for obligatory proofreading corrections and occasional editorial notes — implore the human race to reassess its actual needs and scale back its expectations accordingly. The author cautions that permanent economic growth is impossible, that pursuit of happiness via material gain guarantees disappointment, and that the planet will not support our continued trajectory of population expansion. True prosperity necessitates that we flourish within our planet’s ecological limits.

The Vanishing of a Species is a valuable look both backwards and forwards — the challenges the world faced in the twentieth century, and the challenges it still faces today. Historians and futurists both may find much to like.

Connecting the Dots

ReThink: A Twenty-First Century Approach to Preventing Social Catastrophes by Donald Louria. LouWat. 2010. 200 pages. $24.95.

The world’s problems will be much more manageable if we look at them all at once, says health scholar Donald Louria. In systems thinking, every issue and challenge in the world is viewed as part of an integrated whole. Only by observing the whole, he argues, can we adequately judge the individual parts.

Louria’s own brand of systems thinking diagrams a system’s parts and their relationships. He applies this diagram to a range of contemporary problems. Among them are:

• The case for and against public-health recommendations to consumers to eat more omega-3 rich fish.

• The potential for the United States and other countries to deploy military hardware in space.

• The pros and cons of universal screening for health conditions.

Many approaches for systems thinking and complexity science exist, he says, but they tend to require years of study. Louria touts his method as one that anyone can use: With a semester of instruction, high-school students could become regular systems thinkers.

Louria is a scholar who is writing about futurist theory. But like the method itself, ReThink is approachable for a well-educated reader.