Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee "Questioning Collapse"

ISBN 978-0-521-73366-3. "Questioning Collapse - Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability and the Aftermath of Empire" edited by Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.  The paperback is 374 pages long including a list of figures, list of contributors, preface, acknowledgements, introduction, fourteen chapters in four sections and an index. The title somewhat gives the game away as this is billed as the answer to Jared Diamond's 1997 work "Guns, Germs and Steel" and his 2005 opus "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". We have not read the former as it is a work of history of little relevance to today's globalised economy on the brink of its carbon constrained future. However, the second work has been read and was reviewed here. In "Collapse" Diamond walked us through the anthropological history of multiple cultures, from ancient times to modern days, and reviews how depletion of natural resource contributed to those societies' collapse. This clearly is of interest to us at post-carbon living. Indeed that book is now quite celebrated to the point that it now appears on the syllabus to several University courses as well as being required-reading for the modern ecologist. However, all is not well in the halls of academia. On page 4 we read "Diamond is probably the best-known writer of anthropology even though he is not an anthropologist!" Zing.

The fifteen authors who contributed to "Questioning Collapse" are not happy at all. It seems Diamond has stepped on way too many toes on his way to the top and the "proper" anthropologists are fuming. It may well be that they have a point but we are slightly ham-strung in that, despite the name of this book, much of it doesn't address Jared Diamond's 2005 book. This can be quite confusing as it looks as if many of the authors treat the two books (separated by eight years) as if they are the same thing. For example you would be forgiven to think that chapters 4 (China) and 11 (Australia) solely addresses Diamond's "Collapse". They don't because China and Australia are only dealt with in the modern context by Diamond in his later work. All these history lessons are irrelevant. Thus we sadly must dispense with large sections of "Questioning Collapse". Unless you have read both Diamond's books then there is often little point buying this book. Still, there is sufficient material for us to have a stab at reviewing it. It may well be that what we discover tells us a great deal about the intellectual honesty of the authors who contributed to this.

Our prime criticism is that all but one of the authors clearly haven't read Diamond's "Collapse". We find this shocking. The evidence we have is that all but one of the authors completely ignores Diamond's five-point framework where Diamond postulates that a society's collapse depends upon such factors as environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, trading partners and response to environmental problems. Only on page 279 in Drexel G Woodson's essay on Haiti, is this framework acknowledged. Even there it is dismissed as a "complication". These points are far from "complications" - they are the entire thrust of Diamond's book. How can these authors seek to criticise Diamond when they don't address the points he raises? In fact this book constructs a straw man argument for the burning. The straw man is an unrecognisable version of Diamond's "Collapse". It has none of the subtlety or the caveats that Diamond worked so hard to inject into his grand sweep of history. His work is thoroughly researched and, although flawed, it deserves a slightly more grown up response than this.

Several of the authors take issue with Diamond's definition of "collapse". On page 177 Norman Yoffee tells us that "we can't find any such collapse in Mesopotamia". This is interesting because Mesopotamia is NOT a subject anywhere in Diamond's "Collapse" whilst Yoffee himself goes on to tell us on page 180 that "Of course, there were various "collapses" in Mesopotamian states" - a point he repeats again on page 182: "there were several". So there were collapses in ancient times but only as WE define them not as Diamond does? So what is going on here? Professional jealousy? Are the fifteen authors just a little miffed that Diamond is now famous and making shows for the National Geographic channel whilst they are blowing the dust off ancient texts in some god-forsaken library? It would seem so. It was nice to see that one of the editors, Norman Yoffee, noted this may well be how the work would be perceived. This from page 176 & 177: "Readers may think, oh, here's a picky Mesopotamia specialist who spends is time pouring over clay tablets [...] telling us that Professor Diamond, who sees the Big Picture, missed a few things when he wrote about Mesopotamia". Well, we hate to agree with you Norman but that is exactly how this looks. Drexel G. Woodson adds on page 272: "Diamond bashing by social scientists who know the societies that Diamond covers better than he does is a vainglorious exercise. General readers may think that those social scientists are jealous of Diamond's fame. In any case, bashing Diamond serves no constructive purpose in an intellectual market place where book sales trump quality of ideas." Owe! He goes on to bash Diamond all the same. And Diamond's crime?; "the pitfalls of privileging grand theory as "the" way to encompass social scientific knowledge about and understanding of some facet of the human spectacle." This appears to tell us that "grand theories" suck (at least in the detail-obsessed minds of the social scientists).

Some of the authors' views are worse than others. This is a genuinely mixed bag. Several chapters offer quite a meaningful critique. Here we should single out Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo for their work on Easter Island, and Michael Wilcox for his fresh insight into the fates of indigenous North American Indians. However these treasures are few and far between. The worst section is definitely Christopher Taylor's lamentable chapter on Rwanda that provides no new contradictory evidence whatsoever to offset Diamond's "neo-Malthusian" views. Diamond described the ethnic hatred that lead up to the genocide quite adequately. Taylor's first-hand description of the inner workings of the society add nothing to Diamond's description. Again, we have to ask if Taylor ever read Diamond's "Collapse" or whether his anthropology chums sold him the straw man caricature?

Likewise most of the authors here take issue with Jared Diamond's use of the word "choice" as in "choosing to collapse". Diamond actually takes the last quarter of his book to explain how societies do NOT "choose" to collapse even if that is the outcome of their actions. This section of the Diamond book is clearly not one his many critics appear to have read. We can level this criticism specifically at J. R. McNeill who, on page 356 waxes lyrical about how the Greenland Norse culture lasted 450 years and how this is vastly longer than modern North American culture. He ignores the fact that this very point was made several times by Diamond in "Collapse". Once again we can only conclude that McNeill didn't actually read Diamond's book. These mistakes are occasionally offset by the likes of David Cahill (who wrote the enlightening section on the end of the Incas even though this culture is never mentioned in Diamond's "Collapse" - only the Aztec are) who wrote this on page 210: "The remarkable success of Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in  both public domain and within academe is little short of unique.  [...] Diamonds' "bestsellerdom" across the academic-public divide has few nonfiction parallels... It is well written, engaging, even absorbing; whatever its demerits it is a wonderful guide on how to write for a range of audiences, without ever really [...] "dumbing down"." So it seems that the social scientists like how Diamond writes and the way he has popularised the subject. However they disagree with him about almost every detail in his version of history!

There is just one detail they do not disagree upon though. Despite "Diamond bashing" for 364 pages we are treated to a well constructed summary by (surprisingly) J.R. McNeill. Although he obviously fell for the straw man version of Diamond's "Collapse" (that doesn't exist) he goes on to present the exact same conclusions to Diamond's. His argument is that, despite getting all the details wrong, the "grand theory" remains correct because the modern globalised world is unlike the past. We are in an undiscovered country. Hence this on page 364 & 365: "Fossil fuels [...] represent an enormous subsidy, [...] from a distant time, the carboniferous era. They make it possible for 6.5 billion people to eat. Fossil fuels are the fertilizer of modern agriculture. They pump up groundwater and power tractors. They serve as feedstocks for pesticides and herbicides. They make nitrogenous fertilizers practical. And they power the vehicles that move crops to kitchens. They sustain us. But they also make us unsustainable. First and most obviously, they exist in limited supply. [...] A time will come when all that is left is too difficult to extract at reasonable cost. [...] Second, fossil fuels make our global society unsustainable because of climate change... [...] Diamond is right to be concerned by that." So, despite disagreeing about the historical examples it changes nothing. We can't recommend this book unless you are a fan of history. However it still managed to be enlightening, even for us.

Most of this book doesn't deal with Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse" but that which does betrays the authors'' ignorance of the Diamond book.
Enlightening. We admit we learnt a lot from this book. It was a useful fresh perspective about our history.

Robert & Brenda Vale "Time to eat the dog?"

ISBN 978-0-500-28790-3. "Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living" by Robert and Brenda Vale was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009. For your money you get 384 pages with an Introduction, seven Chapters, a Conclusion, Notes, Sources, Resources and an Index. I suppose a title like that is designed to be incendiary given how close the English are to their pets. The Vales certainly know how to sex it up. For some the very idea couldn't be more offensive than if they had advised us to eat our children. Really. All the publicity this book got at its launch in 2009 came about precisely due to its coverage of the sustainability footprint of our pets. This was a shot in the arm and it certainly got everyone talking and thinking. But apart from this publicity blast does the rest of this book deserve its infamy? Our conclusion: yes, it is well worth it, with a few caveats. To their credit we have to say that the Vales are quite cognitive of the books shortcomings. It would be easy to criticise the work for its accuracy and such but the introduction pretty much heads-off this kind of critique as the authors admit its flaws. So let us focus on the less obvious problems. Firstly you will notice an obsession with numbers. Obsessive to distraction.

Although it is the purpose of the numbers to compare the footprints of different things the Vales insist on showing not only how they calculated the number but also the calculations. This may be occasionally useful if you wished to check their calculations and assumption but I would have edited this book down to half this size to give it more va va voom. The assumptions and technical calcs could have been left to the resources section. After about page 30 your head will spin with all the numbers and you will stop caring about them. We read most of this book by simply ignoring the tables of numbers and, instead, we just read the text. It is the writing where the book is strong and the numbers are largely a distraction. I was quite happy for the authors to draw their conclusions. That isn't to say the numbers aren't useful but they are only there, as the authors remind us, so that we can compare footprints by orders of magnitude. The margin of error on some of them is quite large so they have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Other criticisms might include the lack of illustrations in the book. It is all numbers, numbers, numbers with a few silhouettes behind the text. Not very easy on the eye. I would have like to have seen some colour pictures to illustrate their arguments. Also exercise caution where the authors drift between topics. The Food section in the beginning rapidly goes off course and talks about Photovoltaics for some reason.

The second issue you might find is that the work ends up being very abstract. The number fixation doesn't really help. The sustainability footprint isn't measured in carbon it is measured in hectares of the Earth's surface required to support an activity sustainably. Our hectares per person per year target is 1.85. Currently we hover around 6.41 so we have a heck of a long way to go. But the book isn't really a road map. It wildly gesticulates in the direction of travel and advises us of which roads to avoid but it remains largely unprescriptive. It is up to the reader to make the choices. You will learn the relative footprints of your choices but you rarely get to appreciate if a choice is sustainable per se. We guess it is only the total of your footprints that is important - you choose from the menu as long as the bill adds up to your personal budget. What is very helpful though is the thought-pattern on display. Even if you take the numbers out, there is certainly a great work of modern philosophy here. The Vales see things differently and this makes this book a breath of fresh air. Early on we get to learn that our society gets further and further away from sustainability with every passing day. Hence, when we return the harder it will be the longer we leave it. This is what the ecologists would call "overshoot". In 1964 the population was half what it is now and our individual fair earthshare would have been 3.78ha. As time marches on and our population grows, this footprint decreases hence in the 1950's we could have sustained a 1950's lifestyle but there is no chance of us going back to the 1950's now - there are too many of us. Apparently we have to go back to the 19th century now. Scary.

Occasionally the authors will mention capitalism and the consumer society but their politics remain ambiguous and absent from the page. This is a relief. They even go as far as to say that our Governments have a large footprint so we need smaller Government. That will be music to many on the political-right. What we learn from all this musing and number crunching is also music to the ears of the modern Transition movement. Succinctly put on page 70 "Where things can be done at home, they probably should be." Quite. It also seems that our homes need to be small. It doesn't matter what we make them off - they just have to be small. This will save you money which you should spend on a big garden and lots of solar panels. And this from page 351 "Doing things for yourself is probably the most subversive course of action you can take in a modern market-based economy". Some of the areas they tackle are really obscure and surprising. I really didn't expect to have to learn about the footprint of teapots, shelving and home furniture. Brace yourselves - it is a bit wacky! For example if you are worried about indoor air-quality then you probably shouldn't wear too much deodorant. Blimey. We have visions of the great unwashed. I suspect a few conservative anti-environmentalists would cherry-pick that to show what utter barbarians we all our: live without soap! Outrageous! By the time our authors reach their conclusions they start to ask why we behave so irrationally in choosing unsustainable lifestyles over the sustainable when it doesn't make us any happier? The Vales blame the economists. Most of us would agree.

Other sections of the book just re-affirmed the kind of things that we all know to be true but are too scared to utter in polite conversation. For example: is taking part in sport really necessary? You can get better exercise doing household chores and digging the garden. It seems we go to the gym because it is a fashionable lifestyle choice, our friends do it and it is sociable. It has nothing to do with keeping fit. Many would decry this point of view but the numbers don't lie. If you want to save the planet give up Golf and start Gardening. Likewise hobbies such as DIY, cooking, knitting and sewing are very worthwhile. It seems we should all really stay in more and work a lot less. Basically these are the numbers behind the Transition movement. There isn't a thing here that Rob Hopkins wouldn't have suggested but he wouldn't have worked out the mathematics. But there is darker side to all this as revealed on page 335 where the Vales refer to a study conducted in Solihull, West Midlands, showing an average footprint of 5.5ha/yr could be reduced to 3ha/yr but 1.5ha/yr was intractable. IT COULD NOT BE CHANGED. It was completely beyond the reach of individuals. This footprint is in all the machines and infrastructure of Western society. In essence we can only do so much as individual or as communities. Our entire societal make-up will need to Transition too. Recommended.

An obsession with numbers will leave you cross-eyed.
A fascinating read that takes the reader into all the weird and wonderful corners of our lives with surprising results. Good slice of modern philosophy too.

Patrick Whitefield " Permaculture in a Nutshell"

ISBN 1 85623 003 1. Patrick Whitefield's "Permaculture in a Nutshell" published by Permanent Publications in 2005. Originally published in 1993 this is the 4th edition. This is a gem of a book. A delightful read it tells us so much more than the lamentable "Food not Lawns" could. The only downside is the "Questions Answered" pages repeat points that Patrick made earlier in the book. A waste of space. This repetition could have been replaced with more examples and explanation. The book is only 84 pages long and has a few black and white photo's plus line drawings. It really wets the appetite to find out more. Patrick steers clear of any 'soft' language about 'connecting people with the earth' (although he does occasionally voyage there). Instead he focuses on the non-sustainability of current practices. He seems conversant with Peak Oil although he never mentions this exact term. He does make the mistake of telling us that Oil will run out soon. I am sure he meant to say that CHEAP Oil will run out soon. There is a good reference section in the back with lists of good Companies, Organisations and Books for the interested reader to follow up upon. If you read ONE Book about Permaculture and don't want to wade through a great big thick text book then this is the book for you. It does exactly what it says on the Cover. Permaculture in a nutshell. Pun intended no doubt. Recommended.

Some repetition. Too short and lacking good illustrations.
At last - a really good book about Permaculture.

Patrick Whitefield "How to make a Forest Garden"

ISBN-13: 978-1-85623-008-7. Patrick Whitefield's "How To Make A FOREST GARDEN" 3rd edition was published in 2002 by Permanent Publications. (This reprint 2009. The 1st edition dates back to 1996.) 158 pages long including foreword, introduction, ten chapters, weights & measures, further reading, list of suppliers, plant index and subject index. Last year we gave Patrick Whitefield's "Permaculture in a Nutshell" a high score as it was concise and useful. 'Forest Garden' sees Patrick in more expansive mode. Patrick borrows a lot from the works of forest gardening pioneer Robert Hart and Richard Mabey's "Food for Free". A few flicks through the book does leave you with the impression that the work is not based upon any long experience or history of forest gardening. Forest gardening is a form of permaculture that seeks to emulate the environment of a highly productive woodland clearing or forest edge. This would make you think that mankind has been using this technique for millions of years. However the lack of examples suggest the technique is barely out of the test-tube. As such a lot of the advice appears speculative. There a no real models to choose from and few detailed examples of what works well when fitting different plant species together. That is not to say this is amateurish - far from it. Without reading the two Robert Hart books it is difficult to tell what is state-of-the-art. There just seems to be a lot of guesswork involved.

This may be because, as Patrick often points out, exactly which combination of species works in your garden depends upon your micro-climate. This is a frustrating point observed in several permaculture books. In theory you construct the forest garden in three layers: high trees bearing fruit, mid-level fruit-bearing shrubs followed by low-level, shade tolerant vegetables. No one layer will yield as much in a Forest Garden as they would in a monoculture scenario, but together the total productivity should be greatly enhanced. It is gardening in three dimensions. Nice in principle but you get the impression that you need a PhD in the subject to have even half a chance of making your garden grow. There are so many pitfalls, so many things to go wrong, so many diseases and so many 'fussy' plants that it sounds like you need to endlessly experiment and put up with endless failure before you ever find what works. It is disheartening. Of course, if you love gardening, if it is your hobby, your interest, then you will love this sort of challenge. I am sure the layman would like some proven formulas and rules-of-thumb to get them going. These are lacking. This is probably not a specific problem with this book - just an observation about the entire rapidly evolving field of permaculture. It isn't plug'n'play technology for a race of creatures desperately in need of a replacement its oil-addicted food system. We need a real "how to" designed for complete gardening duffers. It doesn't help that so many of the species of plant Patrick describes you have never heard of, or maybe thought were weeds.

The author seeks to persuade us that there is so much stuff growing that you can eat - as long as you pick it at the right time, wash it, cut the inedible bit off and cook it just right. Some poor punters out there might just think 'screw that - I am off to the supermarket'. Maybe it is a sign of our MTV generation that we have no attention span and desire instant gratification. However we do expect a garden to take time to grow. We know not everything will work, but this book assails you with so many problems you almost feel like not starting. This is not to say that this isn't a good book. Entirely the opposite, as a text book for forest gardening there may be none better as far as we know. But as an advert for a new way of growing food it is very poor. This is a book for the foodies. One for the obsessive. Permanent Publications made no effort to provide illustrations for the book. There are no colour pictures, in fact there are very few pictures. A guide for the layman should be big, bright, bold, colourful and full meaningful 3d illustrations pointing out dozens of example layouts with their pro's and cons. We learn through example but this book has so few. Only in Chapter Ten does the book come close to forest garden design. The rest of it focuses mostly on the plants to put in the forest garden. This makes it a good text book - something to dip into as a reference. You can learn everything you need to know to start a forest garden in this book, however it is tempting to get an expert in to get you started. The process seems all so daunting.

Visually unappealing. Lacking in colour, diagrams & illustrations. No E:Mail addresses or web links to resources.
Good reference material. Worthwhile as a textbook.

Piers Warren "How to Store Your Garden Produce"

ISBN 978 1 900322 17 1. "How to Store Your Garden Produce - The key to self-sufficiency" was written by Piers Warren and published by Green Books Ltd in this revised and enlarged edition in 2008. It seems further recipes were added in the 2009 reprint - this 143 page book boasts two parts, intro and index. The look and feel of the printed book is the same as Charles Dowding's "Organic Gardening - The natural no dig way" so you get large sections of text with only token illustrations although the centre section boasts some colour photo's (none of which add much in the way of explanation). This is how gardening books were produced for many years up until the 1970's when the Readers Digest hit the market with what we call the 'coffee table' style of publishing. Modern books are lavishly illustrated in both colour and with line illustrations showing you exactly how to perform the tasks in the text. Green Books' style is a throwback to the past and it does them no favours if they wish to attract a wider audience. Gardening books are two-a-penny. It is a crowded market so if you want to stand out you probably have to put a but more work into in that has been put into these books. Rather they are for the purist than the for those with an occasional interest. These are books you have to seek out. Cosmetics to one side for a moment - this book is great for its content. It is thorough and it is British.

You learn about crops that grow in this country and they are given the common names we give them here. No need to translate from the American. Breath a sigh of relief. This is a practical guide. It has everything in delightful bite-sized chunks. It is more text book than thrilling read. A flick through will feed the imagination but none other than the hardened foodie is going to read every last line. What you read here has to be practically applied. Hence you are likely to grow the food first then wonder what to do with it. Hence every kitchen should have this book on the shelf. It is conceivable that it may work the other way of course - some may prefer to put the cart before the horse and read the book before planning what to grow. We are sure that would work too!

The methods covered include clamping (hadn't even heard of that before), bottling, drying, salting, freezing (that seems to apply for everything!), vacuum packing, pickling, chutney making, relishes, ketchup, sauces, jams, jellies, fruit butters, fruit cheeses and fermenting. This is why the book often ends up looking like a recipe book. In a few cases it even looks like the recipes may reduce the lifespan of the food rather than increase it. Most methods end up with you having to freeze the result. At this point we hit a bit of a problem - space. To do half of what this book describes requires lots of storage space. You need a big chest freezer or freezers. Storing carrots in boxes of sand requires lots of storage space. All methods seem to require you to add a lot of energy be it through blanching, cooking or freezing. Sometimes you have to simmer and simmer and simmer.... Other methods require the addition of lots of salt, sugar or vinegar. One wonders whether some of these methods are just unsustainable? Will we have endless supplies of sugar and salt in future? Both require lots of energy to process. It looks as if the CO2 footprint of every method should be measured to see how best we can preserve food without resorting to endless cheap oil. So it is no panacea. Is this the key to self-sufficiency? A little yes, a little no. One final note: watch out for the anecdotes. Fascinating as they may be at least a couple are of dubious accuracy. WWII RAF aircrew were not fed carrots to enable them to see in the dark. That was propaganda to disguise the fact that night-fighters had been equipped with radar... Nevertheless - a recommended book.

Many may have difficulty applying these methods. Methods are have high carbon footprint. Book is dated in style.
Essential reading - should be on every bookshelf. If you have the space, energy and the chemicals give it a spin.

Ian Wishart "Air Con - The Seriously Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming"

ISBN 978-0-9582401-4-7. "Air Con - The Seriously Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming" by "#1 bestselling author" Ian Wishart was published by Howling at the Moon Publications in 2009. The author is an "award winning" journalist with his own radio show and a claimed four number one bestselling books in his native New Zealand. You can read more about him at www.ianwishart.com. He opens his Prologue with the statement that "There is an awful lot riding on the global warming industry. Vast fortunes stand to be made by some on the inside, and where there's money there's power and greed close behind." Now let's examine this opening statement in detail. In 2006 the total global trade in carbon was worth just $21.5 billion. That year the global trade in JUST Oil was around $3 trillion.. Throw in Gas and Coal and (I don't know) let's double that to $6 trillion. Oh, but it gets better. Add the cost of the Iraq war. That will be $2 trillion please. Oh no, wait! I forgot all those perverse government subsidies too. That adds another $2 trillion per annum, much of it going to fossil fuels. To be honest, the very idea that somebody is about to make a killing out of fabricating Climate Change is ridiculous. FOLLOW THE MONEY. Who wins? Who loses? Do the maths.

What really motivates a Kiwi shock-journalist to write a book like this? On page 119 he says "are we trusting our personal taxes, and the money we'll be spending on higher fuel and food prices, and a reduced standard of living to [...] a United Nations executive team eager to become some kind of defacto world government?" [Our emphasis.] World Government? Glance inside the rear cover and we see this from Lord Christopher Monkton "The UN, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jaques Chirac, and other world-government wannabes are plotting to establish nothing less than a global, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship under the pretext that it is necessary to 'Save the Planet'." Then flick to page 178 to read this quote from NASA Astronaut Jack Schmitt "The global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making." And please don't think I am cherry picking here because after Wishart runs out of his sciencey-sounding stuff he devotes Chapters 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 to his pet conspiracy theory saying "The battle to convince you of the reality of climate change is intricately entwined with the collapse of the financial markets and the growing push for a de-facto world government."

This seems to be a misunderstanding of the word "governance" (the manner of governing) versus "government" (a body of people governing). It is essential truism of our times that everyone needs better global governance but that isn't how Wishart reads it. His theory requires you to believe that climate change is all a conspiracy (funded by the Democrats & George Soros) that will lead to a UN takeover of our lives. Maybe Wishart is confusing a James Bond movie with reality? Surely much that is wrong with our lives is due to an absence of a United Nations...? Anyway, you get the idea. Global warming is the new communism... Environmentalists are all Nazis.... The author tells us that after his first book (about the international tax dealings of major corporations) his phone was tapped, he suffered break-ins and an attempt upon his life. Oddly enough, despite writing a book about the great global warming conspiracy by a "world government" it seems NOBODY has made an attempt upon his life. Lucky guy - those James Bond villains are really taking a day off.... And if you have any doubts about Wishart's colours then read this on page 190 "...the social liberal leanings of most journalists, whose motivation [is] to make the world a better place, [make] an environmental issue like global warming [...] catapult to the top of the bulletins..." This isn't an "Air Con", it's a "neo-con".

So what is at the heart of Wishart's ideology (and others of his ilk)? Afterall he is a journalist not a climatologist. Maybe its this: since 1989 the Washington-consensus swept the world in the shape of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. They push a singular neo-conservative economic agenda upon poor countries and it hasn't worked for most of them. From the same time America became the only superpower left. It felt all powerful and, with the biggest military machine in the world, the rest of the World trembled. The rest of the World didn't like it. Those in Washington therefore only had one threat to their hegemony. Global public opinion. Us. Everyone else in the world - the vast majority of humanity as embodied by multi-lateral democratic organisations such as the United Nations.... For the Neo-Cons the only people with the right to act like a uni-lateral "World Government" was the Government in Washington. Likewise Wishart can't hide his utter contempt for democracy and consensus. On page 217 (quoting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an attempt to show that the UN is taking over the world) "Polls show that large majorities - 74% to be exact - believe the UN should play a larger role in the world." Wishart is dismissive. Then, page 19: "Just because a whole bunch of people believe something, doesn't necessarily make it correct... big lists don't actually prove the empirical truth of a claim." 

Of course Wishart's fundamental mistake is in believing that somehow any global agreement on Carbon Emissions will just hoover up vast quantities of his poor taxpayers money.... And burn it. Maybe he should actually try reading something like Oliver Tickell's "Kyoto 2". The suggested $1 trillion, that would be raised annually through the auctioning of emission rights, would be spent on renewable energy, converting old coal fired power stations to CCS, building Climate Change defences in poor countries and disaster relief. This is just 1.5% of global Gross Domestic Product. Since the money will get spent globally it just means diverting the money into decarbonising the global economy via free-market mechanisms. The result - green jobs and a green economy rather than one dominated by a global financial casino powered by petrodollars. Of course Wishart would not be a fan of free-markets. Not with all that hard-fought-and-won cash going in "taxes" to all those poor people in countries that (we can only assume) DON'T MATTER. You get the picture. It's nationalism. It's xenophobia. He describes all these good causes as a "black hole" (page 17). It's ideology.

Here's our point-of-view Wishart: even if we are wrong about Climate Change it wouldn't change a thing. The money would be well spent. The problem for Wishart is NOT the raising of a $1 trillion per year, it is WHO will spend it, ie, agencies of the United Nations via some kind of democratic process. Wishart's ideology goes something like this: "Why should all those pesky little countries decide how to spend OUR tax dollars? They will only waste it in their poor countries where people really SHOULDN'T MATTER." So who should spend it? Who can be trusted to decarbonise the global economy? We are sure that if all that money was given to the United States so it could emulate... let's say.. the 'successful' rebuilding of the Iraqi economy (by diverting tax payers money into the pockets of large US Corporations), then Wishart would be a big "believer" in man-made-Climate-Change. Yes?

The suspicion is that people of Wishart's ilk are perfectly happy for the public purse to be raided for a "war on terror" or to maintain the Pentagon-system (the military-industrial complex where the US outspends EVERY competitor solely for weapons of war). We wonder what his views are of health-care reform in America? All this talk of beating swords into ploughshares must be very disturbing to this way of thinking. (You can imagine it: "Tax dollars being spent on renewable energy & hospitals when there are perfectly good stealth bombers to be paid for? Outrageous!") If you don't believe me just read the entire of page 223 which concludes "Most members of the United Nations come from the developing world. Most members of the United Nations stand to see massive investment in their countries [...] because [...] multinationals will make money by building new, greener power plants there. Politically, the UN not only sees this as levelling the playing field and creating a truly global economy, but it also sees it as a power shift away from the US." Which, apparently, is exactly what 74% of the world's population want to see happen. What do you think the "Third World" (aka "the majority world") is for Wishart? Target practice?!

Wishart demands that "we have to be absolutely sure that anthropogenic global warming is taking place before we commit serious dollars and time to possible solutions." Whatever happened to just doing the right thing? What about the precautionary principle? What about peak oil and other fossil fuel depletion? What about the ozone layer, top soil, water and whatever other finite limit you care to mention? Aren't these the sort of precautions we should be taking anyway? Afterall, what if WE are wrong but something is still done? Then we have gone some way to curing our deathly addicition to fossil fuels. A win. What if are right and nothing is done? Then there is a catastrophe. We all lose. Game over. Why gamble? This is not an ideological debate about the sole topic of climate change. It is about sustainability, democracy and justice. None are on Wishart's shopping list. Sure, like Lomborg before him, we get the crocodile tears for the poor of this Earth. Wishart's suggestion? Dig lots of wells to irrigate the Sahara and make it green again. He says there is lots of water under the Sahara. What an excellent way to use up yet another finite resource. Somehow we think that Wishart is not quite on the same small planet as the rest of us. Maybe he lives on planet number five that we will need if we are ALL to consume like a North American?

So what is really left to a book like this? Wishart's central theory is that the climate is always changing but that there are feedback mechanisms (such as clouds) that always bring it back into line. He shows how, in the time of the dinosaurs, that CO2 and temperature did not march hand-in-hand and suggests that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere today is actually a feedback from natural warming. He argues that our temperature measurements are probably not accurate and that any real warming is probably down to the Sun. His central plank of evidence is research suggesting that the Medieval Warm Period was much warmer than today. However, as he starts the book as a self-confessed cynic (and right-wing conspiracy theorist) so he approaches the evidence via his ideology. Hence he seeks out only the evidence that reinforces his belief-system so undermining his credibility from the get-go. It is hard to take him seriously. For example he argues that Glaciers are insensitive to contemporary temperature changes and that, if they are melting today, it is because of an increase in temperature hundreds of years ago. This sounds like thermodynamic nonsense.

Then there are sections where Wishart-the-journalist imagines that he has found the unbelievable flaw in all the work of all those climatologists. They have the temperature reading equipment in car parks and airports! Case closed. (Fancy all those PhD's not spotting a mistake like THAT?) It is beyond parody. It is derisory. This just leaves Wishart to cherry pick the records to his hearts content.... Which appears to be exactly the sort of distortion he accuses the Global Warming "believers" of. We know that the high priests of man-made global warming have made some absolute howlers in the error department. Sure, there has been exaggeration in the interest of getting more action. However, since we have seen so much political inaction and so much money poured into climate change denial you can't help but wonder what Wishart's problem is. He is on the winning side afterall. His viewpoint is not that of the under-dog. His views remain dominant in the face of an equal amount of evidence to suggest that man-made climate change is proceeding more rapidly than first feared.

To be fair, this book has a few good points. The discussion of the fabled "northwest passage" was enlightening, whilst it seems that Polar Bears are not nearly as close to extinction as we first thought.... But these are just anecdotes that prove nothing. Sure, journalists exaggerate but remember that Wishart IS A JOURNALIST. He undermines his own case. Regardless... Books like this will jump to the top of the science best-sellers lists simply because they tell people what they want to hear. His work is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions (read closely what he says about ocean temperature) but all of this will be happily ignored by people all too willing to have the wool pulled over their eyes. If you want to read good books on Climate Change scepticism then I can recommend Lawrence Solomon's "The Deniers" and Patrick J. Michaels "Meltdown". Indeed - keep a very healthy scepticism but please use common sense. Follow the money. Do you really think thousands of scientists all independently dreamt up climate change so that they could earn grants to study it? Exactly in whose interest is it to do nothing to decarbonise your economy? Do you wish to keep fighting those oil wars? Keep suffering terrorism? Endure high petroleum and food prices forever? Is life really a Darwinian battle to the bottom? Or are we all just a little bit better than all that? Just think about it.

The very worst of its genre, not because of its denier stance, but because of its paranoid conspiracy theory.
Neo-con, right-wing, nationalistic, xenophobic, twaddle. We'll give one thumb for the north-west passage story.

Since publishing this review we stumbled upon this delightful reference to the author on Wikipedia. Enjoy: "Wishart is a conservative Christian who generally advocates "right-wing" values. Wishart was highly critical of the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand, and Prime Minister Helen Clark in particular, for alleged Marxist policies. Wishart also criticised gay activists, and sex education advocates for making factually incorrect statements in support of their initiatives. More recently Ian Wishart has been critical of the teaching of evolution in schools and the theory of human induced climate change. Wishart claims that his book Eve's Bite (2007) is "the most politically incorrect book ever published in New Zealand". In the book, Wishart argues that New Zealand society is being "poisoned" and the Western world as a whole undermined "by seductive and destructive philosophies and social engineering that within the space of a generation have intellectually crippled the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen" "

Gabrielle Walker "Hot Topic"

ISBN 978-0-7475-9395-9. "The Hot Topic - How to tackle Global Warming and still keep the lights on" by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King was published by Bloomsbury in 2008. Two books by two authors - Gabrielle Walker is an author, journalist and broadcaster whilst Sir David used to be Tony Blair's Chief Scientific Adviser. From the off it is fair to point out that this book is a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the downright ugly. It has none of the plain speaking of George Monbiot's "Heat" nor does it have any of the authority of David MacKay's "Sustainable Energy without the hot air". To be fair it probably isn't even trying to take on either of these to giants. However its ugliest moments stem from the authors' complete ignorance of the existence of David Hopkins' "Transition Handbook" or Pat Murphy's "Plan C". Their's is a world of mainstream convention. There is no talk of curtailment, relocalisation or building post-carbon societies. No. The fact that the book gets a glowing reference from James Lovelock just might set the alarm bells ringing. Firstly the good: the sections written by King give a good overview of the Politics of Climate Change. It is all rather self-congratulatory with glowing praise for the work of the EU and the UK. If you believed all of this you might believe we could leave it all up to the politicians and the job is practically done. Add to this the normal platitudes about a few energy-saving light bulbs and this is as "good" as it gets. Well, maybe I exaggerate, there is also a good overview of the science and the myths - however King is a scientist so this should be a slam-dunk. Likewise we get a reasonably balanced and praiseworthy account of Carbon Offsetting.... but.... Now for the 'bad' - King is pro-nuclear and manages to deliver this with all the usual pro-nuclear obfuscation that you come to expect. According to King there are some misguided people called "environmentalists" who believe that Nuclear Power is dangerous and leaves lots of radioactive waste. Of course this straw-man is easily disputable for a scientist. (Here's a hint David: check out these other people called "economists" & "accountants" who also tells us that Nuclear Power is so expensive as to be an utter waste of time.) King then takes the sunny-side-up approach and talk only about the fantasy Nuclear Power that is utterly safe and, somehow, incredibly cheap. Too cheap to meter perhaps? Laughable. Even worse is that King goes on to tell us that we'll have more food to eat in a warmer world. It is left to Walker to tell us that it may not be that simple. As we are tapped into a global food market and our weather is about to get very violent then there is no guarantee that the global food situation is about to improve at all. (Without a large change in lifestyle then our meat-dominated diets are completely unsustainable - but this book doesn't mention any of this.) Now the "ugly" - well, let me quote "[Governments should.....] Find a way to tap the rising tide of consumer desire for action." This is so wrong in so many ways it is staggering. The archetypal belief that we can consume our way out of the crisis by buying a few A+ rated fridges is beyond belief. We will never make the sort of cuts in GHG's required if people like this are running policy. Clearly they don't have a clue how to solve the problem beyond a bit of carbon trading and unplugging your mobile phone charger. It is only by page 252 (out of 272) does the book even mention "local solutions". (To be fair Chapter 14 is "How You Can Change the World" but it is all the usual bollocks about carbon footprinting and a drop of recycling.) However a "local solution" for Walker and King is something a Town, City, Council or Borough does. There is  no mention of what communities or farmers can do. There is no permaculture. There is no reduction in consumption. There is no monetary reform or getting out of debt..... Still... "The Hot Topic" is not all that bad and a lot of what it says is perfectly correct. However, this is 2009 not 1989. The world has moved on but these two authors are stuck in the past where simplistic solutions might have saved us. It is too late. The climate has moved on two decades and now we need drastic community solutions not another climate summit. Get real and grow up. Read this book if you want to pretend everything is in hand and the Government will sort it out for you. However, as all the evidence shows that the Governments are doing jack shit we recommend you read the other books we mentioned above.

Pro-nuclear and conservative. Pro-consumption. Clueless.
A good review of UK Politics and Climate Change from a man in the know.

Vaitheeswaran "Power to the People"

Mick Winter "Peak Oil Prep"

ISBN 0 9659000 4 5. Published by West Song Publishing in 2006. Written by Mick Winter - the man behind the DryDipstick.com and BeyondPeak.com web sites. We got all excited when we discovered this book existed. We finally thought we had found a kindred spirit. We expected this book to be like THIS Web Site. In some respects it doesn't disappoint. Each section is liberally dosed with reference web sites and books you just must read. However, the full title of this work is "Peak Oil Prep - Three Things You Can Do to Prepare for Peak Oil, Climate Change and Economic Collapse". Only 3 things? The title is misleading. In fact he lists forty five things to do then, under each heading, he lists three bullets point ideas making 135 things in total. One-hundred-and-thirty-five things??!!  In the Introduction he does have a "Big Three" and they are: use CFL's, bike and plant yourself a garden. Not bad, it covers three of our ten bases.... Sadly the other 100+ ideas just don't scan at all. Sure, he encompasses the various ideas from Post-Carbon Living's own "10 Steps" but each of his ideas is highly dilute and repetitive. As such it comes over as one of those "Dummy's Guides to..." books. He covers nothing in any detail and most of what is there appears to reflect Mick's personal likes & opinions. It is just stuff he has gleaned from web sites. If he would only focus on ten to twenty core topics (as we do), and then talk around these, this book might be more of a winner. Mick is from some place in California and it is clear he hasn't got out much. The book is so entirely focused on North America that it is probably the most parochial work of its kind we have read. Yes, investing in a rail network is good but Mike seems to think that the entire world runs "Amtrak". This is just very annoying to the reader anywhere else in the world. It just could have been written so much better. Then, to top of a mediocre piece of work, he starts to go off at weird tangents. He recommends yoga, breathing deeply, making your own pet food, meditation, massage, aromatherapy, grow your own catnip, heal your pets holistically, eat together as a family and so on, and so forth.... When it comes to Peak Oil I don't think you'll have time for a relaxing bath or a pampered pet. You'll drink the water and eat the pet. Get this book if you must but you might not learn a lot.

Simplistic and repetitive. Inadequate detail. For North Americans only.
Maybe a few ideas here for the complete beginner?