The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World by Oliver Milman - 2022 - 278 Pages

 

 The insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World by Oliver Milman - 2022 - 278 Pages is a fascinating incredibly educational account of how climate change is impacting the insects of the earth and importantly why humans should care about them. Milman begins by focusing on how negatively our food supply would be impacted with out the pollination of food plants by insects.

"A devastating examination of how collapsing insect populations worldwide threaten everything from wild birds to the food on our plate.

From ants scurrying under leaf litter to bees able to fly higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, insects are everywhere. Three out of every four of our planet’s known animal species are insects. In The Insect Crisis, acclaimed journalist Oliver Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history. What is causing the collapse of the insect world?  Why does this alarming decline pose such a threat to us? And what can be done to stem the loss of the miniature empires that hold aloft life as we know it?

With urgency and great clarity, Milman explores this hidden emergency, arguing that its consequences could even rival climate change. He joins the scientists tracking the decline of insect populations across the globe, including the soaring mountains of Mexico that host an epic, yet dwindling, migration of monarch butterflies; the verdant countryside of England that has been emptied of insect life; the gargantuan fields of U.S. agriculture that have proved a killing ground for bees; and an offbeat experiment in Denmark that shows there aren’t that many bugs splattering into your car windshield these days. These losses not only further tear at the tapestry of life on our degraded planet; they imperil everything we hold dear, from the food on our supermarket shelves to the medicines in our cabinets to the riot of nature that thrills and enlivens us. Even insects we may dread, including the hated cockroach, or the stinging wasp, play crucial ecological roles, and their decline would profoundly shape our own story." From the Publisher 

Oliver Milman is a British journalist and the environment correspondent at the Guardian. He lives in New York City.

The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz - 2023 - 288 Pages

 

The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz - 2023 - 288 Pages 

There is more and more focus on climate change in the news broadcasts and on YouTube videos.  There is almost no mention about how these changes impact the  nonhumans with whom we share the earth.  The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz does a brilliant, beautiful highly edifying account of how every thing from red tail Hawks, to ticks, moose and elephants are finding their very existence challenged by forces set in motion by carbon emissions.  The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz is full of fascinating matters it would be hard to find elsewhere.  

"New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“Exquisite.”-DAVID WALLACE-WELLS “At once an elegy and an exhortation.”-ELIZABETH KOLBERT “A book that goes deeper than any before into the meaning of the climate breakdown for all the rest of creation.”-BILL McKIBBEN “Celebratory and heartbreaking.”-DAVID GEORGE HASKELL

A revelatory exploration of climate change from the perspective of wild species and natural ecosystems--an homage to the miraculous, vibrant entity that is life on Earth.

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.

Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic.

An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too " from Bloomsbury Publishing 

Adam Welz is an enthusiastic naturalist and widely traveled environmental writer, photographer, and filmmaker. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Yale Environment 360, The Atlantic, Ensia, and many other outlets worldwide. He's a recipient of a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and currently lives in Cape Town with his wife, Sarah, and triplet daughters.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life 

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction is an expansion of a 2017 article published New York Magazine - is a vivid account of the disastrous consequences if global warming is not mitigated soon.

Every day now on international news programs we see terrible storms that were once said to occur every 500 years, droughts causing potential mass starvation, insurance rates in hurricane prone areas in America becoming much higher with many companies withdrawing from the Florida market,  Forest fires grow more frequent in Canada and California.

Millions seek to migrate from areas hardest hit.

Wallace-Wells begins with an account of the comfortable myths well meaning people believe about climate warming.

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a reliable shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true"

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.

An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth

“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times

“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist

“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post

“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books" from The Publisher- Penquin Randomhouse 

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

THE World Is Blue:How Our Fates and the Ocean's Are One by Sylvia Earle - 2009- 320 Pages

 The World Is Blue:How Our Fates and the Ocean's Are One by Sylvia Earle - 2010- 320

This post is in honour of my Nephew Alan Ulm. Alan just graduated from High School in South West Florida. He received numerous awards for academic achievements as well as for citizenship. He lives very near the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricanes are a seasonal threat. Living so close to the Gulf of Mexico he early on developed a concern for the environment. Like many young people he is rightly very concerned about the disastrous impact of global warming which we are already facing. He was given a special award for his focus on oceanography. Included with his award he was given several books, including a copy of The World Is Blue:How Our Fates and the Ocean's Are One by Sylvia Earle.

Earle shows with great force the dangerous impacts of climate change on the Oceans of the world and the impact of this on humanity. Here are a few of the matters she develops:

"Earth’s life-support system—the ocean—is failing. But who is paying attention? Throughout our history, the mostly blue natural world has been regarded as something to be vanquished, tamed, or otherwise used for purposes that seemed to make sense at the time. Deeply rooted in human culture is the attitude that the ocean is so vast, so resilient, it shouldn’t matter..how much we take out of—or put into—it. But two things changed in the 20th century that may jolt us into a new way of thinking. First, more was discovered about the nature of the ocean and its relevance to the way the world works than during all preceding history. Second, during the same narrow slice of time, human actions caused more destruction to ocean systems than during all preceding history. And the pace is picking up.. it is now clear that well before the start of the 20th century, humans had drastically, altered the fundamental nature ofthe sea by decimating the populations of fish, mammals, birds, turtles, lobsters, oysters, and other ocean wildlife. Further changes were initiated by noxious substances lofted into the atmosphere that eventually made their way into the sea...Ninety percent of many once common fish have been extracted since the 1950s; 95 percent of some species, including bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, American eel, and certain sharks have been killed. ..

But most of all, it matters that the world is blue because our lives depend on the living ocean—not just the rocks and water, but stable, resilient, diverse living systems that hold the world on a steady course favorable to humankind. The big question is, what can we do to take care of the blue world that takes care of us?"

Earle begins with an account of how she got interested in studying the ocean. She, like Alan, has strong personal connections to Florida. Already in the 12 years since her book was published Hurricanes have increased. South West Florida is listed as among the most vulnerable parts of America to rising sea levels. Red tides are increasing, home owners insurance costs have sky rocketed.

Earle talks a lot about possible solutions. Educating a public that will demand corporations and that politicians make climate change a top priority is, as evidenced by Earle, a top priority.

One beautiful solution Earle thrilling talks about is the World wide expansion of marine sanctuaries.

"marine protected areas were expected to be large enough to accomplish the following objectives: Maintain essential ecological processes and life-support system functions. Preserve genetic diversity. Ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems..The international version of The Science of Marine Reserves, published by PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, defines marine reserves as “ocean areas that are fully protected from activities that remove animals and plants or alter habitats, except as needed for scientific monitoring.” Prohibited activities include fishing, aquaculture, dredging, and mining, while nondestructive swimming, diving, and boating are allowed. In studies of more than 124 marine reserves in temperate and tropical areas, increases were documented in biomass, density—the number in a given area—body size, and species diversity. Even small fully protected areas can make a measurable difference, but the benefits of larger reserves include coverage of more habitat types, greater diversity, and greater insurance against catastrophes, from storms to diseases."

Called Her Deepness by the New Yorker and the New York Times and a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and named by Time magazine as the first Hero for the Planet, Sylvia Earle is an oceanographer, explorer, author, lecturer, Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, leader of the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, council chair for the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, founder and chairman of the Deep Search Foundation, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Ocean in Google Earth.She is a graduate of St. Petersburg College and Florida State University, with an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Duke University, and has received 17 honorary doctorates.She has received more than 100 national and international honors, including the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Netherlands’ Order of the Golden Ark, Australia’s Banksia Award, Italy’s Premio Artiglio Award, and medals from the Explorers Club and the Society of Women Geographers. In 2009 she received the TED Prize, the Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award, the BLUE Ocean Film Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the International Women’s Forum.

Everyday we are seeing on news programs the increasing impact of climate change. In the last few days, wild fires in Canada, made much worse by global warming,have given New York City the worst air quality in the world. Earle explains how global warming starts in the oceans.

In America politicians financed by petroleum and coal interests try to suggest climate change is a hoax of some sort, just as cigarette companies once claimed that their products did not cause cancer.

Mel Ulm