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When Rachel Carson--scientist, writer, activist--accepted the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us, she commented, "But this notion that `science' is something that belongs in a separate compartment of its own, apart from everyday life, is one that I should like to challenge. We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in the laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why in everything in our experience." This book, The Earth Around Us honors that sentiment. Throughout its pages, it brings to its readers, the scientific understanding of the consequences of human activity on earth. Some of the thirty one essays that constitute this book offer poetic accounts of human thinking about our earth. Others provide direct and accessible stories of human actions and their aftermath on the planet. In all cases the essays in The Earth Around Us encompass a unique resource, a collection of writings by society's foremost scientist-writers, whose goal is to empower its readers with access to scientific information that will bear directly on the ability of Homo Sapiens to secure a sustainable future on planet earth. Here readers will glean the perspectives of visionary geoscientists who contemplate earth history and the place of humans in it. If the future of humanity is to be environmentally tenable, the public must contemplate these viewpoints. Scientists articulate their working concepts to the reading public all too infrequently. Authors of essays in The Earth Around Us affirm the ability of scientists to communicate relevant science in a clear and engaging fashion, and they enthusiastically embrace their responsibility to do so. The result is a book of lively essays that will captivate readers who desire basic knowledge about the earth that can be used to balance human actions within the natural earth system. According to environmental activist and writer Robert Gottlieb, a key element in Rachel Carson's argument in her book Silent Spring was that science and specialized technical knowledge were separated from public input and that this separation was linked to, in Carson's words, "an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make money, at whatever cost to others, is seldom challenged." In a recent review of John M. Donahue's and Barbara Rose Johnston's Water, Culture, and Power: Local Struggles in a Global Context, Gottlieb also comments that a forceful and effective critic of a proposed dam outside of Phoenix, Arizona, was successful precisely because of her ability to "challenge the technical and financial aspects of the project." Surely, science alone can't fix all the environmental disturbances that humans create. Problems in the physical world are multifaceted; solutions to them will require consideration of ethics and policy as well as judgment informed by cultural, political, social and historical context. In some cases, to solve the problems that we've induced through the application of scientific principles will necessitate technologies that do not yet exist. Nonetheless, a scientifically aware public, one that knows the ABCs of the earth system, will be able to hold accountable others who act in ignorance of the earth's essential character. By adjusting the compass of our thinking about the natural world, The Earth Around Us empowers readers to educated thought, speech and action. The book comprises seven parts, each of which I introduce briefly with a description of the main theme. The book's first section gives readers a sense of earth's time and history as well as the place of people in it. Part II, "Scientific Judgments and Ethical Considerations" divulges the nature of scientific inquiry of the earth and prompts readers to meditate on reconfigured values that might sustain human life on the planet. The third segment of the book explores a newly prioritized set of `resources' that we must preserve if life is to persist here: forests, soils, ground and surface waters, and coasts. In the fourth portion, essayists tell true stories about construction projects that defy geological sense. As a hopeful counterpoint to them, the essays in Part V detail geologically aware, innovative thought and action where people have had to respond to environmental challenges. In the sixth part, authors take up issues of planetary change on a global scale-in particular alterations to the atmosphere. In an effort to spur creative thinking for an environmentally sound and decent future, essayists writing in the final portion of The Earth Around Us, express philosophies meant to inspire humans to think outside their quotidian existence. This book is akin to a chorus of voices. Each part can be encountered alone or in the context of the entirety. Readers can enjoy the essays in any order they choose because each piece of written work is its own whole. However, the constituent essays form an integrated aggregate that takes the reader on a journey towards prescience about humanity's environmental future. Ultimately, the book is an enticing set of true stories with geological themes. Together the essays make a strong case for the centrality of earth science to environmental sustainability. In the dystopic future envisioned by poet and novelist Marge Piercy in her book He, She and It, the heroine Shira describes listening to a lecture "...about two billion people who had starved to death in the Famine, when the ocean rose over rice paddies and breadbaskets of the delta countries like Bangladesh and Egypt, when the Great Plains dried up and blew away in dust storms that darkened the skies and brought early winter, when the deserts of Africa and the new desert of the Amazon spread month by month." Lest this really be our future, every person on this planet must come to appreciate the capacity of humans to act as geological agents at nongeological time scales. We humans are coming up against the limits of earth's ability to provide for us. We have utilized the earth's resources as if the planet were a never-ending cornucopia of riches. Our consumption of nonrenewable fuel resources has led to global warming and ozone depletion, deforestation and desertification. We've impounded water behind dams to generate hydroelectricity without regard for the destruction of upstream wetlands and other habitats. Our desire for picture perfect fruits and vegetables out of season has led to widespread use of pesticides and herbicides that have infiltrated our soils and groundwater. Our consumption of goods with little concern for the waste we generate has led to overflowing garbage dumps often constructed on the lands of people forced out of economic necessity to take in the waste of other people. These same landfills have been constructed sometimes without concern for fluctuating water table depths so that leaks have polluted water supplies. We can not continue to act this way without substantial risk to humanity. All members of the global community must garner solid working knowledge of our home, this planet. Its components, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and lithosphere, forever interact. When humans deliberately or inadvertently perturb the natural system, the planet responds. We must learn to anticipate the effects of our actions. I hope this book will help anyone concerned about our planet's ability to sustain us understand the earth history and processes that ground our environmental problems. In the search for a sustainable future, geological knowledge is central. As an epigraph to Silent Spring Rachel Carson quoted writer E.B. White: "I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially." Unlike White, I am an optimist. A public that understands and appreciates our kaleidoscopic earth can guide communicative scientists and responsible leaders across the globe so that we live attuned to the earth system of which we are a part.
Jill S. Schneiderman Poughkeepsie, New York |