Scotsman Books of the Year: Environment

Roger Cox shares his picks for environmental books of the year

BOOKS about the parlous state of the environment, in particular the vexed question of man-made climate change, tend to range in tone from thoroughly depressing to throw-yourself-out-of-a-window-before-the-flood-comes suicidal. Julie Hill’s The Secret Life of Stuff, (Vintage, £8.99) however, turned out to be refreshingly upbeat. The root cause of all our eco-woes, she believes, is our overwhelming desire to acquire “stuff” and – more importantly – our failure to understand where this stuff comes from and where it ends up. So, in brisk, business-like style, she takes us back to basics, tracing the progress of the various materials we throw away every day from superstore shelf to municipal rubbish dump. The results make for sobering reading in places but her conclusion – that the notion of the green consumer is a myth, and that only government intervention can have any impact on a problem of this magnitude – is one that those in the corridors of power would do well to act on.

If Julie Hall thinks of the environmental challenges we face in a practical, nuts and bolts way, the Australian scientist and eco-thinker Tim Flannery is at the very opposite end of the spectrum, viewing our relationship with the planet in the broadest of broad-brush, philosophical terms. Published in March, his book Here on Earth: A New Beginning (Allen Lane, £14.99) looks at the problems facing us through the prism of evolution, and it’s highly readable, too, despite the epic sweep of its ideas.

Flannery takes as his starting point the scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin. Unlike Darwin, however, who saw evolution as a fundamentally competitive process, Wallace saw it as a cooperative one, with lots of different organisms evolving together (completely unconsciously) to form an ecosystem, and then various different ecosystems combining to create a sort of planetary superbeing, not unlike James Lovelock’s Gaia.

Our problem as a species, Flannery believes, is that we have moved beyond the usual laws of the natural world, and are now able to destroy whole ecosystems with impunity, rather than being subject to their localised laws of supply and demand. The key to our salvation, he thinks, lies in the development of a “global human superorganism” – effectively a conscious version of the unconscious, Gaia-like being that already exists, with the human race as a sort of brain and central nervous system, acting to maintain tolerable living conditions for all.

Mind-expanding stuff. Trouble is, if the concept of a global human superorganism felt a little naive back in March, it seems positively laughable now. How can we humans be expected to manage a system as infinitely complex as the Earth when it seems we still haven’t mastered basic sums?

Laurence C Smith’s book The New North: The World in 2050 (Profile, £20) covered a lot of the same ground as Charles Emmerson’s excellent 2010 tome, The Future History of the Arctic. But whereas Emmerson seemed most interested in exploring the possibility of future conflict between the various Arctic nations, Smith focuses more on the economic possibilities – partly in terms of transport, as a warmer, increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean opens up new shipping lanes across the top of the world, but mostly in terms of resource extraction, as permafrost that has endured for milennia melts away to reveal untold mineral riches beneath.

As developing nations in the south become increasingly industrialised and demand more and more raw materials to make real their urban dreams, Smith suggests, so the world’s eight most northerly countries – Greenland, Canada, Russia, the United States (Alaska), Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland – will find themselves increasingly well-equipped to meet that demand. Of course, that’s not great news for mankind’s carbon footprint, so the sooner somebody translates Julie Hall’s book into Hindi and Mandarin, the better for all concerned.

Surely the most poetic book about the environment published this year, Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction (Granta, £20), looked at how we in the industrialised west have become, as she puts it, “estranged from nature”. Challenger is a poet of some standing, and while her prose occasionally feels a little forced or overwrought, some of her descriptions of the places she vists are dazzlingly good, notably her writing on Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, where the Inuit, facing the loss of their language and their “land ways”, are as endangered as the polar bears they share the ice with, and the abandoned whaling station at Grytviken on the Island of South Georgia - once responsible for driving whale populations to the brink of extinction, now itself in the process of being erased from the face of the Earth.

Finally, Maxwell T Boykoff’s book Who Speaks for Climate?, (Cambridge University Press, £17.99), provided an intriguing look at media portrayals of the climate change debate. Predictably, perhaps, there was much here about the various attempts by Big Business to draw the findings of the majority of climate scientists into doubt by the patronage of their own hand-picked “experts” (and, to be honest, this topic is dealt with in a much more user-friendly way in last year’s excellent Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway). Boykoff’s research does throw up one very striking conclusion, however: that, statistically-speaking, readers of “quality” newspapers in the UK are far more likely to get a true picture of the dangers we face from man-made climate change than readers of tabloids.

Or, in other words, millions of UK citizens are being regularly misinformed about the single most important issue of our age. Now there’s an optimistic note to end on.