The Story of More

{5/5} “If we can refrain from overestimating our likelihood of failure, then neither must we underestimate our capacity for success.”

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren, published in 2020

Jahren uses her birth year of 1969 as a marker to compare how things were then with how they are now. She goes through a bunch of related topics. The book is divided into 5 sections:

  • Life
    • She describes the increases in human population, life expectancy, and the movement from farms to cities. 
  • Food
    • She shows the increase in yield in crops such as corn, rice, and wheat. She shows how much grain is being fed to animals, and how much meat is being consumed by humans. She also talks about the rise of aquaculture, and how much food we throw away.
  • Energy
    • She relates the growth of electricity consumption, and the growth of airplane travel. She shows where oil, gas, and coil come from. She talks about the likelihood of more solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy solving the problem. She talks about the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy.
  • Earth
    • Jahren talks about the increase in carbon dioxide. She shows that the current way the world deals with climate change, with things like the Paris Agreement, is not sufficient. What’s needed is not something incremental, but something transformative. She talks about temperature increase, ice decrease, and sea level increase.
  • The Story of Less
    • Jahren encourages you to make changes in your life that align with your values, from food to investments. In case you were going to try to lessen your use of electricity, she goes through which items in your home use the most. She encourages you to talk about the changes you’re making with anyone you can.

It’s a short book but a powerful one. In a straightforward way, she explains that things are dire but she is hopeful.

It might have been a bit overwhelming to read last year. But now that things are looking better in the world, it’s time to think about the big problems of the 21st century. There’s none bigger than climate change.

Jahren is a scientist who was asked to teach a class on climate change. She did the research, and this book is the result. I’m betting her students found the class engrossing. She puts things in a valuable context.

Her style, described in a blurb as “brilliantly sardonic and conversational,” is unique.

Here’s another quotation: “We shouldn’t be surprised when scientists are wrong. All human beings are a lot better at describing what is happening than at predicting what will happen. Somewhere along the way, however, we began to hope that scientists were different — that they could be right all the time. And because they’re not, we kind of stopped listening. By now we’re quite practised at not listening to things scientists say over and over again.”

One more quotation: “Every single scientist I know is freaked out by the steep increase in carbon dioxide of the last fifty years. But we are more freaked out by the fact that our governments are not as freaked out about it as we are.”

And one more quotation: “It’s no use pretending that conserving resources isn’t at odds with the industries that helped to write our Story of More and that increasing consumption over the last fifty years wasn’t tightly coupled with the pursuit of more profit, more income, more wealth. It’s time to look around and ask ourselves if this coupling is truly the only way to build a civilization, because the assumption that it is may represent the greatest threat of all.”

This is the 1st book I’ve read by Jahren.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2021 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Reviews of books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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