Books
The State of the Earth: Environmental Challenges on the road to 2100, by Paul K. Conkin (University Press of Kentucky, 308 pp., $32)
Maybe Middle America has finally developed an interest in the twin crises of energy and the environment. The Academy Award for Al Gore’s global warming dog and pony show seems a sure indicator that the subject is entering mainstream discourse. Unfortunately, most public discussion of the issue has been sucked into the vortex of politics, with elected leaders doing little more than posturing, while the activist contingent collectively wails and gnashes its teeth. Meanwhile, everyone else is simply bewildered by the complexity of the problem, wondering just what the hell is going to happen to humanity, and to the planet. For the average concerned earthling, a calm voice of knowledge and reason would be more than welcome: enter Vanderbilt’s distinguished historian Paul Conkin, with his book State of the Earth: Environmental Challenges on the Road to 2100, both a primer and a meditation on the present global predicament.
At first glance, Conkin seems an unlikely figure to take on the subject. He’s a highly respected academic who gained prominence for his work on the New Deal, antebellum Christian movements and the Southern Agrarians. But Conkin is an intellectual historian—a historian of ideas—and as such has devoted particular attention to how scientific thought and developing technology have affected American culture, most notably in his 1998 book, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. He has the historian’s gift for grounding broad analysis in hard data, and his synthesis of big concepts and practical realities is exactly what’s missing from much of the media din about the environment.
Conkin has no particular political or ideological axe to grind beyond a human concern for the lives of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A remark in the preface, “I write as an old man. I will not be around much longer,” is the closest thing you’ll find to an impassioned statement in Conkin’s measured prose. His manifesto is simple objectivity: “My task has been to try to gain an understanding of the issues, and to communicate that understanding in a way that will inform a broader audience than is addressed by most experts, and without the political agenda that accompanies most books and articles by committed but often deeply divided environmentalists.”
The State of the Earth literally begins at the beginning, with a concise, highly readable overview of the origins of life on Earth. In less than 20 pages Conkin manages to give serviceable explanations of the Earth’s unique position in the solar system, the chemical development of the primitive Earth, plate tectonics and the dynamics of magnetic fields—all in the service of making readers understand the fragile nature of a living planet.
It’s an impressive writing feat, and Conkin goes on to give similarly artful treatment to the whole constellation of environmental concerns, including population growth, food supply, water resources, pollution, the ozone layer and biodiversity. The technical information he gives is adequate but not overwhelming, and Conkin does an excellent job of making connections for the reader. There’s a forest to be found among the trees, as Conkin effectively marshals facts and figures to illustrate what he regards as the human race’s central dilemma, which he discusses here in the context of water and energy shortages: “All the most basic natural resources needed for human life are now either growing scarce or are frequently polluted. For the most part, the reason for this is a twofold development in the 20th century—unprecedented population increases in underdeveloped countries, where per capita consumption has grown only slowly at best; and unprecedented increases of per capita consumption in industrialized countries, where populations are now stable or declining. Thus, the squeeze comes from two directions, and in neither case is there any likelihood of any early relief.”
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That same predicament—too many poor people in the underdeveloped world, too much greed and waste elsewhere—is cited repeatedly by Conkin as the root problem from which all our environmental ills grow. It’s the primary barrier to effective action against global warming—the issue which, not surprisingly, gets the most intensive scientific and policy discussion from Conkin. Poor countries can’t afford to implement the energy policies that would slow climate change, and rich countries (most notably the U.S.) simply won’t endure the required sacrifices in consumption. Conkin shies away from any head-on social justice analysis, but his sympathies, and exasperation, peek out occasionally: “If the industrialized countries, with all their wealth, and their leeway for reducing greenhouse emissions, should insist that underdeveloped countries accept the same restrictions on increased use, then it would seem to be in a position of dooming their people to perpetual poverty. No one has an answer to this problem, although as a substitute for an answer everyone talks, in vague and ambiguous platitudes, about possibilities for ‘sustained development.’ ”
Conkin rewards himself and the reader for working through all the technical nitty-gritty with a final section on environmental philosophy, including a lively overview of what he calls “passionate environmentalism.” Conkin’s writing is at its best when he’s wrestling with the ideas that engage a culture, and he gives wonderfully lucid portraits of the major strains of activist thinking, such as the Gaia hypothesis, deep ecology, ecofeminism and bioregionalism. He seems to have fun putting aside the climate tables to join the debate on whether a cockroach has a right to live.
The State of the Earth provides no facile answers to the environmental mess that confronts us, but Conkin is no doomsayer, either. The book is likely to frustrate readers who don’t bring the same calm perspective to the issue that Conkin does, but that is precisely its virtue. It’s a rich text for those who want to ask the hard questions—and those who feel it might be useful to bother with the facts.