Publications / Book Reviews
What’s Luck Got to Do with It?
In Success and Luck, Robert Frank underscores the role of “dumb luck” in determining winners and losers, debunking the cherished myth of meritocracy. But how can we get the fortunate to share the spoils?
Wiki Socialism?
In Postcaplitalism, Paul Mason argues that new information technology will end capitalism as we know it and pave the way to a better future. But the technology Mason celebrates won’t do this without mass mobilization on a global scale.
Towards a Sustainable University
Countless universities are exploring ways of incorporating sustainability into their curriculum, research, and practice. The Arizona State University experiment described in Designing the New American University has been at the cutting edge. But does it go far enough?
A Recipe for Change?
Michael Pollan’s new book shows how cooking can contribute to personal and social transformation. But lifestyle changes are not enough to address the systemic crises we face.
Fueling Value Change
In Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, Ian Morris argues that changes in energy capture have driven changes in human values. However, understanding this relationship as co-evolutionary, rather than merely linear, is key as we shape values and energy systems for a sustainable twenty-first century.
Bleak Visions, Blind Spots
In A Rough Ride to the Future, contrarian Gaia theorist James Lovelock counsels abandoning all hope of preventing global environmental change, and adapting to it instead. But by assuming the fixity of human behavior and institutions, he resigns humanity to a passive present and a grim future.
Decolonizing the Empire of Cotton
Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton offers a magisterial history of cotton’s role in the development of modern capitalism. However, it is a partial story: the bright light it shines on the “empire” and its masters occludes the array of social forces and actors working to tame or dismantle the emergent system.
A Tragic Scenario, Narrowly Cast
In The Collapse of Western Civilization, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway depict a dystopian future resulting from climate inaction. But the constricted dramatis personae in their scenario stacks the deck against the social agents that could emerge to alter the narrative.
Mass Extinction: Is the Enemy Us?
In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert powerfully documents a planetary tragedy. But the book is heedless of social roots of and solutions for the crisis, indicting, instead, essential flaws in human nature and offering only fatalistic despair.
Two Cheers for Piketty
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty provides a sweeping explanation of inequality, but his proposed remedies offer reform, rather than the fundamental change essential to guiding the global economy toward a just and sustainable future.
Keeping the Lid on Pandora’s Box
The widely-aired documentary Pandora’s Promise offers a glowing endorsement of nuclear power as the solution for our climate woes. However, it is too quick to dismiss concerns about reactor safety, waste management, and weapons proliferation—let alone cost.
Searching for Radicalism in a Corporate Age
Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaron’s new book Protest Inc. analyzes the headwinds driving against the rise of radical activism. Although it offers a much-needed critique of the weakening of NGO resolve to challenge the system, it provides little guidance on how to bring such change about.
What Would Jane Jacobs Say?
Vishaan Chakrabarti’s recent book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America makes a compelling case that future prosperity lies in cities. But his vision of the built environment, this review argues, leaves out an essential element: the people who inhabit it.
Response to ‘Creating the Future We Want’
The recent book Creating the Future We Want presents a policy approach for addressing a range of sustainability challenges. However, the optimistic perspective of the authors is not always backed up with sufficient evidence, and the authors ignore alternative perspectives on sustainability, particularly those that highlight the fundamental limitations of growth as a tool for a sustainability transition.
Originally published in Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy 8, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 1-3.
Review of ‘Sustainability or Collapse?’
Sustainability or Collapse? is the report of the 2005 Dahlem Workshop, which launched the multi-year project IHOPE (Integrated History and Future of People on Earth). A thorough appreciation of the inherent limits of contemporary models and methodological strategies would require greater attention to such critical issues as the policy implications of deep scientific unpredictability; critical thresholds and uncertainties in the global transition; and the roles of human values, culture, agency, and political mobilization. Nevertheless, by formulating bold, on-point questions, even if grand answers may prove elusive, this book stands as a significant way station on the long journey to an adequate science and practice of global change.
Originally published in Ecological Economics 68 (2009): 1900-1901.