GENERATION REGENERATION, one-stop shop for practical usable solutions to ugly problems

GENERATION REGENERATION
TONY CHO
Greenleaf Book Group Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In an era where concrete dominates and nature feels distant, regenerative placemaking is a movement transforming our cities and rekindling our connection to what truly matters. Generation Regeneration shows us how to rebuild balance between people, communities, and the planet.

Drawing from decades of lived experience, impact entrepreneur and visionary real estate developer Tony Cho introduces you to regenerative placemaking—a transformative approach that moves beyond sustainability toward systems that actively heal, uplift, and regenerate. Through this lens, cities become living ecosystems where community, nature, and culture work in harmony to create abundance for all.

This book equips policymakers, developers, cultural builders, and everyday citizens with the tools to reimagine urban life. You'll explore the three pillars of regenerative placemaking and learn how they can cultivate economic vitality, deepen human connection, and foster environments that nourish both people and the planet. Through real stories from pioneers on the front lines, you will discover that a regenerative future isn’t just possible—it’s already emerging.

Generation Regeneration is an invitation to become a co-creator of thriving, life-affirming cities for generations to come. Join the movement to help shape a world where humanity and nature flourish together.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A developer writes a book about how development, the process of turning our planet's surface into living spaces and zones of economic productivity, into less ecologically and emotionally harmful, wasteful, unpleasant places to be.

I would never have believed you had you told me this would occur in my lifetime. Here it is.

Greens will snort derisively about human greed and outrageous destructiveness. Boosters will blow cigarette smoke at you as they dismiss everything in it as pie-in-the-sky too expensive and who cares anyway. And neither entrenched camp will have read a word.

Bunkered and siloed in our Rightness we can let compromise solutions like these slide through our fingers to fall into the landfill/sewerage outflow pipe. We need solutions, imperfect ones are all we're ever going to have, so think with me about whose mind we can still reach to get these ideas, these goals in front of. Parks department people. High school students and their science teachers. Recent graduates. At ten bucks a pop, you can likely afford a well-thought-out gift to one of these folks; you have their email addy and an ebook can be sent to them blind or to a young person with a phone app.

You and I, doing our whatever we can, will not ever know whose mind we changed that one little bit to get them to do one small thing. Maybe not even something related to this book's topic; but something. And activists who think of development and developers as hopeless causes (as I used to do) can get lots of really valuable ideas for how to approach them with real, viable thoughts on development instead of destruction.

A book that is easy to read and also cracks the nonsense barrier with commonsensical ideas is a great investment. I encourage all y'all to make it.

THE CUT LINE, survival...contingent contentment...solitude

THE CUT LINE
CAROLINA PIHELGAS (tr. Darcy Hurford)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Reckoning with the toxicity of Love is the most difficult emotional task I know of; it is the central concern of this story. In Liine's life there is no softness in the emotional gifts anyone around her grudgingly and contingently grants to her. She finally accepts her partner will never be a validating, accepting, kind force supporting her own betterment. Running away at last, she lands at a family property far from the city, where there is nothing much in the way of modern conveniences. She's also hounded...well...tracked down anyway by her family who think she should accept that her violent, withholding ex is as good as she'll ever get for a man to be with.

Been there, Liine.

Her stubborn resistance to submit to family or ex is rooted in her desire to survive, maybe begin to thrive. But there's a catch (of course there is): her rural haven is under severe stress from climate change; and it's very close to a NATO base provocatively situated close to Estonia's border with Russia, their former colonial power. Liine might have leapt out of the frying pan but it looks like the fire is fast approaching.

Her willingness to work hard is barely keeping her even with the environmental changes; her emotional healing work is under siege from the perfidious ex's smear campaign in their friend circle (after a breakup, Liine, walk away and let those who care follow you; those who don't are not your friends), and her family's pressure to go back; the NATO base is constantly "testing" ie exploding weapons in a cacophonous assault on nature. An environment that does not support her much-needed self-repair work. So what else is new.

It sounds very challenging, right? It really is; it really demands we invest in Liine to overcome her manifold obstacles to becoming herself, for herself, not answering to anyone else. If she can stay the course...if she can pull the heroic feat of self-reinvention off....

In under 150pp, you're not getting a full redemption arc. It's more a book about vibes, about being in the moment with the character. I was rooting for her to live each day, since she tells us directly that "at night I die several times" to make sure we get how intense the labor she does really is.

It comes from deep within, an anger I've never dared to feel before. It's a wild feeling of injustice that I've been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn't deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won't fight back. Why didn't I fight back? Why did I put up with it all? I'm mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment. That's another thing that's been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn't you leave sooner? Stop.

That's a distillation of the work of recovery from abuse that can't be bettered.

What you're getting in this plunge-pool of a story is the dive not the swim. The ending isn't A Resolution; it's Liine committing herself to resolving the problems she came to sort out, to coping with the problems she has limited control over (nature, NATO), and being her own, real, honest self.

It is a gratifying story to read to me in this moment I'm making changes in my own life. It is not all tied up with a bow. That won't be to everyone's taste, some facets (eg going to her sister for...what? nothing happens) were not to mine. No perfect score from me; but a deep, enfolding read about a tough woman finding the strong core she needs to stand on while facing down the world.

And she does it for herself.

THE NEW GLOBAL POSSIBLE: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis, factual combat with soul-sucking sadness

THE NEW GLOBAL POSSIBLE: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis
ANI DASGUPTA
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Global environmental leader Ani Dasgupta takes an honest look at lagging climate action and maps out what can be done to rebuild hope for the future.

In 2015, world leaders came together in Paris and signed an agreement to save the planet. Ten years later, we have made little progress on the ground, and the climate crisis is worse than ever. We’ve mostly figured out what we need to do, but not how to get it done—and time is running out.

In this groundbreaking new book, World Resources Institute President and CEO Ani Dasgupta explores how to orchestrate change at speed and scale. How do we get countries to keep working together on climate action when multilateralism is declining? How do we harness technological innovation to protect nature, rather than destroy it? How do we dismantle entrenched power structures and rapidly transition to a clean, resilient economy?

Based on conversations with more than one hundred leaders around the world, The New Global Possible weaves together stories of unusual partnerships, collaborative leadership, and lessons learned from failure. Mining the rich history of the climate movement, Dasgupta defines the narrow path to a hopeful future—one requiring all of our collective focus and determination—and offers a radical new practice for orchestrating change for good.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm always ready to agree with the old saw, "Cheer up! Darker days are coming," because in my own lifetime I've lost large numbers of people to plagues that could've and should've been stopped sooner than they were; seen my country pull the flush chain on decency and inclusion; and sweated through summers like the ones I knew in 1960s Texas...despite living in 2025 New York.

This is to let you know that I'm not the easiest to jolly-up among the audience. I respond to "it'll all work out fine" with a snarky rendition of "yeah, yeah, pull the other one" if I'm feeling polite. So I am what comedians call a tough room for optimism that isn't firmly grounded in facts and analytically robust everywhere I, with my knowledge independently gained, can push on it. Author Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, passes my pressure test. (The link is to their website, for your reference; it will verify you're a human, not a malware-spreading, dDOS-havocin' bot, so be patient a few seconds.)

Starting our tour of optimism in the wake of the 2004 tsunami...in flattened Banda Aceh, no less...seemed counterintuitive to me at first. Oh gawd, I thought, another every problem an opportunity sermon. While that is a surface truth of the book, it is not close to its affect, or its intent. One of the many weapons in the catastrophist's mental arsenal is, "well it's always been this way, what can you do?" 1) No. It has not "always been this way." b) You can do something...if you look, you can do a small thing like start buying rechargeable batteries for your electronics. "It costs too much! Those create pollution and damage too!" Yep. Initial purchases are more; but, like compact fluorescent lightbulbs in place of incandescents, you buy them once for every ten or fifteen purchases of the old ones; and stopping pollution/environmental damage also includes reducing your use of the trash to dispose of the old-style items. All of this kind of "yes, but" obstructive arguing is what Author Dasgupta is supremely adept at defusing and redirecting. (I can't read by LED lights so don't use them; but they're coming like it or not, and I don't, so I'm as much a problem as the louder naysayers. I have spare compact fluorescents....)

Which segues into, the more of these things you buy, the less capitalism charges for them. And here is where we discuss capitalism. The author's job in Banda Aceh was to administer the World Bank's huge pot of money meant to restore...even upgrade in the process...the tsunami's giant destruction of the area's infrastructure. Using regional governmental coordinating bodies, microcredit lending (think of the hugely successful Kiva.org system) to the affected, and capitalism's value-generating dynamo in balance, the author succeeded in doing what FEMA was prevented from doing post-Katrina.

The US has a terrible case of libertarianism, and refuses to learn that it is not an absolute theory of governmental everything, because there are no functional theories of everything. Ask a physicist. Nothing truer has ever been said than "perfectionism is the end of action." Requiring a solution to be perfect is the fastest way to perpetuating the status quo. (You've never wondered why leftists fail so very often in the US? Look at how their policies are picked apart, scrutinized, and flaws, faults, and problems get shouted about. Funny how much more muted the criticism of capitalism, authoritarianism, religion, and other regressive evils are, isn't it.)

The truth is there are people out there doing loads of practical good across multiple axes of needed change and succeeding at it. Want a dose of climate change real-life success? Follow Simon Clark on YouTube. Want to know what's worked, in reality, on the ground, in the world of positive change? Read this book. Climate Week 2025 is the 21st through the 28th of Sepember. Join the conversation in an informed, energized way.

Jane Goodall's blurb really sums it up best: “A compelling and hopeful reminder that change is not only within our grasp—it is already happening.”

CITIZEN JUSTICE: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion

CITIZEN JUSTICE: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion
Hon. M. MARGARET McKEOWN
Potomac Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment.

Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiritual mantra embraced nature as a place of solitude, sanctuary, and refuge. Caught in the giant expansion of America’s urban and transportation infrastructure after World War II, Douglas became a powerful leader in forging the ambitious goals of today’s environmental movement. And, in doing so, Douglas became a true citizen justice.

In a way unthinkable today, Douglas ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing him admiration from allies in conservation groups but raising ethical issues with his colleagues. He became a national figure through his books, articles, and speeches warning against environmental dangers. Douglas organized protest hikes to leverage his position as a national icon, he lobbied politicians and policymakers privately about everything from logging to highway construction and pollution, and he protested at the Supreme Court through his voluminous and passionate dissents.

Douglas made a lasting contribution to both the physical environment and environmental law—with trees still standing, dams unbuilt, and beaches protected as a result of his work. His merged roles as citizen advocate and justice also put him squarely in the center of ethical dilemmas that he never fully resolved. Citizen Justice elucidates the why and how of these tensions and their contemporary lessons against the backdrop of Douglas’s unparalleled commitment to the environment.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book about a Supreme Court Justice, by a Federal judge. Oh dear, says your inner voice, all lawyers talk too much about dull stuff.

Nay nay nay, say I to the nay-sayer, this book is a pleasure to read. The author's prose is limpidly clear, and the way you know there's a legal mind at work is how *organized* the presentation of the book is. The author clearly admires Mr. Justice Douglas but doesn't shy away from pointing up his lapses of ethics...or morals, though she doesn't phrase it just so.

The man in his element...schmoozing the most powerful person on the planet
The life of a flawed, passionate man is always going to be good reading. The passions of his life were, like his personality, very large. He was not a man to everyone's taste. He was a crappy husband to four wives, each one younger than the last relative to his age. He was a passionate scribbler of books. I don't say "author" here because he appaarently had little interest in the craft and graft of revising and editing his extensive bibliography, which doesn't include his numerous Supreme Court opinions. The books themselves are largely out of the public awareness now, almost forty-five years after his death and fifty since he retired from the Supreme Court.

That's rather a pity because, despite his actions on behalf of the environment, as additional fodder for existing political animus directed at him, resulting in a 1970 attempt to impeach him (which to be honest had a great deal of validity, just not the kind that Nixon used against him). A love for the outdoors, and a famous habit of hiking through places he wanted saved from development and protected for the future, made him a media darling:

Always out for a chace to show people what they were...and are...missing by not getting themselves out into Nature.

Famously hiking the B&O Canal near Washington DC
It was a life fully lived, tainted by scandals he invited with his (mis)behaviors, marked by an uncompromising liberalism of political and social views, and spent in service of protecting the rights of powerless entities to the benefit of us all.

A fine leagcy, one I am sure he was pleased by...though I hope he developed enough as a person to realize there were things he did that it was not correct to be proud of. I prefer to think this of the man who dedicated huge resources protecting and preserving the world around us all.

We could use his like on our twenty-first century Supreme Court.

BROWN PELICAN, strongly Louisiana-centered story of saving...and protecting...an iconic bird

BROWN PELICAN
RIEN FERTEL
LSU Press/Louisiana True series
$21.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compelling book, Rien Fertel tells the story of humanity’s complicated and often brutal relationship with the brown pelican over the past century. This beloved bird with the mythically bottomless belly—to say nothing of its prodigious pouch—has been deemed a living fossil and the most dinosaur-like of creatures. The pelican adorns the Louisiana state flag, serves as a religious icon of sacrifice, and stars in the famous parting shot of Jurassic Park, but, most significantly, spotlights our tenuous connection with the environment in which it flies, feeds, and roosts—the coastal United States.

In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the first national wildlife refuge at Pelican Island, Florida, in order to rescue the brown pelican, among other species, from the plume trade. Despite such protections, the ubiquity of synthetic “agents of death,” most notably DDT, in the mid-twentieth century sent the brown pelican to the list of endangered species. By the mid-1960s, not one viable pelican nest remained in all of Louisiana. Authorities declared the state bird locally extinct.

Conservation efforts—including an outlandish but well-planned birdnapping—saved the brown pelican, generating one of the great success stories in animal preservation. However, the brown pelican is once again under threat, particularly along Louisiana’s coast, due to land loss and rising seas. For centuries, artists and writers have portrayed the pelican as a bird that pierces its breast to feed its young, symbolizing saintly piety. Today, the brown pelican gives itself in other ways, sacrificed both by and for the environment as a bellwether bird—an indicator species portending potential disasters that await.

Brown Pelican combines history and first-person narrative to complicate, deconstruct, and reassemble our vision of the bird, the natural world, and ourselves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I can't think of too many things that more clearly say "Louisiana" to me than the sight of pelicans coming back to their nests from a long day's fishing over the Gulf of Mexico. The unbelieveably narrow brush these big, beautiful bird had with complete, species-level extinction...actually going locally extinct during the rampant mosquito-killing applications of dDT back in the 1960s. That being when I was first aware of the environment of the Gulf Coast and its multivarious bird species, I felt very invested in reading that part especially. (My part of the coast, in South Texas, had more roseate spoonbills over pelicans but they did show up.)

The natural world of Louisiana and of the Gulf Coast more broadly is cramjam full of fascinating creatures very much still threatened by the ongoing actvities of mankind, and the legacy of the petrochemical industry. Climate change won't do that finely balanced system a particle of good, either.

No, this is NOT me. I'm not that old.

While it is an academic book, a good story is a good story! How this species, a bellweather for the overall environmental health of its native region, was and is being protected is worth reading. This book's a great one for your birder friend, your environmentalist grandchild, your Louisiana-loving nephew who's discovered there's more to the place than the French Quarter...also anyone who just loves that there are still these beauties in the world:

I myownself think this is the face your giftee will make when this book comes out of the wrapping paper:

I know it is what my face did as I read about the past and present efforts to protect these marvelous dinosaurs.

KARIBA, filmmaker duo creates beautiful middle-grade fable of the Zambezi River's fight for life

KARIBA
DANIEL CLARKE & JAMES CLARKE (illus. Daniel Snaddon)
Catalyst Press
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The daughter of a river god, raised by a human father and bound to a tragic destiny. An African fantasy-adventure graphic novel inspired by the mythology of the Zambezi River and the history of the Kariba Dam, one of the largest dams ever constructed.
From the director of Aau’s Song, a Star Wars: Visions film from Lucasfilm, and the director of the 2023 NYICFF award-winning The Smeds and the Smoos

Siku has always called the Zambezi River her home. She understands the water—and strangely enough, it seems to understand her, too, bending to her will and coming to her aid in times of need. But things are changing on the river—a great dam is being built, displacing thousands of Shonga people—and things are changing in Siku, too, as her ability to manipulate water grows out of control, and visions of a great serpent pull her further from reality and her loving father, Tongai.

When Tongai ventures to the Kariba Dam to find a cure for Siku and never returns, she sets off to find him with the help of Amedeo, the young son of Kariba’s chief engineer. Together, they traverse elephant graveyards, rugged jungles, and ancient ruins, outrunning pirates, bootleggers, and shape-shifting prophets ready to use Siku to their own advantage. But Siku soon discovers that her father has been shielding a terrible secret: Siku is actually the daughter of the Great River Spirit, Nyaminyami, and the only way to bring about the necessary rumuko—a ritual which has brought balance to the Zambezi for centuries—is for Siku to give up the only life she's ever known.

With the future of the Shonga resting on her shoulders, Siku must journey to the source of the river to understand the ancient power hidden within her.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: An African setting for an environmental fable of the costs incurred through thoughtless action is something I think any tween reader will resonate with...especially those whose faces are shamefully uncommon to see in US bookshops:

The gorgeousness of the artwork is hard to overstate:

...the message is one I hope anyone I know will support delivering to kids of all ages, and it is hard to conjure a better way to get the message of mindfulness and balance when dealing with the environment across. The fact that young Siku has to gear herself up to fight the forces of the adult world that have no sense of the sacred nature of the river they choose to exploit is a wonderful message as well.

Showing the young generation that has to clean up what my generation made filthy that they *can* fight the powers that be is a terrific use of the Yule gifting season. What better book to give for #Booksgiving, the time when sitting quietly and enjoying a story is the point of the holiday?

DAMNATION SPRING, true-life tale of the cost of living in a cheap, disposable world

DAMNATION SPRING
ASH DAVIDSON
Scribner
$28.00 hardcover, available now

PAPERBACK AVAILABLE NOW! Only $17.99.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 32ND ANNUAL READING THE WEST BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION! Follow the link to vote for it.

Rating: 3* of five

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

The Publisher Says:A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"Ask any of these guys. You won’t find a guy that loves the woods more than a logger. You scratch a logger, you better believe you’ll find an ‘enviro-mentalist’ underneath. But the difference between us and these people is we live here. We hunt. We fish. We camp out. They’ll go back where they came from, but we’ll wake up right here tomorrow. This is home. Timber puts food on our tables, clothes on our kids’ backs. You know, a redwood tree is a hard thing to kill. You cut it down, it sends up a shoot. Even fire doesn’t kill it. Those big pumpkins up in the grove, they’re old. Ready to keel over and rot. You might as well set a pile of money on fire and make us watch."
–and–
“The real timber’s gone,” Lark said. “What’s left, ten percent, including the parks? Two thousand years to grow a forest, a hundred years to fall it. No plague like man.”

There isn't a lot to argue with in this novel. The positions are made clear as glass, the townsfolk of the story are innocent of any wrongdoing except not wanting change and the corporate interests are extracting value from the land, the timber, and the people with no slightest regard for the costs.

This ain't rocket science. You know whose side you're on from the jump.

What price innocence...the townies aren't idiots, it's clear that their corporate masters pay them pittances to do dangerous jobs. They love those jobs, they love the life it affords them. So why the hell should they bitch if someone else lives fancier than they do? Ain't like they'd want to live like those folks do, even if they had all the money those folks have. So keep the trees fallin' and the pennies rollin' in.

The personal costs? Well, omelets ain't ever come out of whole eggs, have they. That's the way life is. Except...when you step in front of a woman who wants kids, you'd better be *well*armored*indeed*. Colleen wants babies. She's miscarried eight times! Her sister's had healthy ones, and with a man you'd have to be kind to describe as "grossly unfit." It clearly ain't her body....

And here's my problem: The pace of the novel is, to put it politely, magisterial. The language is limpidly clear, if a bit less than inspiringly lyrical. But the gender politics are awful. The conflict between husband and wife over her screaming NEED to mother a brood, her apostasy to community values (and with a man she has a history with! that gets what feels to me like a pretty insignificant amount of play) because her uterus hasn't popped out healthy babies, squicked me out. I hate it when women in stories play the Mother Card and get away with amazingly nasty shit (see my outraged shout about Gone Girl), unlike Colleen. But basically I don't care about Motherhood. It isn't necessary for you to reproduce yourselves, straight people, the planet's already working itself into a fever to get rid of us. So using it, as Author Davidson does here, as a reason for Colleen to do something that (objectively) is good but will end the way of life these people want to live, shouldn't be framed as "she did it for her babies to be born."

Listen, I don't think what mega-corporations do to the world is laudable, and they do it for the vilest, most selfish reasons. I'm right there with you on the "make it stop" front. But don't play "Sacred Motherhood" on your cards or you'll lose any serious argument for them to be held accountable. NOT being a mother is the responsible choice for all women. The only people who are carryin' on about having more babies are the white supremacists, and we need a lot fewer of them stat.

On balance, three stars was what I could muster, and I felt pretty questionable about that last half-star. The book's set in 1977. We already knew the cost of overpopulation then. The "Zero Population Growth" movement was organized in 1968. It's still a damned good idea. But Sacred Motherhood is used as a primary motivator to positive action in this story, and that sits wrong with me.

The ending wasn't particularly satisfying, after all we've been through; but there not being anything dramatically wrong with the structure or the writing (apart from there being too much of it) I couldn't bring myself to downgrade it. But it wasn't an easy decision. Three...that is, on Amazon's debased scale, a bad rating. I think it's a perfectly fine rating, a perfectly fine read got a perfectly fine rating, and I didn't beat it up beyond its just deserts. That will have to do.

2020...GAWD it stank! Here are some reads to remind us what's at stake in 2021

MILL TOWN: Reckoning with What Remains
KERRI ARSENAULT
St. Martin's Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: The Full Five

The Publisher Says: A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.”

Mill Town is an personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

A FINALIST!! The National Book Critics' Circle's annual John Leonard Prize for a first book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for my DRC.

My Review: The 2020 book I couldn't review because I always end up screaming at my computer and kicking my laundry bag...it is that good, that real, that intense and necessary a read. Using her own hometown, and her entire youth there, as a lens to expose and excoriate corporate chicanery, Author Arsenault is taking no prisoners. Like her predecessors in exposé-dom Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), she dug deep, interviewed widely, and concluded with a shout of outrage you really owe it to yourself to experience.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

REFINERY TOWN: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
STEVE EARLY
Beacon Press
$27.95 hardcover, $14.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The People vs. Big Oil--how a working-class company town harnessed the power of local politics to reclaim their community

With a foreword by Bernie Sanders

Home to one of the largest oil refineries in the state, Richmond, California, was once a typical company town, dominated by Chevron. This largely nonwhite, working-class city of 100,000 suffered from poverty, pollution, and poorly funded public services. It had one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country and a jobless rate twice the national average.

But when veteran labor reporter Steve Early moved from New England to Richmond in 2012, he discovered a city struggling to remake itself. In Refinery Town, Early chronicles the 15 years of successful community organizing that raised the local minimum wage, defeated a casino development project, challenged home foreclosures and evictions, and sought fair taxation of Big Oil.

A short list of Richmond's activist residents helps to propel this compelling chronicle:

- 94 year old Betty Reid Soskin, the country's oldest full-time national park ranger and witness to Richmond's complex history
- Gayle McLaughlin, the Green Party mayor who challenged Chevron and won
- Police Chief Chris Magnus, who brought community policing to Richmond and is now one of America's leading public safety reformers

Part urban history, part call to action, Refinery Town shows how concerned citizens can harness the power of local politics to reclaim their community and make municipal government a source of much-needed policy innovation.

Many thanks to Edelweiss+ and Beacon Press for my DRC.

My Review: There is nothing worse than a corporate lobbyist seeking the blinding of oversight for their industry: Congressional intervention alone saved the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board in 2017, whose paltry $11 million budget stands in stark contrast to the $530 billion industry they're charged with regulating. Author Early, in his extremely tendentious résumé of the many battles fought by the Richmond (CA) Progressive Alliance, some won and others lost but all in service of the humans of the city, kept me gasping in outraged sympathy. I definitely encourage Bernie supporters, environmentalists, and progressives to make the considerable effort to read this case study of a movement.

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COMING OF AGE AT THE END OF NATURE: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet
JULIE DUNLAP & SUSAN A. COHEN
Trinity University Press
$18.95 paperback, $14.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Coming of Age at the End of Nature explores a new kind of environmental writing. This powerful anthology gathers the passionate voices of young writers who have grown up in an environmentally damaged and compromised world. Each contributor has come of age since Bill McKibben foretold the doom of humanity’s ancient relationship with a pristine earth in his prescient 1988 warning of climate change, The End of Nature.

What happens to individuals and societies when their most fundamental cultural, historical, and ecological bonds weaken—or snap? In Coming of Age at the End of Nature, insightful millennials express their anger and love, dreams and fears, and sources of resilience for living and thriving on our shifting planet.

Twenty-two essays explore wide-ranging themes that are paramount to young generations but that resonate with everyone, including redefining materialism and environmental justice, assessing the risk and promise of technology, and celebrating place anywhere from a wild Atlantic island to the Arizona desert, to Baltimore and Bangkok. The contributors speak with authority on problems facing us all, whether railing against the errors of past generations, reveling in their own adaptability, or insisting on a collective responsibility to do better.

Many thanks to Edelweiss+ and Trinity University Press for my DRC.

My Review: A wildly variable collection of young peoples' responses to the horrific crisis my generation refused to mitigate or ameliorate in any way, shape, or form. I enjoyed a few essays that explored personal connections...a young parent pondering the ethics of childbirth at this historical point, a National Park docent contrasting the biome she guides people through with last century's paean essays to its lost glory...empathized with all, and ended up wanting to pen an apologia not a review. If the gutting of oversight and enforcement of regulations and standards on industry, and the all-but-abolishment of Federal land stewardship, causes you pain, read these essays to become galvanized and energized with purpose to fight our planet's hastened end.

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HOW TO CHANGE A LAW: Improve Your Community, Influence Your Country, Impact the World
JOHN THIBAULT
iLobby (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Many thanks to NetGalley and iLobby for my DRC.

I began this book wondering what the heck I could do to impact the legislative process; I ended it eager to apply the seven steps to self-empowerment in the political process. The most mind-blowingly direct, unfussy, and above all practical guide to speaking the language of successful influencers I can imagine. If the 2021 administration change has heartened you to imagine your voice can and should be heard, spend the extremely modest investment in this book and prepare wield your citizen's power effectively.

THE MOST PERFECT THING, how life begins in fragile containers

THE MOST PERFECT THING
TIM BIRKHEAD
Bloomsbury USA (non-affiliate Amazon link
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Renowned ornithologist Tim Birkhead opens this gripping story as a female guillemot chick hatches, already carrying her full quota of tiny eggs within her undeveloped ovary. As she grows into adulthood, only a few of her eggs mature, are released into the oviduct, and are fertilized by sperm stored from copulation that took place days or weeks earlier. Within a matter of hours, the fragile yolk is surrounded by albumen and the whole is gradually encased within a turquoise jewel of a shell. Soon afterward the fully formed egg is expelled onto a bare rocky ledge, where it will be incubated for four weeks before another chick emerges and the life cycle begins again.

The Most Perfect Thing is about how eggs in general are made, fertilized, developed, and hatched. The eggs of most birds spend just 24 hours in the oviduct; however, that journey takes 48 hours in cuckoos, which surreptitiously lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. From the earliest times, the study of birds' ovaries and ova (eggs) played a vital role in the quest to unravel the mysteries of fertilization and embryo development in humans. Birkhead uses birds' eggs as wondrous portals into natural history, enlivened by the stories of naturalists and scientists, including Birkhead and his students, whose discoveries have advanced current scientific knowledge of reproduction.

My Review: I thought "guillemot" was a Dr. Seuss name before I read this book. Author Birkhead disabused me of this with his praises sung for the aesthetics of their shells:
I mean pretty enough, but this guy's obsessed....

And eggs are perfect in so many different ways. They have to be, for birds lay and incubate in such incredible diversity of habitats and situations, from the poles to the tropics; in wet, dry, clean and microbe-infested conditions; in nests and without nests; warmed by body heat and without body heat. The shape, colour and size of eggs as well as the composition of their yolk and albumen all constitute the most extraordinary set of adaptations. The fact that birds' eggs also provided biologists with their first insights into human reproduction makes their story even more momentous.

He is not overselling the burden of his refrain. This is a fascinating look at what these dinosaur revenants do in the reproductive world (I got a new insult out of the read: I told one person I detest that she was an altricial birth to a precocial species) and what that has revealed to scientists in applicability to all others.

People's love of the beauty of eggs has led to some dark consequences. Egg collectors hunted their favorites to actual or functional extinction, inspiring the UK to pass pretty draconian laws against private ownership of the things...in 1954! Even *I* wasn't born then, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was still a love-offering in progress!

What you need to know most is: was it fun to read? I'll say yes, because I really like science and am not afraid of the dictionary. If you're not a science nut, maybe it won't delight you; maybe you'll have to look stuff up; and maybe that won't agree with you.

It agreed with me.

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST, a welcome positive message in a world of depressing facts

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST: Progressing Towards a Greener Future
DAVID R. BOYD
ECW Press
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.

The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.

Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME THIS ARC. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nine years on, this book hits different. We've just been through a truly horrifying US election, won by the lowest scum ever to win the world's most powerful political office; we can expect bad trouble to follow, on many fronts, soon.

That is going to require clear thinking and focused action. In its turn, that will require us to know where we are. The author presents his facts and draws very positive conclusions based on them.

No one can protect something they do not know the value, and the extent of. Learn! Don't despair...learn, and grown hardened to the messages of nihilism and misery and *shudder* change.

Protect our planet or we all go down together.

THE LOOTING MACHINE, outrage upon indignity after robbery

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THE LOOTING MACHINE: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
TOM BURGIS
PublicAffairs Books
$2.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.

In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.

This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth $333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force. What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.

My Review: The statistics are appalling: Two percent of the entire planet's gross domestic product, 13 percent of its population; a whopping 80 percent of the planet's platinum ore; 15 percent of its petroleum reserves...and 69% of the planet's people living in extreme poverty.

It's enough to make a decent human being into a raving lunatic-level, bomb-throwing, anti-capitalist revolutionary.

The scale of this appalling criminal enterprise beggars the imagination. There is no conceivable metaphor for the sheer scope of it. The number of companies and countries involved is shocking, but not remotely the most revolting datum; the volume of money is stunning, but not outside human comprehension; what makes every other data point irrelevant, unimportant, is the fact that a mere handful of human beings—fewer than two thousand—control this machine.

Think about that.

We allow it. We know it's going on. We allow a small town's population of kakistocrats, kleptocrats, scumbagarchs to perpetrate this immense crime every single day without any significant impediment being put in their way. How can that be allowed? What happened to the merest whiff of that antique virtue, morality?

Nigeria, on paper one of the best candidates for wealth in Africa, is mired in poverty and factionalism that drew the author to two inescapable conclusions: he was part of a system that cared nothing for the people it used to perpetuate its privileges, and he was alive in large part at the expense of some of those people whose fate he witnessed firsthand:

I arrived in a village on the outskirts [of a Nigerian city] not long after a mod had set fire to houses and their occupants, among them children and a baby. I took pictures, counted bodies, and filed my story. After a few days trying to understand the causes of the slaughter, I set off for the next assignment. Over the months that followed, when the images of the corpses flashed before my mind's eye, I would instinctively force them out, unable to look at them. ... I felt that I ought to suffer as those who died had—if not in the same way, then somehow to the same degree. The fact that I was alive became an unpayable debt to the dead.

PTSD in textbook case form. Survivor's guilt is damned near unbearable. How come I'm here and that one isn't? How can I keep going when bearing witness is the only power I possess?

Journalism to the rescue, in a way. Reporting the facts is one thing an observer can do that does, in fact, have force and effect in the world. Nigeria's problems, like any and every country's, have many facets and roots and reasons. The heinous kleptocratic regimes aiding and abetting the amoral-by-design corporate exploiters. The exploiters hiding their vileness (not least from themselves) behind the soulless, bodiless legal fiction of corporations with legal responsibility solely and entirely to their shareholders:

What has happened to Nigeria is not the result of some innate facet of the African spirit, as some observers suggest with a shrug of casual racism. British members of Parliament have shown themselves willing to sell their right to ask parliamentary questions, and the pork-barrel politics of Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, looks very much like a patronage system. Lobbyists in every major capital inject money into politics on behalf of vested interests. The difference between a corrupted resource state and a state that can still call itself a place of representative rule is the extent to which such subversion of public office for personal benefit is the scandal or the norm. It is the degree to which the institutions of state -- legislative bodies, the police, the courts -- serve as instruments of the mighty or as checks on arbitrary power.

This isn't an accident. It's a careful design. Think about it: How else can a person, a living one with a heartbeat, live with the inevitable consequences of a resource-extraction economy on the extractees' lives? Distance is the only option. The fiduciary responsibility of corporate officers is solely to the shareholders. By law. Not the environment, not the community, not the stakeholders like employees or citizens of a foreign country. The shareholders' profits are legally ALL that can be considered. Makes sleeping at night a lot easier: "I was just following orders," say multinational Eichmanns in their SS uniforms tailored in Savile Row and Bond Street and Hong Kong, sold at Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus.

But then there's another group of criminals whose participation in the crimes is vital to making sure the spice keeps flowing (Dune reference, go look it up): The banksters. Oh my yes. The banksters are in it up to their pear-shaped hips. The author's a financial journalist by trade, he should know. And he explains in this concise example of the financing of a Ghanaian mine that cyanide-poisoned an entire town:

When the International Finance Corporation announced in 2005 that it was planning to invest in Newmont's development of the Ahafo mine, Newmont's market capitalization, the total value of all its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, stood at $17.5 billion, twice the size of Ghana's economy. Its quickly rising annual revenues were $4.5 billion, and it made $434 million in profits from operations on four continents that produced 9 percent of the gold mined worldwide. The Ahafo concession alone was sitting on gold worth $12 billion. The following year the IFC approved a loan for the Ahafo mine from its own account of $75 million and arranged a further $50 million from commercial banks, including Rothschild and Royal Bank of Scotland. The total package represented a modest 7 percent of Newmont's $1.9 billion total debt.

You don't need a finance degree or a business background to see that a minuscule fraction of debt owed by a profitable enterprise like 7 percent could easily be financed on the open credit market. The risk isn't enormous, when the underlying asset is valued at a sum like $12 billion. The IFC was founded to finance high-risk loans to corporations involved in socially desirable but economically risky activities. Mining $12 billion in gold from a tiny economy's land while poisoning its people doesn't meet a single one of those criteria.

The examples and analyses just keep coming. The book's cumulative effect is much like a dermabrasion treatment for your conscience. How could you not have known? How could anyone who did know not shout the iniquity, unfairness, abusiveness, from the rooftops? And how can you, wired netizen that you (and I) are, possibly disconnect from this system?

Can't. There's gold in each and every device you use at home, in your car, at work. Microscopic amounts, irreducible contributions to the iniquitous resource-extraction economy that stain our collective hands. How to deal with this particular "survivor guilt?"

Don't stuff your ears. Read about it. Talk about it to others because if you don't, who will? When the time comes to vote, look into the stances your candidates take on environmental issues. When the time comes to sign up for a retirement plan, sign up for or switch to a "green" one. Will it save the world? No. But that icon of charity, Mother Teresa, said:

KIDNAPPING THE LORAX, an environmental activist's dream-fulfilling tale

KIDNAPPING THE LORAX
PATRICIA LICHEN
non-affiliate Amazon link
$17.36 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: East Coast politics meet West Coast idealism when three young environmentalists kidnap the U.S. Secretary of the Interior-code-named The Lorax-and take her to the Pacific Northwest woods. Their goal is to re-educate her through tasks designed to open her eyes to the wonders of the forest, so that upon her return to Washington, DC she will be an advocate for the land. Detailed descriptions of Pacific Northwest flora and fauna.

My Review: US Secretary of the Interior Lacey Thurman is set to make a speech at a timber-industry gathering in the Benson Hotel. Plans are known to be afoot for a green group, Planet Now, to stink-bomb the conference in protest. Security is tight, a Federal official can't be left to the tender mercies of the protesters, right? Well...someone forgot that the conference has been on the Secretary's schedule for some time and therefore gave ill-wishers a chance to plant a mole in the hotel. Walden, Fern, and Tracker (not their real names) are impatient with the tomfoolery of stink-bombing a conference...what good will that do?...but they aren't above using the hijinks for their higher-risk, and they hope more effective, plan: Kidnap the Secretary and sensitize her to the plight of the forests the US Government manages for the benefit of the people...who contribute to political campaigns, THOSE people.

The plan succeeds. Sort of. The Secretary, called "The Lorax" throughout the book, is whisked in her pretty blue suit and her sensible heels to the middle of the forest, subjected to more exercise than any Federal official has ever been required to perform in modern history, and generally made cognizant of the wonders of the forest and its web of life. She and her female kidnapper, Maggie aka Fern, form a Stockholm-Syndrome-style bond. Maggie even loses a finger in her quest to re-educate this Beltway-dwelling politico on the proper place of humankind on Earth.

What ending do you suspect is coming down the pike, based on those facts? Sentimental silliness about Gaia-the-mother, bone-crushing sadness about idealism gone wrong? Nuh-uh. Lichen makes the ending real, the stakes being so high. She takes the easy, expected route, and then she says...Reality and Art can't avoid each other forever. Here it is. Live with it.

I got this book from Ms. Lichen as a Goodreads First Read. I was expecting something less professionally edited, something with a more homemade feel. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of writing ability shown in the book, and was actually involved in the story for quite a bit of the way. I was completely irritated and annoyed that the men were characterized, to use the word loosely, in such a one-dimensional and condescending way. The men's ultimate fate had a curled-lip, "feminist" feel of unsympathetic gynocentrism. As I am not at all a fan of the notion, palpably incorrect, that Woman is Superior, this factor popped me out of the story on many occasions.

But then there is the story itself: Most people can't imagine spending a night away from their gadgets, still less a night without electricity, hot running water, 911 access, a mattress...all of which middle-aged Lorax/Lacey is forced to do, reluctantly, with poor grace, but ultimately with a dawning sense of connection to the world, the *actual* world, around her. She is us...Lorax, thou art but shard of our fracturing pot. And this was for me the heart of the book, the point of the exercise: Sit in your comfy chair and read about this poor, poor lady and her travails. Sneaking in behind the story comes the grappling hook of the plight of the only world we have, and the almost desperate need of those of us like Lacey, who live in our cocoons made of pleasure and ease, to be awakened before the nightmare becomes the only reality we have.

It's nicely done. I'd recommend it to you with more enthusiasm if I didn't have the big attitudinal reservation. But I still recommend it.