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by Tom Butler (Editor), George Wuerthner (Editor), Richard Heinberg (Introduction by)
About this title: "ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth" takes an unflinching look at the environmental devastation created by our thirst for energy--including supposedly "clean" renewable sources. From oil spills, nuclear accidents, and mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms and desert-destroying solar power plants, virtually every region of the globe is now experiencing the consequences of out-of-control energy development. Essentially no place is sacred, no landscape safe from the relentless search for energy resources to continue powering a culture based on perpetual growth. Precious wildlands, fragile ecosystems, even our own communities and children's health are at risk. In a large-format, photo-driven narrative (including 195 color photos), "ENERGY" features the writings of more than thirty leading thinkers on energy, society, and ecology. Collectively, they lift the veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of all our energy options. Ultimately, the book offers not only a deep critique of the current system that is toxic to nature and people but a hopeful vision for a future energy economy--in which resilience, health, beauty, biodiversity, and durability, not incessant growth, are the organizing principles.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
What Everybody Ought to Know about Energy
If you've ever looked for an iron-clad case that the fossil energy supply is out-of-control, over-the-top destructive --of planet, wildlife, people's health and culture-- then check out Energy, the latest publication of the Post Carbon Institute.
The word "breathtaking" has become cliche when put with "photographs" but here it really applies. You will gasp aloud as you turn each page. (even my teens did) And then you'll want to show the pictures to more people, because you can't keep this kind of stuff to yourself. Coal strip mines. Spawling oil fields. Landscape wracked by palm oil plantations. The debris of Fukushima. And of course the BP oil platform going down in flames.
The photos do such a good job of drawing you in that it is hard to get to the text. Maybe that's why Post Carbon Institute simultaneously released a paperback -- the Energy reader version -- which apparently skips the photos. Unlike many coffee-table books, in Energy the text is astounding. Post Carbon Institute has assembled an all-star list of contributors, including Richard Heinberg, James Hanson, Wendell Berry, John Michael Greer, and Bill McKibben.
It's a monster of a book -- at 14" x 12", it's so much book that it makes me feel guilty about the energy required to make and ship it -- that reveals in shocking horror the devastation behind our conventional sources of energy. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, Energy covers them all. It debunks "clean coal," and "Drill Baby Drill." There are many sections devoted to fracking, which is described as "a bridge fuel to nowhere."
Unconventional energy supplies are covered too, with a note on each one that reveals that energy source's "Key Limiting Factor" (where it falls short, for example Low Net Energy Ratio, heavy water user, etc.). There are solid explanations of EROEI and Embodied Energy, and there's the constant presence of the concepts of peak oil. Energy doesn't dodge the population discussion, and it includes plenty on climate change.
It is quite light on the ideas of Reduce, deep cuts to consumerism, unshopping, and the realities of what powerdown is going to look like (but perhaps they thought they'd better stop at 273 pages and leave those to someone else). And it's very weak on economics. Like all Heinberg books, Energy is heavy on awareness-raising and talking about The Problem, and far too light on what we can do about it.
All these staggering images, coupled with the pounding text, create a pretty grim book. (maybe it should be packaged together with the joyful and colorful Transition Companion) The question arises: who were they writing for and what do you do with the thing?
Energy makes a pretty rugged package for under the Christmas tree, even though admittedly that's why I bought it. Environmentalists know a lot of this stuff already, so they don't "need" the book (although some will probably yearn to own it). The people you want to have read this book are those who are promoting the fossil energy nightmare -- and good luck getting them to sit down with it.
In a dream world, it might be fun to get a crowd-funded campaign going, to get a copy of Energy placed in every public library, every high school, every congressman's office. Those are the kind of places that need this book. So if you're curious about Energy, might I suggest just that:
Energy is far too big, physically, to be tucked away on a shelf. It will have to sit out on a counter someplace. And then people will see it. And open the cover. And the secrets of Energy will be revealed.
Joanne Poyourow directs the Environmental Change-Makers nonprofit in Los Angeles. She is the initiator of the Transition Los Angeles city hub. She blogs at Transition US and Resilience.org and is the author of several books regarding post-petroleum preparedness. She recently offered "Building a Vibrant Local Economy" through Transition US.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/what-everybody-ought-know-about-energy
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
With that in mind, the 195 color, mostly full page — often double page — photographs in the Post Carbon Institute’s latest book, ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, speaks volumes beyond its gigantic sized pages about the energy and environmental predicament humanity is immersed in today.
But while the book is heavy on blunt and unforgiving photographs, it also boasts a series of probing essays from such peak oil luminaries as John Michael Greer and Richard Heinberg; commentary and analysis by eco philosophers-cum-farmer/cultivators Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, and insight from America’s most famous global warming activist Bill McKibben.
Twenty-five other writers, observers, and analysts also contributed to the project.
Every peak oil-aware person out there knows the difficulty of convincing the energy unaware of energy crisis using plain language, logical arguments, facts, metaphors, analogies, and any other explanatory or storytelling device that makes evident the peak-everything case.
Same goes for chatting up global warming deniers, technotopians, and the just-go-green crowd.
That’s where this book comes to the rescue.
First of all, like I said, it’s physically huge. No one’s going to miss it sitting there on your coffee table screaming out in boldly graphical type: ENERGY, above a photo of BP’s exploding and iconic Deepwater Horizon.
Any visitor to your living room, office, or even dorm room will inevitably ask about the book and be drawn to flipping through it.
That’s when those 195 pictures are worth 195,000 words! So give your visitor all the silence necessary to let the book’s many intense, arresting, and provocative images speak for themselves.
And then wait for it. Now’s your opening.
With the visually uncomplicated aid of the book you can explain a thing or two about peak oil/peak-energy/peak-ecosystem, how you became aware, and why it’s a concern to you. By having in mind a few photos to flip to — one’s that you particularly connect with — you can go forth with your script and the floodgates of curiosity open to more.
In other words, this book is one heckuva ice breaker. No pun intended, Mr. McKibben.
But make no mistake, ENERGY isn’t simply for imparting a raft of intellectual information about our worsening energy predicament. The book’s opening dedication reveals a higher purpose than just that:
For the wild creatures whose habitat is being destroyed by a rapacious energy economy, and for the children whose breathing is labored due to pollution from fossil fuels. May a future energy economy that mirrors nature’s elegance arrive soon enough to relieve their suffering.
Indeed.
Explaining in the Foreword that the book began as an idea in which to reveal the devastating toxicity of tar sands development, conservationist Douglas R. Tompkins says that it soon became obvious that the project should expand, aiming to explain and link all contemporary energy sources to expose a more complex, interrelated picture of human resource use and its far reaching impacts.
Seen and unseen, energy-related impacts are ubiquitous. Even the chemical composition of the atmosphere records the way that humanity is using energy. As soon as one looks beneath the surface — behind the light switch or gasoline pump — one sees an energy economy that is toxic to nature and people….
A deeper look at the energy picture reveals ugliness.
And ugly it is.
The reader is immediately plunged into that truth as the following 25 double-folio full page photographs detail a raft of eco horror shows resulting from our violently extractive and resource-heavy energy economy.
It’s difficult to pick the most arresting from this initial onslaught of photos — each one nearly outdoes the last with an unadulturated bird’s eye view into the hidden world of humanity’s seemingly insatiable appetite for energy slaves.
But my personal favorite, if such a thing can be said, is “No Place Sacred,” a picture of a clergyman outside a church with an ominously billowing dark cloud of coal smoke emanating from the too-close coal-fired towers flanking the church on all sides.
As a Christian woman I couldn’t help but see the contrast between the God that I love and His humble church on earth and the polluting atmosphere that human greed and corporate profits engender.
But not every photo in the book is grim, though most are. The editors reserved a few shots for the beauty of the earth, the diversity of her inhabitants, and the awe of creation (or geology, geography, ecosystems, if you prefer). It is a beautiful earth indeed, making the unflinchingly destructive extraction impacts doubly sorrowful in the comparison.
The book goes on to look in pictures and words at every industrial energy source people use to fuel the globalized economy, offering hours of information to plumb and yet the immediacy of pictures to return to again and again.
With any luck, ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth will be to understanding resource extraction and fossil fuel use what the documentary film Chasing Ice is rapidly becoming in the case for global warming action.
To that end there’s a place for this book just waiting on your coffee table — and for your conversations — too.
–Lindsay Curren, Transition Voice
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-14/no-place-sacred-energy-review
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