Friday, June 04, 2004

I ordered this book on a whim last week after drinking six beers when I got home from seeing The Corporation. I had almost forgotten that I'd ordered it, and I wasn't really waiting with much anticipation for its arrival. Well, it came yesterday and it just so happened that I finished the most recent book I was reading last night. On my way out the door this morning I went to my ever growing pile of books I swear I'm going to read and, since it was on the top, and wasn't as thick and daunting as Guns, Germs, and Steel, I figured, "what the hell" and decided to read it. (Jamund also excitedly gave it wild praise, but he's a lunatic, so I took it with a grain of salt). Jamund was right. After reading the preface, I'm only on page 9 and this book is already AMAZING. It's like the difference between standing on the beach with water up to your ankles and thinking "yeah, the ocean is deep out there" and getting into a submarine and experiencing it. Nuts.

here's an excerpt from page 4. you can read the first couple pages of the book if you click on the cover up there and click the "look inside" link on amazon. I totally recommend it.

A subtler but similarly disquieting development was reported by the New York Times in 1992 in an article entitled "The Silence of the Frogs." At an international conference on herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles), while 1,300 participants gave hundreds of official papers on specialized subjects, none had focused on the total picture. Pieced together informally in the hallways and in the lunch lines at the conference was the fact that frogs are disappearing from the face of the earth at an inexplicably rapid rate. Even more disturbing was the conclusion that these populations are crashing not merely in regions where there are known industrial toxins, but also in pristine regions where there is abundant food and no known sources of pollution. The implications of such a die-off go beyond frogs. The human endocrine system is remarkably similar to that of fish, birds, and wildlife; it is, from an evolutionary point of view, an ancient system. If endocrine and immune systems are failing and breaking down at lower levels of the animal kingdom, we may be similary vulnerable. The reason we may not yet be experiencing the same types of breakdown seen in other species is because we gestate and breed comparatively rather slowly. On complex biological levels such as ours, bad news travels unhurriedly, but it eventually arrives. In other words, something unusual and inauspicious may be occurring globally at all levels of biological development: a fundamental decline that we are only beginning to comprehend and that our efforts at "environmentalism" have failed to address.

From this perspective, recycling aluminum cans in the company cafeteria and ceremonial tree plantings are about as effective as bailing out the Titanic with teaspoons. While recycling and tree planting are good and necessary ideas, they are woefully inadequate. How can business itself survive a continued pattern of worldwide degradation in living systems? What is the logic of extracting diminishing resources in order to create capital to finance more consumption and demand on those same diminishing resources? How do we imagine our future when our commercial systems conflict with everything nature teaches us?

I'm not quite sure if his parallel between frogs and humans in this case is a hundred percent scientifically accurate, but the point is still valid and illustratory.

In short, you should buy this book ... and read it. It'll only cost you 12 bucks! Maybe I'll send a copy of it to Bill Gates through inter-office mail. Why not? He is the richest man in the world. The dude has clout ... perhaps i'll also send him a copy of my million dollar plan. (that's the one where he writes me a check for a million dollars because, relative to the amount of money I have, that's like 40 bucks to him. No, actually, it's even less than that.)