Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death Review

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Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death ReviewI have an open mind about all the subjects dealt with in this book and therefore found reading it very worthwile. Yes, the authors are from what one could call the 'other side' as they make no bones about directly attacking what the authors call 'ideological environmentalism'. However, the book is well written given the number of authors involved and clearly presents their arguments and information.
The book covers such topics as global warming, sustainable development, biotechnology, chemicals/pollutants and the environment, population, et. al. that should be of interest to everyone.
The strength of the book is the attempt to bring scientific research and data to bear on these important and sensitive issues and the policies that exist or that have been promoted to deal with them. This approach is very much needed and the authors should be commended for their work, regardless of where you might stand on any of the issues. We need reasoned debate.
The authors do engage in some of their own political poking at those they don't agree with and do resort to the straw man approach using 40 year old books and articles as the straw man and they do also use statistics in ways ranging from acceptable to somewhat dubious that present their case in the strongest possible light. They do ignore certain issues such as biodiversity where positive data (their obvious preference) is not available to support their strong optimism that markets and science have and will benefit humanity and solve all its problems. However, this political and economic perspective is to be expected from the American Enterprise Institute and is not presented in a too polemical tone.
Overall this book is comprehensive in its coverage, informative, well referenced and thought provoking, and therefore I can highly recommend it for those seriously and dispassionately interested in understanding these issues better.
I do not agree with certain of their analyses or use of statistics or all of their underlying philosophy but I commend them again for providing a sane and reasoned book that gives me the opportunity to study, analyse, raise questions, search references and become better informed.
Lets not shoot all the messengers or we can't discuss anything serious anymore.Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death Overview

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To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Review

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To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Review(This review is based on the Penguin India edition).
To read To Uphold the World is to read several books at once. Presented as "a call for a new global ethic", To Uphold the World is a timely critique of the instrumental rationality of our time that has produced a globally networked self-destructive culture of consumption. At the same time it is a narrative of travel, a contemplation of the phenomenon of travel, a biography of the great King Ashoka, who Rich discovered while traveling when he came upon his monumental inscriptions, and then of his councilor Kautilya, and a philosophical treatise on ethics. Ultimately, To Uphold the World is a meditation on leadership and its importance in a world of collective self-deception.
It is a tribute to the importance of this book that it is published by Beacon Press, the publisher of Herbert Marcuse's magisterial One Dimensional Man. Rich extends and updates Marcuse's critique of the authoritarian ritualization of meaning that closes the "universe of discourse." Rich observes that "the penetration of market, transactional relationships has become so pervasive in Western society, and particularly in the Anglo-American world, that family and personal relations are increasingly atomized and replaced by market-derived transactional interactions." Past and future fade in our networked world of instantaneous communication; we have become a culture of the "eternally ephemeral".
Arguing that the modern world has exchanged traditional forms of social authority and identity for a highly structured global consumer economy, and now finds itself teetering on the brink of catabolic collapse, Rich suggests that mankind is left bereft of guidance on how to transit to a more resilient, sustainable and free state.
He turns to the past for lessons, because "the past provides us with a store of human experience that can be truly subversive of the present." The core of the book is the story of Ashoka the Great, the warrior emperor who unified India in the third century BC through a series of bloody campaigns, converted to Buddhism, and ruled benignly for about forty years, leaving behind a legacy of benevolent rule and respect for life, including arguably the earliest known bans on slavery and capital punishment, and the earliest environmental regulations and the protection of natural areas.
Although the story of Ashoka is, if not well known, not particularly obscure, Rich identifies a significant and underappreciated aspect; behind the visionary Ashoka stood his administrator Kautilya, author of the Artha''stra, the first known treatise on statecraft and economic policy. Kautilya was a materialist, master of realpolitik, and the fisted glove behind Ashoka's vision. "The critical issue is not the desirability of Ashoka's principles, which at a certain level of generality is easy to acknowledge. How to put these principles into practice in a society, and Ashoka's success and failure in doing so, is the deeper issue.... The greatness of Ashoka likes not only in his conversion ... following [the bloody battle of] Kalinga, but in his heroic effort to reconcile the underlying, tragic tensions between the dharma of the king and warrior, which prioritizes force and violence, ... the revolutionary materialism of Kautilya and his espousal of [it] in statecraft; and a universal dharma of non-violence." Ashoka and Kautilya represent the unity of universal ethical values and pragmatism. Perhaps it is this loss of unity that explains why, in today's world, progressives can't progress and conservatives can't conserve.
Rich concludes that we live on the cusp of a second "Axial Age" where "the old Gods are dead and what will replace them is still being born". He looks to religious tradition and a growing ecological consciousness as sources for an "emerging sense of the transcendent". The emergent culture will require both Ashoka and Kautilya in order to put principles into practice. Indeed, in the future we are likely to get a full measure of Kautilya in view of the massive system disruptions from a runaway climate that humanity is likely to face due to our lack of resolve today; the challenge is to find the Ashoka of the twenty-first century who can articulate the vision we need of a more resilient, sustainable mode of being.To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Overview

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