Skip to main content

Extraction to Extinction - David Howe ****

In this book, David Howe manages the near-impossible - making geology interesting. Usually, this is one of those dull, earnest sciences that it's hard to get too excited about. It might be a slight exaggeration, but for many of us, when you've seen one rock, you've seen them all. But Howe overcomes this issue with a combination of engaging storytelling and combining information about geology with how we humans have made use of them and the materials made from them - the book absolutely comes alive whenever we move from how the rocks were formed to how they have been used (and abused).

That storytelling element captured me from the first sentence: Howe had me at 'I was standing on Alderley Edge when I first wondered about it.' I admit that this is partly a matter of personal identification with the story. I too went to school in Manchester and explored Alderley Edge as a teen - I was a fan of Alan Garner, and even (not entirely licitly) ventured down the copper mines that Howe describes.

As far as the applications side goes, we tend to take for granted the availability of the raw materials extracted from the Earth that go to make up familiar objects, but as Howe takes us through the origin stories of brick and ceramics, copper, iron and steel, concrete, glass, aluminium, plastics and lithium and the rare earth elements, he both makes these everyday objects appear far more special and puts them into their context in the bigger picture of nature.

We then get the least satisfactory part of the book, where Howe takes us through the downside of our overuse of the Earth's resources and of the pollution and greenhouse gas production that results. It's not that these are unimportant issues, but they need a book in their own right to be as nuanced as the rest of the contents - having a couple of chapters on the subject just takes away from the rest of the book without being able to explore the issues properly. (There is, for example, no real mention of the need to balance out inconsistent sources like wind and sun, particularly somewhere like the UK, with storage and, almost certainly, nuclear.)

Things pick up again with the final chapter on the debated topic of whether we are now in the 'Anthropocene' epoch, where the reader is presented with the beguiling concept of future geologists finding layers in the Earth that correspond to what humans are doing at the moment. The only opportunity potentially missed here was to open up the debate as to whether this is a true epoch or a geological event.

Every now and then, usually when trying to be humorous, Howe's writing style becomes rather old fashioned - for example 'There appears to be a population of bevvy-swilling bozos who, wishing to show their strength by crushing flat their drained cans and then tossing them out of their car windows lend support to the Yorkshire proverb "Strong int'arm and thick in't head"' - but mostly I found this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more