Skip to main content

Democracy in a Hotter Time - David Orr (Ed.) ***

There's a certain class of book that is beloved of academic authors, but that is often almost unreadable. It consists of a series of essays on a particular theme, each by someone different. Often they repeat each other, lack any cohesion and are deadly dull. I can only think that academics like doing them because it's a quick way to get a brownie point for having something published. This is such a book, but the good news is it's one of the most interesting ones I've read.

The idea is to pull together two major world concerns: climate change and the state of democracy. Although there are a range of views, they all come from the same broad starting point that democracy is faring worse than it has for quite a while, that dealing effectively with climate change is best handled by democracy (despite some grudging acceptance that China is finally starting to get somewhere), and considering some of the impacts of climate change itself.

The reason I'd say it's one of the more interesting such books is that the overall thesis is an interesting one I've not seen elsewhere and there is some reasonably effective analysis of the state of democracy. It's rather more variable on climate change, veering from 'it can be fixed with tech' to 'it's the end of the world'. A lot of the useful content is very specific to the US - as the cover suggests, this is a very US-centric book (in fact you might think, reading it, the weird US version of democracy is its only form). This might seem to miss the point that climate change is a global issue, though to be fair part of the whole 'democracy to deal with climate change' picture makes it clear that global institutions rarely make things happen - that's down to individual countries.

This feels more of a political book than a scientific one, and (as is common in politics) there are some dubious numbers thrown around without apparent sources. For instance, we are told that 'as much as 37% of greenhouse gas emissions' are down to the food system, where the best estimate I can find is 26%. We are told that 'almost half of farmworkers are poisoned yearly' - which seems an extremely unlikely number, and isn't backed up in any way. And, one essay claims that the Earth's average temperature rise since 1959 is 6 degrees Fahrenheit - where the generally respectable NOAA tells us it's 2 degrees since 1880 - quite a disparity.

When I've helped undergraduates with their essay writing skills, something I always stress is not to make fact-like statements without evidence - but that happens a lot here. For example, we are told ‘there can be no decarbonisation without democratisation' - based on what? The same section, by Hélène Landemore argues strongly for citizens' assemblies and referenda rather than leaving dealing with climate change to career politicians as the latter are too easily swayed by vested interests. But this does assume 'the people' will do the right thing, which is a significant assumption, again with no evidence provided to back it up. For example, until relatively recently, the majority of British people wanted a return to capital punishment. It was only career politicians that stopped us having it. 

At least, however, Landemore offers solutions (even if rather poor ones). Some sections,  for example David Guston's Governing Science, Technology and Innovation in Hotter Times are just loaded with academic buzzwords and offer little value. Sadly, a lot of the content takes form ‘to do this, things have to be like that’ with no suggestion at all of how to make the required transformation happen. For example, Ann Florini, Gordon LaForge and Anne-Marie Slaughter in Democratic Governance for the Long Emergency offer us ‘Information systems have to be designed to ensure that the basic data are accurate, the information extracted from those data are of value, and the information is interpreted using beliefs and judgment systems that are rooted in reality.’ That sounds easy, doesn't it? 

One final niggle - the thing I found most distasteful is a quote on the cover that starts 'The brave authors of this remarkable compendium'. I'm sorry, there's nothing brave about writing an essay. The word is being relentlessly misused - this is just the latest example. Please stop.

Overall, although the book suffers from the format, is far too US-oriented for a global problem, and contains some essays that are unreadable academic speak, or offer sweeping 'solutions' with no clue as to how they could be implemented, it's an interesting pairing of climate change with democracy and should be of interest to anyone studying either.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more

Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's  Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences  (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare
Post a Comment
Read more