The New York Times reported this week that the Democratic Republic of Congo announced they were planning to auction off huge tracts of land in their old-growth rainforest for oil and gas exploration. (That NYT link should be free for all to read.) It was only eight months ago that Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, pledged at the Glasgow Climate Summit to endorse an agreement to protect this same forest.
This vast ancient forest is one of the five remaining megaforests on the planet, as covered in Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet, by John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy, published in March. The other four are the Taiga, stretching across Northern Russia and Scandinavia; the North American Boreal, stretching across Canada; the Amazon; and on the island nation of New Guinea. The loss of these forests could be calamitous, as they are vital reservoirs of stored carbon. The Northern Boreal, for example, is estimated to have stored in its deep soil and peat layers some 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of 190 years of the current rate of global emissions. Imagine these vast quantities of ancient carbon being added to our current climate-changing emissions.
The book combines serious natural history and biology with evocative travel narrative. The Taiga, for example, is the largest unbroken expanse of forest on Earth. The book sets the stage by pointing out that on the flight from Moscow to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Bering Sea “weather permitting, you can spend the next nine hours looking out the window at trees.” Also notable is that one-third of that vast expanse of trees are larch trees, which are in one respect a rarity among trees. They are deciduous conifers, trees that grow needles but, unlike most conifers, drop them in the winter. There are only twenty species of deciduous conifers, among a total of 60,000 tree species.
None of these are ‘virgin’ forests, a category that doesn't really exist. All forests have been touched by humankind; only the degree varies. There is a standard for defining a relatively intact expanse of trees: the Intact Forest Landscape, or IFL, which is defined as a minimum of 125,000 acres. Only 25% of the Russian taiga meets that standard, down 10% from the year 2000. The far north has suffered the greatest percent of losses to natural fires, followed by oil exploration. Humans have had the main impact in the southern portion, through fossil fuel extraction, mining and Chinese logging.
The Amazon is the only one of the megaforests I have visited (the Peruvian and Ecuadorean portions), and I was enchanted by the descriptions of nature. There is the White Witch moth, the largest moth in the Americas, which is so rare that scientists have not yet discovered its caterpillar. And the birds: in the 1950s, scientists pretty much felt they had identified every species of them, around 10,000 at the time. But since then, there has been an explosion of new discoveries in the Amazon, such as the musician wrens that sing a different song on one either side of their river habitat. It turns out that not only do they sing differently, they are different species, even though they appear identical. They don’t mate with each other.
Sometimes the authors’ views can seem a bit extreme. Take roads, for example:
It may seem harsh to oppose roads that could give remote forest communities easier access to the rest of the world….While access is important, the unconditional right to a community driveway has no ethical basis….
Governments can help isolated forest communities thrive without building roads. They can, for instance, subsidize air transportation, as is done for food in roadless parts of Canada and passenger travel among cities in the Brazilian Amazon. Further, satellite internet can help transfer services like education, health care, and banking to remote settlements, sparing villagers epic walks or weeklong boat rides to jungle cities.
Well, yes,,,but can that truly substitute for road access? Yet roads are a huge contributor to deforestation.
The Congo rainforest is also home to Africa’s greatest population of forest elephants and gorillas, as well several hunter-gatherer tribes collectively referred to as ‘Pygmies’ (the Bambenga, Bambuti and Batwa, for example.) All this is endangered as well, aside from the climate disaster that would result from the destruction of this forest.
The book is chock-full of information: history, forestry, biology, zoology, and the political economic forces which are leading the destruction of it all. The scale of these forests is so grand as to be almost unimaginable, but the way the book focuses on the details makes them seem so present and intimate. The loss of these forests will be heartbreaking in the near term, and disastrous in the longer term.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Putin, by Philip Short. The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty years
Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story. He is also a man who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush.
Drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin will be the last word for years to come.
- The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020, by Jonathan Lemire.
“The Big Lie,” as it’s been termed, isn’t just about the 2020 election. It's become a political philosophy that has only further divided the two parties. Donald Trump first tried it out in 2016, at an August rally in Ohio. He said that perhaps he wouldn’t accept the election results in his race against Hillary Clinton, that the election was “rigged.” He then mentioned it at more rallies and even at one of the fall debates. He didn’t have to challenge the result that year, but the stage was set. When he lost in 2020, he started the lie back up again and to devastating results: an insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021. In the more than five tumultuous, paradigm-shifting years of Donald Trump’s presidency and beyond, his near-constant lying has become a fixture of political life. It is inextricably linked with how his party behaves, how the Democrats respond to it, and how he remains relevant, even after a decisive loss in 2020. Jonathan Lemire brings his connections, profile, and dogged reportorial instincts to bear in his first book that explores how this phenomenon shapes our politics.
- Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, by Kathy Kleiman. While doing research, the author stumbled across photos of ENIAC computer, the world’s first all-electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer, built at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) during World War II. There were men and women in the photo: the men were named, but the women were not. When she asked around, she was told there were no women involved in ENIAC, that the women in the photos were simply models for decorative purposes. But Kleiman didn't give up. Her research uncovered six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program ENIAC— even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. While most students of computer history are aware of this innovative machine, the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told -- until now. Over the course of a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded extensive interviews with the women about their work. PROVING GROUND restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC Programmers' groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before, and Proving Ground is the celebration they deserve.
- Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity, by Antonio Padilla. Leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe.
- Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood, by Hilary A. Hallett.
nlike typical romances, which end with wedding bells, Elinor Glyn’s (1864–1943) story really began after her marriage up the social ladder and into the English gentry class in 1892. Born in the Channel Islands, Elinor Sutherland, like most Victorian women, aspired only to a good match. But when her husband, Clayton Glyn, gambled their fortune away, she turned to her pen and boldly challenged the era’s sexually straightjacketed literary code with her notorious succes de scandale, Three Weeks (1907). An intensely erotic tale about an unhappily married woman’s sexual education of her young lover, the novel got Glyn banished from high society but went on to sell millions, revealing a deep yearning for a fuller account of sexual passion than permitted by the British aristocracy or the Anglo-American literary establishment.
In elegant prose, Hilary A. Hallett traces Glyn’s meteoric rise from a depressed society darling to a world-renowned celebrity author who consorted with world leaders from St. Petersburg to Cairo to New York. After reporting from the trenches during World War I, the author was lured by American movie producers from Paris to Los Angeles for her remarkable third act. Weaving together years of deep archival research, Hallett movingly conveys how Glyn, more than any other individual during the Roaring Twenties, crafted early Hollywood’s glamorous romantic aesthetic. She taught the screen’s greatest leading men to make love in ways that set audiences aflame, and coined the term “It Girl,” which turned actress Clara Bow into the symbol of the first sexual revolution.
- This Mortal Coil: A History of Death, by Andrew Doig. University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening portrait of death throughout history, looking at particular causes – from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet – who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them. Along the way we hear about the long and torturous story of the discovery of vitamin C and its role in preventing scurvy; the Irish immigrant who opened the first washhouse for the poor of Liverpool, and in so doing educated the public on the importance of cleanliness in combating disease; and the Church of England curate who, finding his new church equipped with a telephone, started the Samaritans to assist those in emotional distress.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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