📚It’s interesting and depressing to see just how well and widely understood climate change was over 40 years ago. That includes representatives of oil and gas corporations. According to Rich, some seemed to recognize rather than downplay the threat, and be willing to change the industry accordingly.
📚 “Losing Earth: A recent history”by Nathaniel Rich focuses on the years between 1979 and 1989 when activists, scientists and politicians (!) in the US almost made the big decisions needed to tackle climate change “in time” (relatively speaking, from the 2024 perspective).
📚 ”That includes not only predictions about degrees of warming, sea level rise, and geopolitical strife but also the speculations about geo-engineering technology, the appeals to help developing nations overcome starvation and disease…”#booksky
The writing is thoughtful and thorough without becoming lofty. She gives lots of concrete suggestions and motivating real-world examples.
📚 You can tell Cripps used to be a journalist before becoming a philosopher. The arguments are presented through a combination of analytical philosophy, scientific studies, anecdotes and the author’s personal experiences as a parent.
📚 “Parenting on Earth:
A Philosopher's Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids—and Everyone Else” by Elizabeth Cripps discusses what we owe to our own children, each other and the planet in the age of climate change and other global threats… #booksky
📚 It’s also a story of strong family ties, deep romantic love and the politics of scientific research. That last one sounds less sexy, but I found it really interesting and depressing that these great minds struggled for funding and other resources even AFTER they won the Nobel prize.
The Curies could have made a fortune with patents and by selling the valuable samples they produced. Instead, they gave all that up for free, citing THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT…
📚 I was struck by the moral principles Curie and her husband Pierre lived and worked by. Some would call the principles naive, I’d say supererogatory…
📚 ”Madame Curie”, by her daughter Eve Curie, is a biography of the first ever two-time Nobel prize winner Marie Curie, who was also a mother and something of a civilian war hero having developed mobile x-ray units for WW1… #booksky
