I was quite eager to read Jahren’s new book, having thoroughly enjoyed her first book, Lab Girl, which I unreservedly recommend. Her writing style is not like her scientist peers; nor is it reportage of the journalist mode. Jahren is personal, using anecdotes from her life to set up a topic. This has the added effect of personalizing a topic that can feel distant and unconnected to your own life, a major problem with writing on climate change. She also avoids the trope of finger wagging, a tone and approach all too common in climate change literature. Here we get a scientist who knows how to navigate data troves to bring back straightforward trends, then communicate them without threat or melodrama. She is direct, humorous, creative, providing comparisons and context that are meaningful and unvarnished.

The core of Jahren’s argument is that Western civilization took a path of More about 100 years ago— all choices, from the personal scale to the industrial and governmental scale, have been toward increased consumption of all resources. This lifestyle of constantly increasing consumption on a planet with finite resources is insupportable, not a logical long-term strategy. Another path civilization embarked on was basing industry and lifestyle around fossil fuels as an energy source. Jahren is not a “green” energy proponent; she aptly illustrates how renewable sources could never meet current demand:

“Powering America using only wind power would require more than one million wind turbines, or one every mile or so across the whole of the continental United States. As for solar energy, a land area the size of South Carolina would have to be sacrificed to solar panels in order to generate America’s annual diet of electricity. Entirely switching over to renewables at their present rate of efficiency is, unfortunately, a pipe dream.” p. 122.”

Jahren traces various threads of consumption, from energy use in all its forms, to plastics, agriculture, meat consumption, food waste, fish consumption; each of these threads and more are woven into making a complex story understandable. Most of these elements are not bad as many preachy journalists would have you believe. It is the ramped up scale of consumption of each of these that becomes problematic. To sustain the level of consumption of each element enjoyed in the developed countries, or to have more or all of earth’s 7 billion people living at that level of consumption, is quite simply impossible. There just are not enough resources. To think that we’re going to innovate our way out of this problem is also fantasy. Jahren traces how most innovation typically leads to ever increasing patterns of consumption. She describes how each time we innovated to increase crop yields and land productivity, our food consumption also dramatically ramped up. In fact:

“Twenty percent of what American families send to the landfill each day is, or recently was, perfectly edible food….we throw forty percent of everything we just accomplished into the garbage.”

The forty percent figure comes from when you add in all the time and energy inputs from farmer to consumer. Jahren’s entire premise is that the relentless pursuit of More is unsustainable on a finite planet with 7 billion consumers.

I think most readers would find this book an entertaining, informative, reasonable presentation of the facts, with no sermonizing, but only practical suggestions about how to examine your own consumption patterns and consider ways to modify them. Highly recommend.