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A review by books_ergo_sum
The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg
reflective
5.0
Best climate change anthology I’ve ever read. For two very specific reasons:
✨ it had essays from basically every academic discipline
✨ the essays were written by the Who’s Who of each niche topic
All glued together with no-nonsense essays by Greta Thunberg.
(… and because I can’t resist being long-winded about literally everything…)
It intrigued me that this anthology was an embodiment of the debates surrounding the 1959 CP Snow, Two Cultures speech (which argued that dividing science from the humanities would hinder both discipline’s ability to solve the world’s problems—and is required reading if you ever come to our house for dinner 😆)
There’s something to this problem. And climate change books are a good example of why.
Because climate change involves every single university department. Of course, you have your earth science and ecology people (like Mr. BooksErgoSum). But also epidemiologists (climate change pandemics, oh goodie). Also physicists and engineers (green tech, please). And economists (globalization F-ed us). Political scientists (we need to un-manufacture the consent for climate destruction). And post-colonial intersectionality peeps (climate destruction and our current solutions are super unjust and discriminatory).
Literally everyone. And this anthology represented that. There were even Literature Department people like Margret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh in here. Most climate change books don’t try to reconcile all these university departments. But I love that this one did.
So kudos to Greta Thunberg for this collection of authors. And kudos to all the authors for synthesizing this information as much as they did. The silo-ification of the university doesn’t make it easy.
✨ it had essays from basically every academic discipline
✨ the essays were written by the Who’s Who of each niche topic
All glued together with no-nonsense essays by Greta Thunberg.
(… and because I can’t resist being long-winded about literally everything…)
It intrigued me that this anthology was an embodiment of the debates surrounding the 1959 CP Snow, Two Cultures speech (which argued that dividing science from the humanities would hinder both discipline’s ability to solve the world’s problems—and is required reading if you ever come to our house for dinner 😆)
There’s something to this problem. And climate change books are a good example of why.
Because climate change involves every single university department. Of course, you have your earth science and ecology people (like Mr. BooksErgoSum). But also epidemiologists (climate change pandemics, oh goodie). Also physicists and engineers (green tech, please). And economists (globalization F-ed us). Political scientists (we need to un-manufacture the consent for climate destruction). And post-colonial intersectionality peeps (climate destruction and our current solutions are super unjust and discriminatory).
Literally everyone. And this anthology represented that. There were even Literature Department people like Margret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh in here. Most climate change books don’t try to reconcile all these university departments. But I love that this one did.
So kudos to Greta Thunberg for this collection of authors. And kudos to all the authors for synthesizing this information as much as they did. The silo-ification of the university doesn’t make it easy.