The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

I enjoyed the interplay between Jahren's personal stories of growing up in Minnesota with the stark facts of the climate emergency we face. Unfortunately, Jahren painted an overly favorable picture of the American agricultural system, praising the increases in crop and meat production, without highlighting the detrimental impact of the chemical fertilizer/pesticide cycle and soil degradation associated with monoculture. It seemed very light on systemic criticism, while putting the onus of action on the shoulders of the individual, which is exactly what polluting industries have always done (calling on Americans not to litter, instead of altering their packaging).

I loved Jahren's first book Lab Girl, and I am delighted to report that this book may just be better. Jahren uses a combination of data and nostalgia for an America past to explain how what we do impacts the environment. This is certainly not my first book about the destruction of the planet, but it is my first book that 1) did not feel like eating my peas; 2) I truly enjoyed, and 3) convinced me to make a couple minor changes, effective immediately, to help chip away at the outsize portion of the planet's natural resources the US consumes.

Lately I keep hearing the "it doesn't matter what I do, the vast majority of environmental impact comes from industry" excuse for doing nothing. Well that is certainly true that industry has the show more largest share of the blame, but industry is serving you - your choices change industry behavior. A gallon of gas moves the average commercial plane about 400 feet. Yes, that shocked me too. So if people cut down on air travel the airlines and Boeing/Airbus will start to spend on planes that do a better job, just as the oil embargo of the 70s made car companies work on mpg (which they abandoned because when gas prices went down American decided they needed Yukons more than they needed a planet for their grandchildren. The two things that really struck me were the impact of air travel, and the clear and unbending limitations on wind and solar and the cosmic joke of ethanol and biodiesel. (I knew about ethanol, you don't live in North Dakota without getting a pretty clear understanding of what ethanol is, and how much cropland it requires to get a gallon of the stuff and also the impact on air and water of manufacturing what is essentially moonshine for cars.)

Anyway, my point is this is a pleasure to read, and it is broken down in an uncondescending way so that I the reader truly understood this complicated matter, immediate and future impacts included, and also what we can do to help, though Jahren is clear it might be too late already. This is not fear mongering, it is honest and helpful and lovely. show less

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down is a concise description of The Story of More. Hope Jahren has written a passionate, direct and searing indictment of what Man has made of this planet in just her lifetime (She repeats at least 20 times she was born in 1969). And yet, every chapter (there are 19) begins with a nostalgic look at her childhood in Minnesota, her parents, family rituals, and life at that time. She had a pet chunk of ice she named Covington that she kicked all the way to school and back all winter. The book is a wonderfully odd combination of warm, fuzzy memories and stark, fraught trends and stats, that do not portend good things to come.

Minnesota and her later home in Iowa have changed dramatically over her show more lifetime. The increased amount of corn per acre is stunning, but pales before the amount of fertilizer and pesticides used to get those better yields. She says we have pushed plants to produce as much as they physically can, and where we go for more is unfathomable. Not that we make good use of it. About 20% is simply burned up in biofuels, and most of it goes to feed domesticated animals for meat. The amount actually consumed as food comes dead last. She backs it up with figures, both global and American, that demonstrate the really poor connection between then and now. (She lists them all again at the end, because frankly, it's all very hard to believe one at a time.)

Americans eat 15% more food today. It shows. They throw out 40% of the food they buy, enough to feed all the undernourished in the rest of the world. By 2004, Americans were consuming a pound and a half of sugar - a week. In sum, Americans, who make up 4% of the global population, consume 15% of the food, 15% of the energy and 20% of the electricity in the world. If the rest of mankind were to the rise to that level - the world could simply not work.

Already, half the fish we eat are farmed because there aren't enough left in the wild. The amount of excrement they produce is way more than the oceans can deal with. Similarly, cattle and our other domesticated animals produce 300 million tons of feces a year, far in excess of the amount humans produce as a result of eating them. It's not a beneficial tradeoff. To make that manure, those animals consume a billion tons of grain, in order to give consumers (just) 100 million pounds of meat. This math leads nowhere good, and Jahren soon switches from dispassionate scientist to frustration:
"The amount of fruits and vegetables that is wasted each year exceeds the annual food supply of fruit and vegetables for the whole continent of Africa. We live in an age when we can order a pair of tennis shoes from a warehouse on the other side of the planet and have them shipped to a single address in less than 24 hours; don't tell me that a global food distribution is impossible."

All this overconsumption seems to have done Americans no good. They are no happier now that they work more, eat more, drive more, fly more and consume more. Quite the opposite, according to the figures. She says we need to consume less and share more. But neither of those are American values any more, and she has no stats for trends in sharing - just aspirations. More is a one way street, an addiction and a plague on the planet. Americans have yet to notice.

Meanwhile, there are (still) a billion people with no access to electricity.

Her 19 chapters cover the gamut from plastics to cars to species extinctions, passing through global warming and greenhouse gases. She has unkind words for both deniers and alarmists; neither is doing any good. She is all about reducing consumption, and concludes with how each individual American can reduce consumption and actually make a difference. "If we want to take action, we should get started while it still matters what we do."

David Wineberg show less

I loved this book way more than I anticipated. I strapped in for a depressing, long and boring treatise on the end of the world. Instead, I was treated to Jahren's cozy and slightly weird style, short chapters with just enough information to make you go, "Really? I want to read more!" and an ending that leaves you flipping off light switches...until you get to the line where she literally writes that flipping off light switches isn't going to do much good.

And yet, after a surprisingly humorous look at such global devastation, Jahren gives us hope by reminding us that we are not much different than our ancestors who also faced horrific struggles with limited information and leaves us with practical steps that make an impact.

Highly show more recommend, especially for young adults as this is a great introduction to climate science. show less

Much as Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food can be boiled down to "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants," Jahren's book could be encapsulated by her phrase USE LESS AND SHARE MORE. (88) A researcher and scientist, she provides ample evidence, and presents it in ways the average reader can understand. Quite simply, many of us are using and consuming far more than our fair share of everything - food and energy, particularly - while others are starving and suffering. This is not due to "Earth's inability to provide," but "our inability to share." Jahren offers solutions on a individual and societal level, but there's no silver bullet that will avert (further) climate change without some sacrifice for many of us who have grown show more accustomed to MORE rather than ENOUGH.

See also: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert; How to Be A Conscious Eater by Sophie Egan; Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich

Quotes/Notes

...societies that feature a low gender gap are also populated by women who give birth, on average, half as often as women who live in societies with a high gender gap....It makes sense that the most effective and long-lasting mechanism for curbing global population growth revolves around an elimination of gender inequality.
These data also imply that closing the gender gap around the world would likely result in something near replacement-level fertility...(12-13)

...most of the want and suffering that we see in our world today originates not from Earth's inability to provide but from our inability to share... (14)

avg. # global deaths/yr due to war: 50,000
homicide: 500,000
suicide: 800,000 (50,000 in America)
Every year, the world over, about 1 percent of the population becomes sick and dies. (18)

Cities...hold half the world's population, but they are...distributed very unevenly around the world. (21)

The fact that GMO plants have laboratory-altered DNA does not make them dangerous for human consumption....The problem with GMOs is [the small number of companies with an effective monopoly over the seeds][same companies that make and sell pesticides]. (36)

The production of meat requires a tremendous investment of resources [fresh water, antibiotics - most of which pass through the animals unabsorbed and make it into farm runoff - and grain]. (48)

If the entire OECD adopted the habit of just one meatless day per week, and extra 120 million tons of grain would be available to feed the hungry this very year....
Starvation is caused by our failure to share what we produce, not by the earth's ability to provide. (50)

[Aquaculture] At present, about one-third of the total catch fished out of the ocean is ground up into fish meal and then fed to fish that live in pens. (59)

Most of the rapid increase in sugar consumption between 1962 and 2000 came not in the form of food but as beverages: sodas, sports drinks, fruit punch, and lemonade. (67)

The steep increase in [high fructose corn syrup] consumption from basically nothing during the 1970s up to almost 10 percent of total calories by the year 2000 has closely coincided with Americans' sharp increase in weight over the same several decades... (69)

America...makes up 4 percent of the world's population, generates 15 percent of the world's organic waste. (76)

Americans make up 4% of the world's population but consume 15% of the world's energy production and almost 20% of the world's electricity. (83)

India and Sub-Saharan Africa...make up one-third of the world's population but consume less than 10 percent of the world's electricity. (87)

If all fuel and electricity in use today were redistributed equally to each of the seven-plus billion people on planet Earth, each person's energy use could be equal to the average consumed by people living in Switzerland during the 1960s. (88)
--If...the countries of North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand reduced their energy use to that level now, total global energy use would plummet by at least 20 percent, as would carbon dioxide emissions. (168)

The U.S. has witnessed a conspicuous divestment in its railroads during the last two decades [and the rail system was not robust to start with]. (93)

...only five percent of Americans use any kind of public transportation on a daily basis. (95)

America thoroughly offset any oil independence it could have gained from the miracle of renewed fuel efficiency during the 1970s and 1980s by doubling down, making more automobiles, and proceeding to use them harder. (99)

..the lack of overlap between where fossil fuels are found [the Middle East] and where they are used [OECD countries]. (105)

-the majority of plastic produced each year is consumed as disposable packaging
-more than 90% of plastic goes into a landfill, not recycling
-10% of the plastic we throw away gets into the ocean (112)

Hydroelectric power plants generate 18% of the world's electricity; wind-powered electricity generates less than 4% of the total electricity consumed around the world in a year. (117)

I do believe that renewable energy is part of the Use Less and Share More solution and that there is room to meet in the middle of using less electricity while making a larger fraction of it from water, wind, and sun [but the necessary metals for the turbines and batteries come from only two countries, Chile and Peru]. (122)

Since 1880, the average height of global sea level has gone up by more than seven inches. More than half of this rise has occurred since...1969, which means that global sea level has not only risen, the process of rise is accelerating. (149)

At present, one-quarter of the earth's population lives less than sixty miles from the coastal ocean....Bangladesh lies just barely above sea level....the people benefiting from the use of fossil fuels are not the people who suffer the most from its excess. (151)

[Sixth extinction causes: (1) loss of habitat, (2) climate change] (159-160

Since the first Europeans showed up, North and South America have lost 88 percent of their tropical forests, 90 percent of their coral reefs, and 95 percent of their tall-grass prairies. The species that were adapted to those niches have all but vanished now. (159)

Regarding the crisis in species decline, nothing has been shown to prevent extinctions so well as simply protecting habitats by preventing human access and development. (167)

Look at your own life: Can you identify the most energy-intensive thing that you do? Are you willing to change? We will never change our institutions if we cannot change ourselves....It is precisely because no single solution will save us that everything we do matters. (172)

The people of the OECD, while representing only one-sixth of the global population, use one-third of the world's energy and half the world's electricity and are responsible for one-third of the world's carbon dioxide emissions....the OECD consumes one-third of the world's meat as well as one-third of the world's sugar. (185) show less

This 7-hour audiobook was another climate change warning but the only one (so far) that has left me feeling serene and content. Perhaps it was the narration in her soothing voice. It certainly didn't add any new hope, since her solution is for us all to reduce consumption and share. I've been doing that for years, whatever I can, while watching other Americans' wasteful behavior with astonishment.

All climate change books end with hope. ("There's still more time!") No, there's not. I'm a cynic. I don't believe it. Especially when, in the midst of obvious heat waves, fires, floods, and tornadoes, Americans (who are the highest CO2 emitters) are still not slowing down. In fact, yesterday, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, when everyone and show more his brother were heading home after the holiday, the airline industry broke all records.

Still, I'm glad I listened to this book. I liked her calm writing and now look forward to her "Lab Girl."

Recommended. show less

Having hope requires courage.~from The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Succinct, well organized, and with a powerful narrative that is engrossing and accessible, The Story of More crunches down what I have read in numerous books into 224 pages.

Author Hope Jahren, author of the best-selling memoir Lab Girl, based the book on her climate change classes.

"All of this has convinced me that it's time to bring global change out of my classroom and into this book," Jahren writes in the introduction. "So if you'll listen, I'll tell you what happened to my world, to your world--to our world. It changed."

She starts at the very beginning--the fact that humans are on this earth and that our population is continually growing. Following a logical show more narrative, Jahren covers how we get our food and our growing energy use and the changes we have wrought on earth.

Along the way she points out that we have enough of everything but it is not shared equitably. Millions live without enough food, clean water and other things some of us take for granted. And millions of us spend money on things we don't need, wasting the clean water and energy available.

Scientists have been aware for nearly my entire lifetime that our dependence on fossil fuels was a problem. We have seen the environmental damage caused by human activity, including factory farms and our dependence on gasoline fueled cars and air travel. We know that the sea level is rising and glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting.

Jahren concludes with actions we can all take.

First, we must determine our personal values. Learn what you can about what you value. Are your personal activities in line with those values? What about your personal investments--are they in line with your values? How we spend our money and how we invest our money should reflect what we believe. Share your values with institutions to pressure change.

Americans can make a huge impact. Every step we take to limit our energy use and reduce our consumption makes an impact. We can't give up. We can do with less.

Do not be seduced by lazy nihilism.~ from The Story of More by Hope Jahren

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. show less