currently reading: Strange Harvests by Edward Posnett
books bought:
none!
books received:
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (e-galley, out 2/19)
Strange Harvests: The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects by Edward Posnett (e-galley, out 8/6)
Marilou is Everywhere by Sarah Elaine Smith (e-galley, out 7/30)
books finished:
Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips
Hey you,
Good evening, hello. Something about me is that I have a little journal in which I write notes about books. I started the journal because I felt weird about reading so many books that I would just totally forget about. (Incidentally, a passage from our friend Jules Renard's Journal, which I might've shared with you already but which I am thinking of now: "It's enough to throw you into despair: to read everything, and remember nothing! Because you do remember nothing. You may strain as much as you like: everything escapes. Here and there a few tatters remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke left over after a train has passed." Jules, man! You get it!) I thought maybe jotting something down about the books I read would help, but unfortunately I overestimated myself and while I give every book a whole page to itself, some of the pages just say "forgettable." What an asshole.
I started reading The Uninhabitable Earth the other day. The first half of the book is divided into sections that read like plagues: Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Disasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict. I wrote a few sentences about it which I'm sharing with you instead of thinking of something new to say, which feels kind of like cheating, except better:
So the first thing is that, yeah, that is actually how I write to myself jesus christ that’s embarrassing. Another thing is that when I say kick the tires I mean check the sources, basically. It doesn’t mean, necessarily, I find a claim dubious—just interesting. So for example, I highlighted this and made a note to check on it: “Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything was becoming more like junk food.” And if you check the footnotes you find he got this information from a study called “Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 garden crops, 1950 to 1999,” the abstract of which is publicly available here. If you look read through it, the authors note that they found statistically significant declines in six nutrients they measured and did not find statistically significant changes in seven other nutrients they measured in each of their 43 crops. They conclude: “We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content.”
So maybe a more accurate thing to say would have been that the levels of some of the nutrients in some of our foods have decreased, but for reasons that aren’t clearly linked to global warming, although it is a problem likely made worse by warming. What’s there is fine, and not technically a lie, just a little misleading— Wallace-Wells doesn’t outright say “this is because of global warming”; he just says discusses this nutrient loss while describing some negative agricultural effects that have occurred at least in part because of global warming.
(The thing that gets to me is the confidence of “to name just four.” You only had six to choose from! You named two-thirds of them! “To name just 66.67%” has a different ring to it.)
If you read almost any pop science or pop psychology book and check the notes you’ll find stuff like this. The problem is no one reads them, and why would you? Who’s going to check every single one of them? Not me!
OK, cool. I was going to just scan the journal pages but as you can see I got myself a little worked up there. I am going to go have a bowl of cereal and watch Schitt’s Creek to go calm down.
Actually one more thing—I finished Impossible Owls and it really was fucking great. You should read it.
Also you should read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
Your friend,
Smalls