Global Environment Outlook 3
Past, Present & Future Perspectives
United Nations Environment Programme, Kofi Annan (Contributor)

This book and accompanying CD ROM is an amazing compendium of facts, figures, graphs, tables, satellite photographs and descriptions of the environment and the problems we face. It gives an overview of the present crisis, and projections for the next 30 years. There is a fine description of the rise in environmental awareness since the 1960s, written from a UN/NGO point of view. A time line illustrates key events through this period; conferences and treaties. All throughout, facts are given. Global warming is speeding up, with predicted temperature rises between
1.4 C and 5.8 C over the 21st century. Three million people die every year from water related diseases.

The results of scientific research are tabulated, but also presented visually, as with the startling photograph of the ozone hole on page 213, reaching up to Chile. Yet, disgracefully, America has opted out of the Kyoto Protocols. The 1997-98 El Nino is frequently referred to, and many statistics about this are given. Africa produces less that 3.5% of global emissions, but there were droughts in 1973-74, 1984-85, 1987, 1992-94, 1999-2000, and the continent bears many of the consequences of global warming.
Cars and industrialization bring respiratory diseases in cities like Lagos. Floods caused by El Nino result in water supply contamination, which in turn starts cholera outbreaks. Then there is the Asian brown cloud. 12 out of the 15 world's worst polluted cities are in Asia.

The book divides the world up into colour coded regions - Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, West Asia, the Polar Regions. This helps keep the problems in slightly more manageable portions, but there is still this sense we are being overwhelmed. A graph in the North American section [p 231] shows, not just that the temperatures are rising, but also that the extreme peaks and troughs of hot and cold diverge wildly from the centre of the trend. The climate is less stable.

It is not possible to do full justice to this book in such a short review. The facts, figures and graphs, all collected together, put about as much environmental information into one package as it is possible to handle.
It is well presented, and clear to understand. Every school and college, every public library ought to have one. If we are to act to try to stop environmental damage, we need information and analysis. A lot of what we need is right here. Buy it!

SB

Against the Machine
The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives
Nicols Fox

"I am a Luddite!" Such was the scandalous proclamation Wendell Berry bellowed in 1993 at the first official gathering of the new technology critics in the United States. For the time the statement was bold and heretical.
Since the rebellion (and demise) of the original Luddites at the launch of the industrial revolution some 180 years earlier, this new wave had been constrained by an intellectual context forged by the winners of the earlier conflict and their reformist historians: the term "Luddite"
had been made into a dirty word, a put-down, a brazen denigration.

Everyone laughed - Wendell was, as always, preposterously right-on - and everyone breathed in relief. Langdon Winner.
Stephanie Mills. Godfrey Reggio. Helena Norberg-Hodge. John Mohawk. Kirkpatrick Sale. Jerry Mander. Martha Crouch.
Sigmund Kvaloy. Vandana Shiva. For us a deep-seated taboo had been broken: without further excuse we were going to be who we were. To boot, our work - which up until that meeting had been conducted by isolated individuals - could move forward enriched by a hearty collection of hearts and minds.

At the same time, other activists and thinkers - alternative-technology inventors, native and land-based peoples favoring traditional livelihoods, monkey-wrenchers, anarchists, and modern rebels against the future - were boldly challenging technology with their own words and actions. The upshot: the proclamation "I am a Luddite"
re-entered the vernacular.

This is the intellectual context into which Nicols Fox's Against the Machine arrives. Fox comes to her ideas about machine-based society through a labyrinthean tour. She is a journalist and essayist, having previously written on such diverse topics as granite quarrying, censorship, and food.
An ever-so brief reference to a body of literature paralleling the Luddite rebellion in Kirk's Rebels against the Future set Fox on this current exploration, and indeed her eclectic/elastic mind has offered up a treasure:
Against the Machine is a truly scandalous book.

Against the Machine is perhaps most scandalous for the historical basis it lays to the issues you and I face in a world shaped by techno-economic forces every bit as consequential as those of industrialism. The dissent of the Luddites, it turns out, is not so very different from our own passions, longings, and interpretations. Indeed, Fox's method is to lift the veil between contemporary critics, rebels, and prophets and the many comrades who preceded us.
She goes looking for modern-day Luddites, and she finds them - hauling hazel sticks in Cornwall; teaching values at Schumacher College; weaving in Barnsville, Ohio; making art on the Maine seacoast - bringing us right back to ourselves. And so we are left with a historically-informed and presently-embodied appreciation for Wendell Berry's boldness.

Look out: Against the Machine is subversive material, reminiscent in scope and intelligence of the work of yet another technology critic, Lewis Mumford. Luminous, lyrical, impassioned, profound - I had to put the book down every few paragraphs and breathe in relief.

CG