The Story of More (Adapted for Young Adults): How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here - Hardcover

Jahren, Hope

 
9780593381120: The Story of More (Adapted for Young Adults): How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593381122 ISBN 13: 9780593381120
Verlag: Delacorte Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

This young adult adaptation of acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren's highly respected nonfiction work is the perfect book for those interested in learning about climate change and how they can contribute to creating a more sustainable future.

Hope Jahren, acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist, details the science behind key inventions, clarifying how electricity, large-scale farming, and automobiles have both helped and harmed our world.
 
Jahren explains the current and projected consequences of unchecked global warming, from superstorms to rising sea levels, resulting from the unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases being released into our atmosphere. The links between human consumption habits and our endangered existence are very real, with consequences leading to a crossroads of survival and extinction.
 
Still, Jahren maintains that our ever-broadening science-based knowledge can help us counter this dilemma. The eye-opening information provided in The Story of More will help readers understand the path we must take. If we collectively make informed choices now, Jahren reassures us, our future can be as bright as we imagine it can be.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996. She is the author of two works of nonfiction: The Story of More and the bestselling Lab Girl. Recognized by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Jahren is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and served as a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the isotope geobiology laboratories. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo in Norway.

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1

Our Story Begins

The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
—Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)

You have probably been hearing about climate change your whole life. Maybe you’ve seen it on the news, or seen movies about it, or read about it in school, or heard people debating about it in your home. You’ve probably heard people ask if climate change is real. Is it something we should be afraid of? When will it happen and how bad will it be? You may have heard it called a “hoax.” You may have heard it called “the biggest challenge your gen­eration will ever face.” You might even be sick of hearing about it altogether.

You know what? I get it. I’m more than fifty years old, and I’ve been hearing people argue over climate change for at least twenty years. I am a scientist who studies climate change, and so—lucky me—I get to hear people argue about it almost every day. But lately I learned that the arguments go back much further than that.

In 1969, more than half a century ago, the Norwe­gian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his col­leagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea. The New York Times picked up the story, and Walter Wittmann of the US Navy immediately disagreed: he had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.

But that’s not nearly all: in 1931, Thomas Edison said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, “The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” That’s right—the guy who invented the light bulb (Edi­son) urged renewable energy on the guy who invented the car (Ford) and the guy who invented the tire (Firestone). Almost one hundred years ago these important men were talking about “green energy,” while at the very same time, they were initiating our modern addiction to fossil fuels.
Let’s go back to 1969 for a moment, back when Balchen was fighting with Wittmann. I don’t remember 1969 per­sonally, but, like every year, it was full of beginnings and endings, problems and solutions, equal to any that had gone before or have come since.

Most of the trees you see out your window were barely seeds in 1969. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was incor­porated in 1969 and has since become the world’s largest private employer. Sesame Street premiered in 1969 and went on to teach millions of children how to count and spell. Big things started out as small things, then grew to change the world.

Way up north, in Mower County, Minnesota, my par­ents weren’t paying attention, for I was one of the ten million babies born on September 27, 1969, and the last of their four children. The world would be different for this baby, my parents promised each other, and they made the ancient vow that all mothers and fathers make in the euphoria that follows a happy birth.

I would have all the love that my father could give and all the love that my mother should have been given. She will grow up free, my mother resolved—free from hun­ger and from the shame of being taken by the county. My father, for his part, looked forward to a century of technologies that would save us all from sickness and want. Like the millions of couples who had come before them, and would come after, they looked at the world they lived in and thought about the one they wanted. Then my parents turned to each other, in love, and they named me Hope.

Forty years later, in 2009, my department chair called me into his office and asked me to teach a class on climate change. I’ll admit that, at first, I was not excited about the idea. Convincing people to lower their energy use is like trying to get them to quit smoking or to eat more health­fully: they already suspect they should do it, but there’s a billion-dollar industry working round the clock, invent­ing new ways to make sure they don’t. I would start, I conceded, by taking my boss’s orders at face value. I sat down at my desk, turned on my computer, and began to research change. Over the next several years, I cataloged the data that describes how population has increased, how agriculture has intensified, how energy use has skyrocketed over the last half century. I accessed public databases and downloaded files of numbers and spread­sheets. I searched through the data for patterns across the decades of my own life. I set out to quantify global change in the most concrete and precise terms that I could apprehend, and I learned a lot by doing it.

This research became the foundation of a course I taught many times. Each week during the semester, I’d pick up the chalk and teach a room full of students the numbers describing how planet Earth had changed since I was a kid back in the 1970s. I taught them what has happened. Not what I think might happen. Not what I think should happen. I taught them the things that I had taught myself. And as I did my job, I finally began to un­derstand why I was doing it: because only after we see where we are can we duly ask ourselves if this is where we want to be. At the bottom of it all, I had learned, we have only four resources: the earth, the ocean, the sky, and each other.

All of this has convinced me that it’s time to bring global change out of my classroom and into this book. Not because I am a scientist who thinks she’s right, but because I am an author who loves both words and num­bers, and a teacher who has something to say.

So if you’ll listen, I’ll tell you what happened to my world, to your world—to our world. It changed.


2

Who We Are

Four thousand years ago, the people living along the Tigris-Euphrates River valley in a place they called Mesopotamia, were deeply worried that planet Earth could never provide enough food, water, shelter, and space for the population they saw increasing all around them. Their poets wrote about “the countless tribes of men” who “oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed Earth.” These poems were written in about 1800 BC, just as world population hit somewhere near one hundred million people. During the one thousand years that fol­lowed, global population doubled.

The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that politicians should decide “of what numbers and of what sort of people” a country should contain because, ac­cording to him, “too large a multitude are incapable” of keeping themselves in good order. If people would just follow his directions, Aristotle insisted, the population would be appropriately curbed, and Earth would forever be able to supply its inhabitants with the “necessaries of life.” He wrote these things over two thousand years ago, just as world population was nearing 250 million. Dur­ing the one thousand years that followed, global popula­tion doubled again.

A priest named Suger spent much of his life raising funds to renovate his church entrance, which was so crowded that it “forced women to run to the altar on the heads of men as on a pavement” due to the popu­lation explosion of the High Middle Ages. Suger wrote this nine hundred years ago, when the world popu­lation was about one-half billion people. Within the next five hundred years, global population doubled yet again.

Thomas Robert Malthus made people really nervous in 1798, when he wrote An Essay on the Principle of Popu­lation. Any and every improvement in food production, he...

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Verlag
Delacorte Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593381122
ISBN 13 
9780593381120
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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preigu
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