By Jeremy Williams The world needs more metals, especially the ones necessary to the clean technology revolution. And yet “mining is one of the planet’s most polluting and deadly industries”. That’s the conundrum at the heart of Christopher Pollon’s book Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places. Because it’s so damaging, and because the most valuable resources […]
By Jeremy Williams I was on holiday on the South Coast this summer, and when I’m by the sea I like to read about it. This time I chose Vincent Doumeizel’s The Seaweed Revolution, which is a book I have been anticipating for some time. I expect ocean farming to be one of the big stories of this century, an […]
By Jeremy Williams This Changes Everything was the title of Naomi Klein’s big climate book a few years ago. This book echoes that in both the title and its blue design, striking a cautionary note – other things matter too, and there are consequences to forgetting that. And no, as Hulme says in pretty much every chapter, that isn’t a […]
By Jeremy Williams “What comes into your mind when you think of environmental breakdown?” asks Laurie Parsons in the opening to his book Carbon Colonialism. For a lot of people it’s still melting ice and polar bears. If people feature, it’s likely to be forest fires or famines far away. With some notable exceptions, “what your example is unlikely to […]
By Jeremy Williams When I needed the atlas in my school library, I knew it would be in the reference section – the place you go to look stuff up, to get the definitive answer. So it’s strange to think of an atlas as something provisional and temporary. I suppose they always were, but more so in an era of […]
By Jeremy Williams The last book with Greta Thunberg’s name on it was a slim volume of speeches that you could read in an hour. She’s a good writer and I’ve been looking forward to something more substantial. Well, this would be it: a 446 page tome with the boldly definitive title The Climate Book. Thunberg’s message has always been […]
By Jeremy Williams Among the various things that I feel I lost to the pandemic is my subscription to The Correspondent. Well established in the Netherlands, its English-language edition launched at the worst possible time and did not survive. But I appreciated its community journalism ethic and its ability to get behind the news, and that same philosophy is present […]
By Jeremy Williams Permafrost has a particular place in climate change discussion. It doesn’t come up often, and when it does it’s frequently in the apocalyptic tone of tipping points and catastrophe. Fundamentally, it seems under-studied, or at least insufficiently explained for non-academic audiences. So I was interested to see a new book on the subject. Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood […]
By Jeremy Williams Leah Thomas is a climate educator, the founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist collective, and also a case study in my book of someone who puts justice at the centre of their environmentalism. As someone I’ve learned a lot from already, I’ve been looking forward to her book for a while. What exactly is intersectional environmentalism then? It’s […]
By Jeremy Williams Every week there are steps forward on climate change to report. There is movement. Things are happening. “The problem,” writes Simon Sharpe, “is the pace of change.” It’s all moving too slowly, bogged down in glacial decision-making processes, held back by institutional inertia and the power of vested interests. The carbon intensity of the global economy is […]