Author Archives: Harry Katz
All the Beauty in the World
Patrick Bringley spent ten years working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. All the Beauty in the World is a wonderful memoir of that time. It’s about art, of course, and about grief and joy and how art reflects them back to us. Continue reading
The War Below
The clean energy transition is forcing countries and communities to make very difficult choices. Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels means we need huge quantities of raw materials: lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, aluminum and other critical minerals. The War Below explores the conflicts around mining for the materials we need to power the clean energy transition. Continue reading
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold was one of the founders of the modern environmental movement. His book A Sand County Almanac, written 75 years ago, is a key source of many pivotal concepts about ecology and the environment, especially his idea of the “land ethic.” It’s still worth reading today. Continue reading
The Strongman Fantasy
Lots of people like the idea of “strong” leaders, leaders who are decisive, who aren’t afraid to “blow things up” including even democracy itself. But as historian Timothy Snyder writes in a recent article, the idea of the strongman leader is a dangerous fantasy. Continue reading
The Worlds I See
Dr. Fei-Fei Li may not be a household name, but for over twenty years she’s been a driving force behind the advancement of artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision and deep learning. Her book, The Worlds I See, is both a personal memoir and a history of AI. Continue reading
What An Owl Knows
People have mixed feelings about owls. They’re silent nocturnal hunters with haunting cries. They appear in our stories, myths and even cave paintings. In this book, Jennifer Ackerman surveys the latest research about owls, the scientists who study them, and the ways we humans relate to them. Continue reading
A century of reforestation is cooling the eastern US
New research shows that reforestation in the eastern United States has contributed to significant cooling of the region, countering the warming trends of climate change. Continue reading
Democracy in a Hotter Time
Democracy in a Hotter Time is a collection of essays about the relationship between climate change and democracy. The contributors do a good job diagnosing democracy’s problems dealing with the “long emergency” of climate change, but few propose practical solutions. I was disappointed by this book. Continue reading
Not the End of the World
Not the End of the World is a powerful antidote to climate doom-ism. Hannah Ritchie shows how our situation today, awful as it is, is still far better than the past. And she points to solutions that could make the future even better. Continue reading
The Rights of Nature
In 2017, New Zealand’s Parliament passed a law granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River. Granting legal rights and personhood to nature might seem crazy at first. But David Boyd explains in this book that extending rights to non-humans isn’t so strange after all, and could help save the planet. Continue reading
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