Book Review: The Age of Consequences

The Age of Consequences:A Chronicle of Concern & Hopeby Courtney WhiteCounterpoint, 2015Environmental activists are by nature optimists, and that's just as well, since their job often seems heartbreakingly futile. Corporate malfeasance, rampant environmental degradation, widespread extinction on an almost unprecedented scale, still-pervasive public indifference ... environmental activists have to face mounainous obstacles like these every time they try to save an endangered species, clean up a toxic waste dump, or even safeguard a stream. They're forever colliding with vested interests, and vested interests are always better-financed and almost never teachable.Courtney White, the author of the stirring new book The Age of Consequences, is just such an environmental activist optimist, despite the large amount of close work he's done with the hands-down worst example of vested interests anywhere in the United States: the Amerian rancher. In fact, White is such an industrious optimist that he's even managed to interview in his book a handful of ranchers who don't sound like the strutting, arrogant, grassland-denuding, wolf-slaughtering government-handout parasites they uniformly are. He gets them to talk about carbon footprints for his tape recorder, and at no point does any of them say "If'n you don't give me 'n mine evruhthin we want, I'll shoot your goddam citified face off," although it's just possible some of them were thinking it the whole time.And to be fair, the looming catastrophes White lists aren't all the fault of ranchers. In fact, those lists are planet-wide and dire: the runaway buildup of greenhouse gases, the desertification of over half the world's growing-land, the rapid-fire disappearance of species (as White succinctly puts it, "The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years"), the deforestation of tropical rainforests happening at roughly an acre every second, and so on. And all these unfolding tragedies take place in an atmosphere of almost carnival over-consumption, especially in the United States where, as White rightly points out, the very idea of conservation is often anathema:

Everything in our daily lives shouts that it is not all right to live with less. Moreover, no one in a responsible social position, including Democrats, says anything to the contrary. And who could blame them? What politician in their right mind would run on a platform of less? At the same time, we're beginning to understand that there's only a finite amoung of more in our future. Some scientists, in fact, insist that we're already in "overshoot" - meaning, we're beyond the point where the planet's limited resources can sustain the current size of the human population (much less the extra two billion projected to be alive by 2050).

In order to chronicle the human side of these dramas, White and his family drive and jet all over the world (largely ignoring the shrieking hypocrisy involved in that fact, given the book's subject), talking with specialists and frontline activists in a dozen different theaters of environmental warfare. These travels give the book a scenic readabilty that does a lot to underline the global nature of White's study, although he's certainly no Mary McCarthy when it comes to pithy travel-writing (about Venice's St. Mark's square, he says, "What a place!").He has much more serious concerns, of course, and although he's assiduous in proposing solutions to even the most intractable problems, the dark enormity of those problems sometimes seems to overwhelm even our author's cheery outlook:

We're not saving much anymore, it seems. Oh, we're still trying, but under the specter of accelerating climate change, one has to wonder what we're actually saving in the long run. Take wildlife, for example, which has been the focus of so much conservation work over the last century. Have we really saved the whooping crane? The polar bear? The whales? The marmot? Tigers? Elephants? Is the future brighter or dimmer for these species? Dimmer, I think.

Despite passages like that, The Age of Consequences brims with upbeat energy and admits virtually no limits to what the ingenuity of concerned humans can accomplish. In its pages, White looks catastrophe squarely in the face and refuses to cede defeat. In these dark environmental times, that's an invigorating thing in itself, regardless of any likely outcomes.