The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

by Hope Jahren

Paperback, 2020

Status

Available

Publication

Vintage (2020), 224 pages

Description

"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels. In short, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming and automobiles--that, even as they help us, release untenable amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. She explains the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gases--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and shares the science-based tools that could help us fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of warming and a capsule history of human development, The Story of More illuminates the link between our consumption habits and our endangered earth. It is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it."--… (more)

Rating

(79 ratings; 4)

User reviews

LibraryThing member nancyadair
Having hope requires courage.~from The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Succinct, well organized, and with a powerful narrative that is engrossing and accessible, The Story of More crunches down what I have read in numerous books into 224 pages.

Author Hope Jahren, author of the best-selling memoir Lab
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Girl, based the book on her climate change classes.

"All of this has convinced me that it's time to bring global change out of my classroom and into this book," Jahren writes in the introduction. "So if you'll listen, I'll tell you what happened to my world, to your world--to our world. It changed."

She starts at the very beginning--the fact that humans are on this earth and that our population is continually growing. Following a logical narrative, Jahren covers how we get our food and our growing energy use and the changes we have wrought on earth.

Along the way she points out that we have enough of everything but it is not shared equitably. Millions live without enough food, clean water and other things some of us take for granted. And millions of us spend money on things we don't need, wasting the clean water and energy available.

Scientists have been aware for nearly my entire lifetime that our dependence on fossil fuels was a problem. We have seen the environmental damage caused by human activity, including factory farms and our dependence on gasoline fueled cars and air travel. We know that the sea level is rising and glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting.

Jahren concludes with actions we can all take.

First, we must determine our personal values. Learn what you can about what you value. Are your personal activities in line with those values? What about your personal investments--are they in line with your values? How we spend our money and how we invest our money should reflect what we believe. Share your values with institutions to pressure change.

Americans can make a huge impact. Every step we take to limit our energy use and reduce our consumption makes an impact. We can't give up. We can do with less.

Do not be seduced by lazy nihilism.~ from The Story of More by Hope Jahren

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
I loved Jahren's first book Lab Girl, and I am delighted to report that this book may just be better. Jahren uses a combination of data and nostalgia for an America past to explain how what we do impacts the environment. This is certainly not my first book about the destruction of the planet, but
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it is my first book that 1) did not feel like eating my peas; 2) I truly enjoyed, and 3) convinced me to make a couple minor changes, effective immediately, to help chip away at the outsize portion of the planet's natural resources the US consumes.

Lately I keep hearing the "it doesn't matter what I do, the vast majority of environmental impact comes from industry" excuse for doing nothing. Well that is certainly true that industry has the largest share of the blame, but industry is serving you - your choices change industry behavior. A gallon of gas moves the average commercial plane about 400 feet. Yes, that shocked me too. So if people cut down on air travel the airlines and Boeing/Airbus will start to spend on planes that do a better job, just as the oil embargo of the 70s made car companies work on mpg (which they abandoned because when gas prices went down American decided they needed Yukons more than they needed a planet for their grandchildren. The two things that really struck me were the impact of air travel, and the clear and unbending limitations on wind and solar and the cosmic joke of ethanol and biodiesel. (I knew about ethanol, you don't live in North Dakota without getting a pretty clear understanding of what ethanol is, and how much cropland it requires to get a gallon of the stuff and also the impact on air and water of manufacturing what is essentially moonshine for cars.)

Anyway, my point is this is a pleasure to read, and it is broken down in an uncondescending way so that I the reader truly understood this complicated matter, immediate and future impacts included, and also what we can do to help, though Jahren is clear it might be too late already. This is not fear mongering, it is honest and helpful and lovely.
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LibraryThing member DavidWineberg
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down is a concise description of The Story of More. Hope Jahren has written a passionate, direct and searing indictment of what Man has made of this planet in just her lifetime (She repeats at least 20 times she was born in 1969). And yet, every chapter
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(there are 19) begins with a nostalgic look at her childhood in Minnesota, her parents, family rituals, and life at that time. She had a pet chunk of ice she named Covington that she kicked all the way to school and back all winter. The book is a wonderfully odd combination of warm, fuzzy memories and stark, fraught trends and stats, that do not portend good things to come.

Minnesota and her later home in Iowa have changed dramatically over her lifetime. The increased amount of corn per acre is stunning, but pales before the amount of fertilizer and pesticides used to get those better yields. She says we have pushed plants to produce as much as they physically can, and where we go for more is unfathomable. Not that we make good use of it. About 20% is simply burned up in biofuels, and most of it goes to feed domesticated animals for meat. The amount actually consumed as food comes dead last. She backs it up with figures, both global and American, that demonstrate the really poor connection between then and now. (She lists them all again at the end, because frankly, it's all very hard to believe one at a time.)

Americans eat 15% more food today. It shows. They throw out 40% of the food they buy, enough to feed all the undernourished in the rest of the world. By 2004, Americans were consuming a pound and a half of sugar - a week. In sum, Americans, who make up 4% of the global population, consume 15% of the food, 15% of the energy and 20% of the electricity in the world. If the rest of mankind were to the rise to that level - the world could simply not work.

Already, half the fish we eat are farmed because there aren't enough left in the wild. The amount of excrement they produce is way more than the oceans can deal with. Similarly, cattle and our other domesticated animals produce 300 million tons of feces a year, far in excess of the amount humans produce as a result of eating them. It's not a beneficial tradeoff. To make that manure, those animals consume a billion tons of grain, in order to give consumers (just) 100 million pounds of meat. This math leads nowhere good, and Jahren soon switches from dispassionate scientist to frustration:
"The amount of fruits and vegetables that is wasted each year exceeds the annual food supply of fruit and vegetables for the whole continent of Africa. We live in an age when we can order a pair of tennis shoes from a warehouse on the other side of the planet and have them shipped to a single address in less than 24 hours; don't tell me that a global food distribution is impossible."

All this overconsumption seems to have done Americans no good. They are no happier now that they work more, eat more, drive more, fly more and consume more. Quite the opposite, according to the figures. She says we need to consume less and share more. But neither of those are American values any more, and she has no stats for trends in sharing - just aspirations. More is a one way street, an addiction and a plague on the planet. Americans have yet to notice.

Meanwhile, there are (still) a billion people with no access to electricity.

Her 19 chapters cover the gamut from plastics to cars to species extinctions, passing through global warming and greenhouse gases. She has unkind words for both deniers and alarmists; neither is doing any good. She is all about reducing consumption, and concludes with how each individual American can reduce consumption and actually make a difference. "If we want to take action, we should get started while it still matters what we do."

David Wineberg
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LibraryThing member Tytania
Just a long litany of all the grim statistics: the population growth, the food waste, the melting ice, the fossil fuels, you name it - want to see statistics about every possible way we've messed up, this is the book for you. It really did almost nothing to inspire me. The "How We Got to Climate
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Change" part of the subtitle led me to expect more of a narrative arc. That, plus the word "Story" in the title, I guess. The second part of the subtitle, "Where to Go from Here", constitutes only one measly final chapter. I need more hope.
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LibraryThing member Aronfish
I'm not a non-fiction reader, but I love Hope Jahren, and would read anything she writes. She makes science understandable to me and this book is no exception. She ends on a hopeful note with some strategies for improving the climate crisis dilemma.
LibraryThing member Beamis12
Thoughts soon.We are at present a deeply divided nation politically and unfortunately this has spilled over to the politicalzation of science and climate change. Many simply do not believe or at the least mistrust both. This is unfortunate in many ways because but we don't have an earth left for
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our children and grandchildren, none of the rest matters.

In this very readable book the author takes us through the last fifty years, using facts and figures, to show us how we got from there to here. Extreme weather patterns, polluted and and water, polar ice caps melting and the extinction of many species, population growth are all discussed among other subjects. The use of fossil fuel alone has tripled, 25 percent of animal species will have become extinct by 2050, and we waste 40 percent of our food, enough to feed the entire world.

Like the title portrays, we and the top nations just simply want more. Giving up something seems not to be in our nature, but it needs to be and quickly. At books end she gives us easy ways to start, little actions that if more people adopt them could make a small difference. Of course bigger actions by our governments, our scientists and wealthy corporations and individuals are needed. This book should be a must read.
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LibraryThing member LGCullens
Recommended reading for everyone, even those avoiding the issue or in denial. If it were not for the pressures of our materialistic culture, this book would be a required reading in all post elementary schools. A myrid of facts with statistics and data that bear them out are presented, together
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with how various opposing arguments can be both right and wrong, and the drawbacks of proposed solutions, so read carefully. It is the author's intention to inform, not scare, the reader.

Far too many humans ignore, even deny, the reality of climate change in their subjective avoidance of inconvenient issues affecting their lifestyle and/or aspirations. To me, this is equivalent to burying one's head in the sand with a tsunami on the horizon.

With the author's personal touches, this book presents the facts of how humanity has effected, and is accelerating, climate change via global warming. It also dips into tangential issues with surprising statistics and where such are leading — e.g. trophic cascades, and poisoning the soil, water, and air. In reading this book, keep in mind that climate change is both a symptom of and a contributor to the deteriorating biosphere conducive to human existence. At the end the author presents thoughts on how we might alter our self-destructive course, and notes how readers can verify the many presented facts.

While it's true that major shifts in climate have occurred many times over Earth's history, they have commonly occurred over geologic time frames. Now we are seeing the effects of climate change within our lifetimes. For example, in the two million years prior to human causes, average global temperatures varied at a rate of about one degree per thousand years. Since the pre-industrial era though, the rate has roughly doubled on an upward spike. Now, on the course we are on, with positive feedback loops kicking in (e.g. thawing tundra releasing methane), it is estimated that the rate of change could increase twenty fold within a century.

As to the possible fate of humankind, I'm compelled to note that microorganisms tend to be capable of a relatively fast rate of evolution, whereas multicellular animals like ourselves are less successful due to the functional complexity of cellular interactions (between some thirty trillion cells in the human body, not to mention the approximately thirty-eight trillion bacteria in and on our bodies that help to keep us alive). Given what we know from the fossil record, the average species exists approximately ten million years. Homo sapiens have thus far existed only two to three hundred thousand years.

“All species will go extinct eventually, even our own: it is one of nature’s few imperatives. As of today, however, that train has not quite left the station. We still have some control over our demise—namely, how long it will take and how much our children and grandchildren will suffer. If we want to take action, we should get started while it still matters what we do.”
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LibraryThing member streamsong
In 2016 author [[Hope Jahren]] emigrated to Norway as she feared scientific intellectual freedom might be compromised in the United States.

She was asked to teach a course on climate change at the University where she was working. This book is the result of her research for that course.

It’s very
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clear and concise. There are lots of good scientific facts (increase of population, increase of atmospheric CO2 levels, agricultural advances that lead to more disparity between the first world and third world countries) presented in a way that is both scientific and quite readable for the non-scientist.

The ‘Where to Go From Here’ section is quite short and boils down to her mantra: “Use less and share more”. She advocates changing your own practices first. Identify a cause you are interested in and make one change in your own life.

For instance, if you are worried about food insecurity, you could vow not to let your personal food go to waste. (This one hit home for me as I always have some veggies that go bad and end up in my compost bin). Spoiled food is not just a handful of bad celery, but represents water, fossil fuel and people’s lives as they grow it and transport it to you.

If you are worried about energy efficiency and worldwide rising CO2 levels, start by replacing one electrical appliance with a more efficient one. She advocates choosing the appliance that is using most of your energy as a percentage of your bill – she gives the example of a changing out your water heater instead of deciding to vacuum once a month instead of once a week. Unfortunately, that choice would would only make a miniscule difference in your energy footprint. (tears on my part)

When one habit is entrenched, go on to the next.

I do not think this book would change anyone’s mind who already has their mind firmly made up that climate change is a hoax – but it has given me a logical way to present facts.

I do wish the ‘Where to Go From Here’ section was longer.

3.8 stars
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LibraryThing member Pferdina
This was the sustainability/summer research book for summer 2020. I bought a copy but did not get around to reading it for two years. This is less depressing than the other sustainability selections, but still the message seems to be hopelessness, Jahren's final chapter of positivity
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notwithstanding. Yes, we need to find a way to take less, but I have no confidence that we, as a species, will do that.
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LibraryThing member bangerlm
I really love Hope Jahren's narrative style, how she narrates her own books, and her dry sense of humor. I also love when authors incorporate cross disciplinary research as she does.

This book is interesting, informative, disheartening, hopeful, sad, and a call to action. Reading this in the midst
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of the social distancing, and quarantining going on due to COVID-19 which is resulting in a significant reduction of "more" I feel like we as a society could use this as motivation for long term habitual change. Drive less, telecommute more, use airplanes less, travel closer to home, consume less.
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LibraryThing member mykl-s
I've never regreted reading anything, book or blog or web page, by Hope Jahren.
LibraryThing member KallieGrace
This is a concise, straightforward detailing of what has changed in our world to propel us towards irreversible climate change in the last few decades. There's really no arguing with the facts here, but the conclusion of "what can you do as one person to reduce your impact" is just not it.
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Widespread national change needs to be enacted to even make a dent, and no matter how many vegetarians pop up it just won't be enough. The tone here is somber, and with good reason.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2020

Physical description

8 inches

ISBN

0525563385 / 9780525563389
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