Diplomats from 193 countries prepare to hammer out a global climate treaty in Copenhagen. But few expect this year’s activism, politics, or diplomacy to change the game. The 21st century to-do list keeps growing. What will it take to accelerate change?

Three recent books say that it’s all about thinking. In The End of the Long Summer, Dianne Dumanoski tells how our thinking got us in planet-scale hot water; in Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand advocates heresy to get us out; in Thinking in Systems, the late Donella Meadows teaches a different way of thinking altogether.

While the subject matter of this trio of titles may sound familiar to Worldchanging readers, all three books deserve a careful read. Each of these authors is an elder with wisdom to impart. It’s up to the generation building a bright green future to match that wisdom to new challenges.

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n The End of the Long Summer, Dumanoski applies the lessons of the ozone story to the challenge she calls “a planetary emergency . . . that involves far more than the pressing problem of climate change.” She examines evolutionary and modern history for clues about our capacity – as a species and as a civilization – to act. Dumanoski’s criterion for success in the coming century is not prosperity, but survival. If she is right, success will boil down to our ability to “shockproof” societies to withstand changes unlike any confronted during the 10,000-year run of the civilization project.

Her storyline is not for the faint of heart. Human activities have destabilized several fundamental flows of the Earth system. The comparative climate stability experienced during the “long summer” of the last 10,700 years is the exception in Earth’s history. Big changes in climate are underway, no matter what actions societies take to control emissions. Abrupt climate changes are possible and growing more likely as carbon emissions rise. The thinking that built a globalized civilization capable of disrupting planetary systems also makes that civilization more vulnerable to the consequences of instability.

Related posts:

1. Planetary Boundaries
2. Johan Röckstrom talks about Planetary Boundaries
3. Books on global sustainability

• Common Wealth: Economics for a crowded planet
• Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development
• The Dominant Animal: Human evolution and the environment
• The Bridge at the Edge of the World
• Earth in the Balance
• The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the global environment
• How the Rich are Destroying the Earth
• Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?
• Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet
• Blubberland: The dangers of happiness
• Enough: Breaking free from the world of more
• The Big Earth Book
• The Sustainability Project

For example,
How the Rich are Destroying the Earth, by Hervé Kempf

Refreshingly, this slim, searing, openly political essay on environmental degradation points the finger of blame at the left for ignoring ecology, as well as the rich for over-consuming and creating damaging role models for society to follow.

Kempf walks in the long shadow of one of industrial society’s most quietly influential political economists, Thorstein Veblen. Kempf, though, is much angrier and less nuanced.

Whereas Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, wrote about economics from an almost anthropological point of view, Kempf writes more as a campaigning journalist. His target is the social strata he terms the “predatory oligarchy”, whom he accuses of having “no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology.”

The book’s coverage of environmental issues will be very familiar to many audiences, but it is well-written nevertheless. At times his turns of phrase are philosophically enigmatic in the tradition of the French footballer, Eric Cantona: for example, there is a section headed “We are all Salmon” (a tale concerning polychlorinated biphenyls).

Where Kempf adds value is in highlighting the threat to democracy at the heart of the oligarchy’s response to the very environmental crises that they, he argues, are themselves largely responsible for creating.

Reviewed by Andrew Simms

Related posts:

1. Three books about planetary transformation
2. Books: Social demoncratic thought, peer review, and genetic engineering
3. Sustainability Science Program at Arizona State University