---
bibliography: bibliography.bib
title: Reading log
author: Joe Carstairs
---

## 2026-04-16

## 2026-04-15

### @{net-zero}

A very calm, practical book. Economics for a popular audience. The big idea: we
need unilateral action, not multilateral. Each nation that obeys these three
principles will eliminate their contribution to climate change in the cheapest
and most effective way: polluter pays, public money for public goods, net
environmental benefit. Decarbonisation is costly, a carbon tax is the most efficient way of pricing this cost in.

I found him persuasive.

I was surprised to see his statistics showing that the world as a whole has done
nothing to stop causing climate change, and has continued to accelerate at the
same rate. However, I was convinced, because of his pivot from looking at
production to looking at consumption. While Europe has hugely decreased its
contribution to carbon production, its contribution to carbon consumption has
not budged, because it has offshored its heavy industries to China, where those
industries are fuelled by coal.

It was not particularly hope-inspiring. It put the onus on national politicians,
and I already don't feel hopeful that national politicians in the UK or much
anywhere else are capable of doing anything sensible. He persuaded me that this
is a sensible, practical course of action, but not that there is any likelihood
that it will happen nor that there is anything beyond mere token acts that I can
do to change anything. I enjoyed his candid, lucid, practical style. I felt like
he's the right sort of person to be running the country.

### @{heat}

George Monbiot had a hard-nosed pop-science proposal for the cheapest way we
could run the UK with a 90% cut in carbon emissions. He described what consumers
would need to be consuming, what infrastructure would need to exist. He didn't
attempt to explain the political route to get there. So, a utopian vision rather
than Realpolitik? His ultimate plea to his readers is to join a campaign group,
so that politicians will start making regulations to prohibit us from making
polluting consumption choices, albeit in ways which minimise the cost to our
lives of luxury. I was struck by his account (Chp 11) of how he struggled to
connect his abstract technological proposals to the people he beholds with his
eyes.

In his view, the problem with much environmental political campaigning up to now
is that it has assumed that consumers need to carry a very heavy burden, we need
to stop living the lives of luxury which fossil fuels have enabled, but this is
not politically feasible, because people don't want to give up their lives of
luxury.

Chp 1: in the Permian extinction, 90% of species and nearly all plants died. We are already on a course for droughts and shortages of water and food, and the melting of the Greenland ice cap. 2C of warming will unleash feedback loops.

Chp 2: Exxon funds climate misinformation, which ends up in mainstream media and
high politics.

Chp 11: it's hard to turn abstract scientific discussion into something
concrete. It's hard to connect it to the people I see with my eyes. I'm
vulnerable to hoping of a technological deus ex machina, but it's a dangerous
hope and must be extinguished. You need now to join a climate change campaign
group to pressure politicians to limit our freedom to continue polluting.

### @{turned-out-nice-again}

Richard Mabey pushed me to indigenise myself with my weather environment. He
showed how the weather can integrate with our moods, our art, our sense of
beauty, hope, joy, our activities and lifestyles, our environment. Living in
tune with the weather can lead us to react better to climate change, as we
listen to and accommodate the weather instead of fighting it.

Chp 5 argued that we need to accommodate the weather. He pointed to two events.
The first was the 1987 storm, how people said 'trees are at great danger from
nature,' when in fact, when we left the trees alone, they grew back with gusto.
Another is the slow advance of the sea along East Anglia's coastline, which
created the Broads in the thirteenth century, leading to houses on stilts and
special shoes, and now means a revival of stilt-houses, solar-powered boats, and
bin-barges. He told the story of the Jolly Sailors in Orford, where punters took
to the tables during a storm surge to carry on drinking, the landlord diving to
the cellar to retrieve the beer, the plaque now on the wall commemorating the
highest waterline. Contrast with building badly designed houses on floodplains,
or not building houses at all.

Chp 4 was about halcyon days, howthey can give a snub to big world events,
though seemingly only in an 'allegorical' way, seemingly nothing more than
making one feel better about things. Not about deep hope in my opinion, more
about living in tune with the weather.

## 2026-04-14

### @{wilding}

Isabella Tree made me feel hopeful. (I was already in an emotional state after
reading @{losing-eden}.) I was on the edge of tears three times while reading
_Wilding_.

_Wilding_ is the story of how Isabella and her husband rewilded their farm at Knepp in Sussex over twenty years, and the explosion of wildlife that resulted.

She tells a story of how, while we destroy nature in so much of the world at
large, this is a little haven, and you can do something to build a little haven,
too.

Could this have something in common with the vision of the New Jerusalem?

A phrase that stuck out to me (and nearly made me cry twice) was 'keystone
species' – if we start behaving properly, we humans can become a keystone
species.

> Brooke and Banksy \[two newly introduced beavers\] got straight to work.
> Within weeks, they had cut down or coppiced dozens of shrubs and small trees,
> and built a lodge and several dams. From a tiny, trickling stream, they have
> created a pond nearly 2 acres in size. In the sizzling drought of that summer
> \[2022\], the beaver pen was a haven for wildlife, and emerald-green
> _*watery kingdom*_, filled with insects and birdsong.

I noticed her revulsion at the term 'weed', and insisted that so-called 'weeds'
are in fact native grasses and wildflowers. We should never call them 'weeds'
because they are very productive for wildlife.

There was also a theme of 'letting nature take care of itself.'

She uses modern agricultural animals (though often rare breeds) to mimic the
ecological role of ancient native animals, many of which are now globally
extinct.

The scrog took over Knepp. With grazing to keep it in check and prevent it
turning into dense canopy, scrog is good for wildlife.

She hates pesticides and artificial fertilisers.

Knepp is home to rare species threatened and/or in decline elsewhere, like
turtle doves, white storks, nightingales.

### @{losing-eden}

Lucy Jones made me feel hopeful. She made me want to get outside, touch nature
from the inside, take action, love, laugh, work. She made me feel that nature is
wonderful, and within reach, and we can do something, and we must do something
now, so let's go! Hooray, what joy! She made me go outside. I went to the shops
and found myself dangling my toes in the Braid Burn. I pondered what I could do.
I felt angry and frustrated when I couldn't think of what to do.

Key themes:

- We need nature for our mental health
- We have and are isolating ourselves from nature, which is suicidal
- We are in a crisis, and it will get worse until we change course
- We must stop destroying and start cherishing nature urgently
- We under-value nature, as if it is optional, not critical
- We must change our relationship with nature urgently

In Chp 1, she had a moving account of how in early adolescence, she turned her
emotional life off with depression and substance abuse, she became numb. To
recover, she needed nature. Recovery groups in churches with gardens. She felt
an urgent desire for nature. She walked in Walthamstow Marshes. Variety,
physicality, communion of species, light, wholeness vs alienation, isolation,
darkness, narrowness.

Chp 2. Evolutionary explanation for this? Biophilia hypothesis.

Chp 3. Children need outdoor play. UK forest schools lead the way. Joy for
children and for teachers.

Chp 6. Hard to persuade people to go for a walk in the woods, not what anyone
around them does, deviant, even though it's good for them.

Chp 7. Hard, irritating, to imagine the damage done by our consumption, the lies
of advertising. We don't see the damage we do. Grief perhaps needed, can
paralyse but can spur into action. I frequently worry about my daughter's
future, relate to BirthStrikers. I lead my daughter in thanking the food, not
just farmers, 'pig' not 'pork'.

Chp 8. Druid: as Jung exposed the psychological importance of sex, we're having
a similar revelation now about the psychological importance of nature.

Chp 10. Detroit, a biophilic city. Wild Law / Earth Jurisprudence. When the
Oneida had to move out of New York City, wolves were in the way, at the council
meetings, they asked, 'who speaks for the wolf?'

Chp 11. 'At the moment, the relationship between us and the natural world feels
like that of a truculent teenage daughter and her mother.' We need to fall in
love with nature again, stop destroying it, 'emergency,' 'Hero myth' of control
has gone too far. Time is not on our side. We must walk in the woods, say thanks
for our food, design biophilic cities, messy gardens, issue wildlife ID cards,
et alia. 'Becoming indigenous to place.' I used to feel fear at 'climate chaos
that would cause apocalyptic global instability,' guilt at having second child.
Now I feel hopeful. Action is happening. Changing relationship: not conquerors
but co-tenants.

## 2026-04-13

### @{greenhouse-effect}

Key themes:

- Warning
- Catastrophe now and in near future
- Government action
- International co-operation
- Hidden threat
- Urgency, crisis
- Scientific knowledge critically important

The authors emphasised that catastrophic effects of atmospheric pollution are
happening now and will get worse. The drought of 1988 in Africa and the USA,
threats of food shortage, and the ozone hole features prominently, but so do
floods, sea level rise, et alia.

Chp 1: increasing danger. The cause is all around us: combustion. (Hidden
threat?)

They emphasise action from governments and businesses. They briefly diverge to
claim that their book is addressed to individuals (Chp 8), asserting that the
root cause of the greenhouse effect is individual behaviour. But then it
subjects individual behaviour to bigger forces: ignorance (media environment),
poverty, third-world debt, corporate greed. It immediately turns to 'stories of
hope' entirely focused on action by NGOs, development banks, and governments.
However, it does also feature consumer advice, esp. Chp 7.

I noted an epigram by TH Huxley at the beginning of TH Huxley. The scientists to
the rescue of society?

Chp 5: Everest had three approaches. Budyko infamous for the wait-and-see
approach, accused of 'swearing in church', implies scientific research, not
enough happening. Adaptation necessary; climate change used as a bad excuse for
inaction by leaders in the Sahel. Moderation of the greenhouse effect also
necessary, implies not reducing consumption or limiting economic growth but
energy efficiency and renewables. Tim Wirth gave a speech to the US Senate
condensing Earth's history into 100 years: we must act in the next four seconds.

'Experiment' language used frequently. WMO 1985. Thatcher 27 Sep 1988 at annual dinner of Royal Society, 'Mrs Greenmantle,' motivated by public opinion, Hinkley Point, international politics? 'The massive experiment is going awry.'

There was a story in Chp 4 that international politics is waking up to the
threat. Thatcher, Bush 'White House effect', Gorbachov saying traditional
industrialisation means environmental catastrophe. In Chp 8, optimistic about
international co-operation, climate change as a common enemy around which the
divisions of the world must and therefore will crumble, ideological/economic
systems likely to converge, 'universal crusade to save the planet.'

Also in Chp 4: 'environmental security' idea, protecting environment needed for national security, climate change already causing millions of climate refugees.

Book written as a warning. Chp 4: 'We must begin to take action to reduce global
warming. And we must learn that global warming is in reality a global warning to
heed the thresholds of ecological tolerance. The massive experiment is going
wrong.'

Chp 2 an interesting history of climate science and action. 1957, Scripps, Roger
Revelle. 'Great geophysical experiment.' Mauna Loa vs Antarctic cores showed CO2
had increased since 1850. Early 1970s, computer models showing increasing CO2
and temperatures. No interest in first WCC 1979 Geneva, Kenneth Hare biting his
nails, but it created WCP with a remit to 'warn governments.' It produced dire
warnings. Needed alarmism to provoke interest? Prophetic function? Major warming
and weather events (esp droughts) helped to generate attention.

Chp 3. Climate change in the past makes the world look weird: extinctions of
major animals, Europe with no trees, hippos in the Sahara 6000ya. 21st century
may be more extreme, we can't know how much. Strong emphasis on 'we don't know
enough and need more research.'

### @{lost-words}

I noticed:

- Icons
- Jumbled letters hiding in the environment
- Bramble apocalypse
- Weasel-fire connection: 2 Pet 3:10?
- Things hidden in plain sight
- Remembering things (words, names) that had been forgotten
- Naming things without names

## References