Publisher's Hardcover (Large Print) ©2020 | -- |
Livestock. Climatic factors.
Animal culture.
Sustainable agriculture.
Large type books.
Extending an argument that began with Eating Animals (2009), novelist Foer (Here I Am, 2016, etc.) traces climate change squarely to human deeds and misdeeds.Our species, suggests the author, just isn't very smart when it comes to thinking ahead and doing something about errant behavior. "We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane," he writes, "and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way." It behooves us to get better at the latter, since ever more intense hurricanes—and blizzards, droughts, and all the other portents of a drastically changing climate—are in the offing for the near-term future. There are things we can do to ameliorate the situation: For one thing, we "need to use cars far less," but we also need to pat ourselves on the back a bit less when we do something virtuous of the sort, since there's so much else to do. One critically important thing, writes Foer, is to eat lower on the food chain. A prominent driver of climate change is deforestation, and a prominent engine of deforestation is clearing ground for animal agriculture. As he notes, "sixty percent of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food," so lessening the number of animals slated to be eaten will decrease the rate and scale of deforestation. "It will be impossible to defuse the ticking time bomb without reducing our consumption of animal products," reads a chapter title that scarcely needs supporting text. That's a big, even revolutionary demand, but it's not an impossible one by Foer's estimation. After all, all of us humans got together and, at least for a time, cured polio because we took our vaccine, and even if we don't want to hear it, the ticking is getting louder and louder.Foer is not likely to sway climate-change skeptics, but his lucid, patient, and refreshingly short treatise is as good a place to start as any.
Horn Book
Kirkus Reviews (Mon Oct 07 00:00:00 CDT 2024)
New York Times Book Review
The oldest suicide note was written in ancient Egypt about four thousand years ago. Its original translator titled it "Dispute with the Soul of One Who Is Tired of Life." The first line reads, "I opened my mouth to my soul, that I might answer what it said." Careening between prose, dialogue, and poetry, what follows is a person's effort to persuade his soul to consent to suicide.
I learned about that note from The Book of Endings, a compilation of facts and anecdotes that also includes the dying wishes of Virgil and Houdini; elegies to the dodo and the eunuch; and explanations of the fossil record, the electric chair, and man-made obsolescence. I wasn't a particularly morbid child, but for years I carried that morbid paperback around with me.
The Book of Endings also taught me that my every inhalation includes molecules from Julius Caesar's final exhalation. The fact thrilled me--the magical compression of time and space, the bridging of what felt like myth and my life of autumn raking and primitive video games in Washington, D.C.
The implications were almost unbelievable. If I had just inhaled Caesar's last breath (Et tu, Brute?), then I also must have inhaled Beethoven's (I will hear in heaven), and Darwin's (I am not the least afraid to die). And that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Rosa Parks, and Elvis, and the Pilgrims and Native Americans who attended the first Thanksgiving, and the author of the first suicide note, and even the grandfather I had never met. Ever the descendent of survivors, I imagined Hitler's final breath rising through ten feet of the Führerbunker's concrete roof, thirty feet of German earth, and the trampled roses of the Reich Chancellery, then breaching the Western Front and crossing the Atlantic Ocean and forty years on its way to the second-floor window of my childhood bedroom, where it would inflate me like a deathday balloon.
And if I had swallowed their last gasps, I must also have swallowed their first, and every breath between. And every breath of everyone. And not only of humans, but all other animals, too: the class gerbil that had died in my family's care, the still-warm chickens my grandmother had plucked in Poland, the final breath of the final passenger pigeon. With each inhale, I absorbed the story of life and death on Earth. The thought granted me an aerial view of history: a vast web woven from one strand. When Neil Armstrong touched boot to lunar surface and said "One small step for man . . . ," he sent out, through the polycarbonate of his visor, into a world without sound, molecules of Archimedes hollering "Eureka!" as he ran naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse, having just discovered that the bathwater displaced by his body was equal to the weight of his body. (Armstrong would leave that boot on the moon, to compensate for the weight of the moon rocks he would bring back.) When Alex, the African grey parrot who was trained to converse at the level of a five-year-old human, uttered his final words-- "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you."--he also exhaled the panting of sled dogs who pulled Roald Amundsen across ice sheets that have since melted and released the cries of exotic beasts brought to the Colosseum to be slaughtered by gladiators. That I had a place in all of that--that I could not escape my place in all of that--was what I found most astonishing.
Caesar's ending was also a beginning: his was among the first recorded autopsies, which is how we know that he was stabbed twenty-three times. The iron daggers are gone. His blood-soaked toga is gone. The Curia of Pompey, in which he was killed, is gone, and the metropolis in which it stood exists only as ruins. The Roman Empire, which once covered two mil- lion square miles and encompassed more than 20 percent of the world's population, and whose disappearance was as unimaginable as that of the planet itself, is gone.
It's hard to think of a more ephemeral artifact of a civilization than a breath. But it's impossible to think of a more enduring one.
Despite my recalling so much about it, there was no Book of Endings. When I tried to confirm its existence, I found instead Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Every- body, published when I was twelve. It contains Houdini, the fossil record, and many other things that I remembered, but not Caesar's final breath, and not the "Dispute with the Soul," which I must have learned about elsewhere. Those small corrections troubled me--not because they were themselves important, but because my recollections were so clear.
I was further unsettled when I researched the first suicide note and reflected on its title--on the fact that it was titled at all. That we misremember is disturbing enough, but the prospect of being misremembered by those who come after us is deeply upsetting. It remains unknown whether the author of the first suicide note even killed himself. "I opened my mouth to my soul," he writes in the beginning. But the soul has the last word, urging the man to "cling to life." We don't know how the man responded. It is entirely possible that the dispute with the soul resolved with the choice of life, postponing the author's last breath. Perhaps a confrontation with death revealed the most compelling case for survival. A suicide note resembles nothing more closely than its opposite.
Excerpted from We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves with our reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, We Are the Weather, reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat and dont eat for breakfast.