Third Horse in the Troika?
Posted by Eric Roston at 6/28/2008 10:22 AM and is filed under Civil Society,Economics,media,carbon cycle,Books,sausage-making,The Carbon Age,carbon science 
Jennifer Ouellette thinks of her blog(s) as a writer's workshop. I think I need to take that approach, too. I'm so used to writing writing writing until I'm satisfied with the prose (to the extent time will allow) it's really been an impediment on my blogging.
The Carbon Age came out this week. I thought this would be a good moment to talk about how I began to think about the project during its long gestation. Over the last two years or so, I've been describing it as a (humble!) complement to two seminal works: Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
Friedman first. Flat is a book that forcefully links American technological progress and economic growth to scientific education and scientific literacy. Friedman spends a lot of time with Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who has traveled the country for several years now talking about the "quiet crisis" in this area.
Friedman's book is in the same vein as a report that I think about quite a bit. In 2001, former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman led a commission on threats to national security in the 21st century. Released in February 2001, the report's primary recommendation was that the U.S. expect extremist Muslim terrorism. Seven months later they were proven frightfully prescient.
The second recommendation in this report--no less prescient--is that science and education are in dire need of attention. I interviewed Newt Gingrich in 2005, when Rising Above the Gathering Storm came out. He said something so unambiguous I almost couldn't believe my ears: "Scientific illiteracy is a threat to national survival."
Friedman describes the problem at hand and illustrates it with his ever-vivid reporting and personal anecdotes. Considering The World Is Flat, the Hart-Rudman Commission report, and Gathering Storm, I decided that The Carbon Age should aim to provide some of the science that this troika so powerfully argues is missing from American public life. (Somebody please remind me to rip Edward Hirsh's 1987 Cultural Literacy to shreds this week.)
These works on scientific literacy needed a complement.
That brings us to the former Vice President. The popular writing on climate change has long been extraordinary, from Bill McKibben's The End of Nature to the more recent The Weather Makers (Tim Flannery), to Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth Kolbert). The king of popular communication of climate change is, of course, Al Gore. By the time An Inconvenient Truth was released, I was advanced in my research and writing. I knew from the get-go that I didn't want to write "another climate book" -- given the quality of the aforementioned tomes. But watching An Inconvenient Truth crystallized for me what I was actually doing in The Carbon Age.
These works, too, I discovered, could use a complement, a book about the very dynamic, but very absent fundamental science of how the world works.
IPCC conclusions and a world of scientific research on climate change had made their way into the public sphere. But very few writers focused on the big picture: How does climate change usually happen, when humans weren't hitting the planet like a meteor? What is carbon, really? What are the properties that make it life's core element and maker of diamonds -- and how do these properties make it a heat-trapping gas in CO2? Many people, Gore most prominently, had shown how the Earth we are used to is broken. But how is it supposed to work in the first place.
This touches on the last motivation that I'll write about today. Science has become an umbrella term, really, for an astonishing number of specialized professions -- the disciplines. The number of scientific disciplines has exploded in the last five to 20 to 40 years. This is one reason why the public may feel so alienated from science -- it's just too technical. So one solution was to just throw out all of these disciplines, all of the -ologies, and put them in one big box, called "carbon science." In The Carbon Age, many disciplines all rub shoulders, and because they're all in the same box, the dynamic nature of carbon comes to the fore. It's a simple way to turn all of these "sciences" back into one "science."
So that's where The Carbon Age fits, I hope people agree. I think of it graphically, like this: There should be a companion book to The World Is Flat that tells the story of the science Friedman rightly points out is missing. And there should be a companion book to An Inconvenient Truth that talks about manmade climate change in the context of the overall Earth system -- and what carbon fundamentally is.
The Carbon Age came out this week. I thought this would be a good moment to talk about how I began to think about the project during its long gestation. Over the last two years or so, I've been describing it as a (humble!) complement to two seminal works: Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
Friedman first. Flat is a book that forcefully links American technological progress and economic growth to scientific education and scientific literacy. Friedman spends a lot of time with Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who has traveled the country for several years now talking about the "quiet crisis" in this area.
Friedman's book is in the same vein as a report that I think about quite a bit. In 2001, former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman led a commission on threats to national security in the 21st century. Released in February 2001, the report's primary recommendation was that the U.S. expect extremist Muslim terrorism. Seven months later they were proven frightfully prescient.
The second recommendation in this report--no less prescient--is that science and education are in dire need of attention. I interviewed Newt Gingrich in 2005, when Rising Above the Gathering Storm came out. He said something so unambiguous I almost couldn't believe my ears: "Scientific illiteracy is a threat to national survival."
Friedman describes the problem at hand and illustrates it with his ever-vivid reporting and personal anecdotes. Considering The World Is Flat, the Hart-Rudman Commission report, and Gathering Storm, I decided that The Carbon Age should aim to provide some of the science that this troika so powerfully argues is missing from American public life. (Somebody please remind me to rip Edward Hirsh's 1987 Cultural Literacy to shreds this week.)
These works on scientific literacy needed a complement.
That brings us to the former Vice President. The popular writing on climate change has long been extraordinary, from Bill McKibben's The End of Nature to the more recent The Weather Makers (Tim Flannery), to Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth Kolbert). The king of popular communication of climate change is, of course, Al Gore. By the time An Inconvenient Truth was released, I was advanced in my research and writing. I knew from the get-go that I didn't want to write "another climate book" -- given the quality of the aforementioned tomes. But watching An Inconvenient Truth crystallized for me what I was actually doing in The Carbon Age.
These works, too, I discovered, could use a complement, a book about the very dynamic, but very absent fundamental science of how the world works.
IPCC conclusions and a world of scientific research on climate change had made their way into the public sphere. But very few writers focused on the big picture: How does climate change usually happen, when humans weren't hitting the planet like a meteor? What is carbon, really? What are the properties that make it life's core element and maker of diamonds -- and how do these properties make it a heat-trapping gas in CO2? Many people, Gore most prominently, had shown how the Earth we are used to is broken. But how is it supposed to work in the first place.
This touches on the last motivation that I'll write about today. Science has become an umbrella term, really, for an astonishing number of specialized professions -- the disciplines. The number of scientific disciplines has exploded in the last five to 20 to 40 years. This is one reason why the public may feel so alienated from science -- it's just too technical. So one solution was to just throw out all of these disciplines, all of the -ologies, and put them in one big box, called "carbon science." In The Carbon Age, many disciplines all rub shoulders, and because they're all in the same box, the dynamic nature of carbon comes to the fore. It's a simple way to turn all of these "sciences" back into one "science."
So that's where The Carbon Age fits, I hope people agree. I think of it graphically, like this: There should be a companion book to The World Is Flat that tells the story of the science Friedman rightly points out is missing. And there should be a companion book to An Inconvenient Truth that talks about manmade climate change in the context of the overall Earth system -- and what carbon fundamentally is.
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