‘It Got Me Thinking’ … More!

Review by Bill Doughty––

Hope Jahren quotes a bit of eye-opening graffiti at the very end of her latest book, “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here” (Vintage Books, Penguin Random House; 2020).

Jahren –– gifted scientist, teacher, painter of words, and author of “Lab Girl” –– looks all around for inspiration, and she finds it in trees, fish, cornfields, slaughterhouses, sanitation systems, memories, history, prehistory, and, yes, graffiti. More about the graffiti in a moment.

Ford, Edison, and Firestone –– and trees.

In this beautiful, funny, but melancholy personal reflection on climate change, Jahren examines the survivability of our species and the choices we make. Can we help each other and the planet we share? She’s not sure. But Hope drives her points home: use less, share more.

“The Story of More” opens with a meeting between Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and tire magnate Harvey Firestone. Edison said, as a brilliant insight, “The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” Then, Jahren imagines Ford and Firestone, after listening to Edison’s insight, “nodded politely, finished their drinks, and went straight back to motorizing the planet.”

By the way, Jahren admits her disdain for the automobile:

“While pursuing the ever-elusive more, we inadvertently trapped ourselves into metal boxes. Now we spend our mornings and our evenings maneuvering among the other metal boxes, watching each other through the glass.”

But she really, really hates “crap cars.” She’s convinced, rightfully so, that most Americans (especially those over the age of forty) have a story of a “crap car” from college with doors that would fall off, windows that wouldn’t crank open, starters that wouldn’t start, or, as in the case of Jahren's car described in "Lab Girl," where you could look down while driving and see the street whizz by.

Hope and beloved dad celebrate her birthday.

There are other ties to her wonderful first book “Lab Girl” –– her childhood in the heartland; Coco, the family Chesapeake Bay Retriever; co-worker Bill; and loving memories of her scientist dad who loved to always say, when served a Coke with lunch, “Coke with chow; wow!”

Of course, her fond memories and other ties to the past are her way to tie in science. “Coke with chow; wow!” leads to discussion of sugar production and consumption. When Coco jumps into Kailua Bay and swims toward the waverider buoy, it’s a disarming way to discuss a scientific instrument that measures sea levels and shows a rise of seven inches since 1969, the year Jahren was born. That's around the time I read Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

The 1960s is when “ecology” first became a buzzword in high school and college campuses, and a year before Earth Day started, recognizing the damages of overpopulation, fossil fuel production and consumption, and a decline in forests and animal species.

Jahren speaks frankly that we are on the way toward a sixth mass extinction, with 25 percent of species expected to be extinct by the year 2050:

“All species will go extinct eventually, even our own: it is one of nature’s imperatives … [but] we still have control over our demise –– namely, how long will it 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.”

What can we do?

Jahren provides the answers in one of the book’s several appendices, with steps to examine values, gather information, consider personal activities, evaluate personal investments, and see how to move institutions “toward consistency with your values.” Imagine how big a difference can be made if each person makes enlightened decisions to doing something to counter climate change, environmental destruction, and mass extinctions.

“Knowledge is responsibility,” Jahren says, and people can have hope, but “having hope requires courage” not fear or “lazy nihilism” as an excuse not to roll up our sleeves and make personal choices –– even as simple as what foods we choose to eat, how much water we use, and where we get our energy and how we use it. 

It’s also important to consider the source of information we receive. What’s believable? What’s backed by science –– even if scientists can be “both right and wrong,” as she illustrates early in the book. She examines claims by Aristotle, Thomas Malthus, M. King Hubbert, and Henry George, who “came the closest to being right about population growth” –– population kept up with food production (at least so far). Also, according to George:

“Most of the want and suffering that we see in the world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share.”

Jahren also examines claims from a Norwegian explorer and U.S. Navy experts.

“Back in 1969, the Norwegian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his colleagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea and that this could change weather patterns such that farming would become impossible in North America ten to twenty years hence. The New York Times picked up the story, and Balchen was promptly shouted down by Walter Whittman of the U.S. Navy, who had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.

“As is the case with most scientists most of the time, Balchen was both right and wrong in his claims. By 1999, the submarines that had been cruising the Arctic Ocean since the 1950s could clearly see that polar sea ice had thinned drastically during the twentieth century –– thinned by almost half. Nevertheless, it’s been fifty years since Balchen graced the pages of the Times and American agriculture has yet to feel the full effect of any melting. Which, technically, means that Whittman was also both wrong and right.”

Jahren says that it’s not good science or good strategy to incite panic about fossil fuels running out. “Scientists have been accused of crying wolf since 1939, when the director of the Naval Petroleum Reserves informed Congress that America’s oil reserves would not outlast another world war.”

Scientists are better off when they maintain their skepticism, humility, and sense of awe in the face of chaos and the unknown. “Studying biology,” Jahren writes, “is like studying a Hieronymous Bosch painting: The chaos that you sense from a few steps back only increases as you lean forward to examine it more closely.” Case in point: Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights":

And it’s important, Professor Jahren says, to teach and not preach. “My own goal is to inform and not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I’ve found that fear makes us turn away from an issue, whereas information draws us in.”

“An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness,” she concludes.

Which brings us back to the humble line of graffiti she credits in the acknowledgements at the end of “More.” Along with tons of scientific papers, journals, and other sources she cites is this random bit of wisdom at the corner of Blindernveien and Apalveien in her home of Oslo, Norway:

“We worship an invisible god and slaughter visible nature –– without realizing that this nature we slaughter is the invisible god we worship.”

Jahren thanks the anonymous author and concludes, “It got me to thinking.”

In “The Story of More” Hope Jahren presents a wake up call to people who might otherwise prefer to sleep through reality without thinking –– or deny the nightmare of environmentally devastating climate change.

(It was a career highlight to sponsor Hope Jahren for a visit to Pearl Harbor in 2017, where she spoke at NOAA's Daniel K. Inouye Regional Center about many of the same themes in this book and the need to address climate change. Jahren toured USS Halsey (DDG 97) and learned how the Navy helps protect the environment while protecting the nation.)

Above: Dr. Hope Jahren, a geobiologist and New York Times bestselling author, speaks to audience members during a science and leadership seminar April 10, 2017 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility in Pearl Harbor. Jahren's visit was part of an open discussion on science, leadership and facing challenges in the workplace, as well as readings from her book "Lab Girl,"which documents her adventures studying plant life throughout the course of her career. (MC2 Jeff Troutman)

Top photo: Airman Apprentice Nicole Duquet, aviation machinist mate, left, and Seaman Kimberly Usrey, boatswain's mate, both assigned to Transient Personnel Unit Norfolk, plant flowers during a base-wide Earth Day cleanup in 2009 at Naval Station Norfolk. (PO3 John Suits)