Hope Jahren

"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels. In short, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming and automobiles--that, even as they help us, release untenable amounts of carbon dioxide. She explains the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gases--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and the science-based tools that could help us fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of warming and a capsule history of human development, The Story of More illuminates the link between our consumption habits and our endangered earth. It is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it"--

How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

The Story of More

Hannah Yang

This is a great, accessible, science-backed introduction to climate change and a variety of different environmental/social issues. While I personally feel like most of the information was familiar (and at times, presented somewhat patronizingly? Jahren is a teacher), I am sure this will be an eye-opening read for many, especially younger students.

Its call for individuals to embrace a 'Story of Enough' is compelling, and I agree with Jahren in that our individual actions can matter + that climate change believers need to approach our calls to action with humility/introspection rather than self-righteousness. At the same time, calling upon a billion individuals to consume less is a much more scattered effort than placing more pressure on governments / corporations to take more accountability and action. Also, the kind of cultural reset Jahren hopes for seems difficult to maintain solely by the wills of individuals without being backed by governments and corporations. 

I'm far from an expert, but The Story of More is just a little too optimistic about individual willpower for me -- though it is an excellent starting point on the subject and a quick read worth your time.

Andrew John Kinney

Hope Jahren has written a page-turner of a book, full of humor, about a serious subject: climate change. As the title says, the book is about how we got here and what to do about it, and her illustrations of the sheer size of humans' impact of the planet are helpful in terms of getting your head around the issue. Some of her illustrative examples are laugh out loud funny, like how she provides a visual image of the quantity of, er, human waste produced on a daily basis by the residents of St Paul, MN - fyi, her brother works at the Sanitation Department for St Paul, so she has an inside track for this information. The book is full of numbers and numerical analysis of our predicament, but all of it is presented in an accessible way, as when Dr. Jahren explains the massive effect that air travel has on atmospheric CO2 by comparing the gas mileage of a car (about 30 mpg) to a jet airliner, which is.....about 500 FEET per gallon. When I read that, being a math geek, I thought, that can't be right, because that means a plane would have to carry nearly 10 times as many gallons of fuel as the number of miles it is going to fly, for example, 3625 miles from NYC to Paris. So I looked up the fuel capacity of a Boeing 777, and sure enough, it can carry more than 48,000 gallons of fuel. Wow.

The book is full of this sort of concrete information that makes you think, and helps you understand how big an impact humans, and especially those from the OECD countries are having on the planet. For instance, did you know that the total weight of plastic produced each year exceeds the total weight of humanity? Yikes! Many of her points have to do with either a) how much more efficient we are at producing food and other essentials than we were 50 years ago, or b) how much of the available stock of everything we have used up. And these two points have implications that are obvious and not obvious; often the more efficient a process is, the less room for disruption there is, and the closer we cut things in terms of taking the maximum possible number of fish or trees or whatever, the closer we push the larger system to collapse. So, for example, American agriculture is hugely efficient in terms of extracting the absolute maximum yield from an acre of farmland, but what if average temperatures rise 3 degrees F, and weather (rain, wind, etc) become less predictable? All other things being equal, yields will decrease because we won't be able to maintain that astonishing level of productivity absent the reliable weather we are used to. And with regard to fish stocks, scientists estimate we are using 75% of the stocks that are available. Once we pass 100%, the fish stocks will collapse, and we know this because there are precedents, like the Atlantic cod fishery, which collapsed in 1992, and has still not fully recovered 30 years later.

Hope Jahren's key message is we should all consume less and share more, and that is a real part of any strategy to get through the next 30-50 years and avoid global warming's worst effects. OECD residents need to use less electricity, less fuel, drive less, fly less, eat less red meat (by the way, the huge inefficiencies involved in producing the massive amounts of meat eaten by Americans gets a full chapter from Dr. Jahren). She also talks about ways to reduce CO2 emissions by converting to renewable sources of energy, but she is realistic about how much we can move in that direction, and her analysis provides a corrective to starry-eyed ideas of 100% renewable energy; maybe someday, but not with current technology. Which again means we have to reduce consumption to make ends meet on reducing CO2, and we have to keep those nuclear plants humming, at least for now.

But I feel I'm not doing justice to Hope Jahren's sense of humor in this review - the woman is funny! I often felt like she was channeling Kurt Vonnegut, only funnier. And her oft-expressed, deeply felt love for her science-teacher dad, and anecdotes related thereto were really moving. Her indignation at the amount of wasted food in the US arises naturally from growing up amongst the farm communities of southern Minnesota; she knows, as few Americans do, the back-breaking labor required to bring food to market, and wasting it just feels wrong to her, disrespectful of the labor. In many ways, I wanted to start reading this book again as soon as I finished it, and take notes, to have a summary of facts I can throw out in conversations about over-consumption and global warming. I may do that.

The one criticism I have is that Dr. Jahren did not go far enough down the road of explaining what we should do. Should we all buy electric cars? Well, not if the electricity to charge them comes from a coal-fired plant. Should we build 100 million scrubbers to pull the CO2 out of the air, as Elizabeth Kolbert has suggested? Will we need to shade the Earth with a particulate screen to hold down temperatures to bridge to a decarbonized future? Dr. Jahren does point to the book, Drawdown (which is also an active science / engineering project and website) as a resource on these questions, but we need a consolidated, comprehensive plan, and that plan is not part of her book. Which, honestly, would be a lot to ask of one person, but I wish she had speculated a little, at least. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book more than any I've read lately on the subject of sustainability, and I highly recommend it. I liked it so much, I will shortly be buying the hardback version, and her earlier book, Lab Girl, just because I enjoy her writing so much.

P.S. - After writing this review, and after also reading Lab Girl, I read an interview with Hope Jahren in which she was asked about her literary influences:

"Interviewer: Who is the author, or what is the work, that has been most influential to you?

HJ: There are so many. I think Kurt Vonnegut is the voice that most rings in my memory — a clear direct voice, with a long-sounding tenor of ache, simply confessed — that is a voice that spoke to me most deeply when I read it, the one which I aspire to recreate as best I can."

I knew I was hearing echoes of Kurt in her writing!

Sarah Schumacher

Unfinished. I couldn’t really get into this, and while there might be a link to an online bibliography I missed, when I realized there weren’t any sources listed for the many, many quoted statistics I was out (I made it 1/3 of the way through).

I loved Lab Girl and recommend it, but this was a very different type of book. It felt more like a introductory primer, so I’m probably not the target audience, but if that was the intent it’s even more important that sources are cited.

From the bestselling author of Lab Girl comes a slim, urgent missive on the defining issue of our time: here is Hope Jahren on climate change, our timeless pursuit of more, and how the same human ambition that got us here can also be our salvation. Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels. In short, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming and automobiles--that, even as they help us, release untenable amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. She explains the current and projected consequences of greenhouse gases--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and shares the science-based tools that could help us fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of warming and a capsule history of human development, The Story of More illuminates the link between our consumption habits and our endangered earth. It is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it.

Jen Estrella

All of the want and suffering in the world-all of it-arises not from the earth's inability to produce but from our inability to share.
Need to get my own copy so I can make annotations

Ruby Huber

listened to this in almost one sitting. Short, simple, and extremely upsetting! Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is probably in my top 10 favorite books, and I loved her take on our current climate change mess, and there were some alarming stats that its good to be reminded of, even for those of us who are overall pretty conscious of our impact.

Katherine

A great, optimistic primer on climate change, how we got here, and what we can do about it. Super approachable and easy to read.

Jeremy Cote

When I read Lab Girl a few years ago, I couldn't help but notice how great of a writer Hope Jahren was. This book is no different. It's short, but packs a serious punch. The chapters blend into each other beautifully, and I found the book distressing but also hopeful. It really makes for a thought-provoking read. Jahren is clear that her goal isn't to spread despair, but instead is to give people a chance to think about their actions and how they can be changed. I know that I'll be doing a lot of reflection from this book (the last part of the book helps with that). The writing itself is also amazing, so I would really recommend this book for people who are interested in our globe and what is happening.

The Story of More might paint a bleak picture of our Earth, but it also urges each and every one of us to create our own Story of More when it comes to improving our lives in relation to consumption.

The Story of More How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

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