Reviews for Introduction to Marine Biogeochemistry

The average rating for Introduction to Marine Biogeochemistry based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-19 00:00:00 Jimmy Mancini As a daily newspaper journalist I once attempted to research and write a Front Page story detailing the problems associated with Peak Oil. It was part of my intellectual growth, I suppose, in that I was awakening to energy issues and beginning to incorporate them into my knowledge of urban planning and transportation issues. I remember working my ass off to get that story - to localize and regionalize what amounted to a global issue - and working with the photographer to illustrate it. I remember getting up at the ungodly hour of 3 a.m. just so we could ride a shuttle van with a person I found who decided to jettison her car because of high gas prices and who naturally breathed real life into my story. Anyway, the photographer and I were both excited about the story, about getting at something big. To this day, the photographer, Dean Koepfler, remembers it. I actually spoke to him during a social occasion last year, and our attempt in 2005 to raise the public's consciousness of Peak Oil was one of the first things he mentioned to me as we shared war stories from the newsroom. "You were right," Dean said, almost wistfully. Maybe I was. The Front Page story never ran. It got junked into a sidebar and tucked inside where it played second (third? fourth?) fiddle to a story about alternative fuels. The story behind why it got junked is long and not worth going into right now. But after reading "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" by Richard Heinberg, I can't stop thinking about my attempt at what Heinberg has more comprehensively accomplished: showing why we better get serious about rescaling our lives in light of the end of the cheap oil age. I can't stop thinking about the fact that if people honestly processed what Heinberg has accomplished with this book, they would have to think differently and act differently and understand just how energy (particularly oil and natural gas) undergird everything we do, and how that undergirding is breaking apart. I can't stop feeling sad about how my story never saw the light of day - isn't that what journalists and newspapers are supposed to do? Tell people something they don't know, preferably something important? Heinberg even takes a swipe at mainstream newspapers for failing to tell people the broader story about oil and energy when they had one of the best opportunities to do so: when gas prices were skyrocketing earlier this decade. I feel like calling him up and telling him I tried. It is a strange feeling to read a really good book that marshals scads of evidence and fact and science to blow up people's misconceptions about how the world really works and then think to yourself: How many people know about this book, how many people are going to read it, how many people are going to understand that Heinberg isn't out to depress them but to motivate them to act in the face of physics and reality and the laws of thermodynamics? Heinberg's book is the most comprehensive - and technically, albeit densely, precise - rundown of our energy predicament I've ever read, covering everything from geopolitics and photovoltaic cells to oil and natural gas depletion. Everything you ever wanted to know about energy and how it supports our modern industrial life is right here. And Heinberg lays out a number of things we can do to deal with the coming oil crash. The United States has something like 5 percent of the world's population and uses a quarter of its natural resources. We consume the most oil. We support client states that oppress their indigenous populations so that we can enjoy the spoils of their resources. In our relationship with Saudi Arabia, we have one of the nastiest geopolitical foreign policy arrangements in the history of the planet. And, as this telling excerpt shows, we've been waging wars and implementing policies to secure the energy to maintain our wealth and hegemony for a long time: "The U.S. policy of maintaining resource dominance is not new. Shortly after World War II, a brutally frank State Department Policy Planning Study authored by George F. Kennan, the American Ambassador to Moscow, noted: 'We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality ... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.'" Incredible, isn't it? Are people paying attention to this? I mean, enough people to actually bring about significant change? Oh, I forgot. They're busy watching "Gossip Girl." Well, as the title of Heinberg's book starkly puts it, the party's over. OIl is a finite resource. So is natural gas. And we're on the downslope of both. Coal is a poor substitute, and, when used, poisons the earth. Nuclear, while arguably better for the planet, is scary and just too costly to make happen on the scale we'd need to continue civilization as we know it. Wind power will help, but can't be scaled to the present footprint of human civilization. Solar will help. But, as with wind power, scalability is extremely problematic. From Heinberg's point of view - and he backs it with plenty of evidence - our modern industrial society is a 100-year anomaly of sorts that was enabled by cheap, abundant oil, and, by extracting it and not caring about the consequences, we overshot our population and had a lot of fun and manufactured a lot of plastic and fertilized the fuck out of our soils and caused ecological damage and now here we are, facing the cliff, the downside of Hubbert's Peak, and we're still willing to listen to any politician who'll tell us, hey folks, it's OK, you can keep the party going. So, what do we do? Heinberg lays out a comprehensive set of actions, local, regional and global, toward sustainability. He covers everything from farming and transportation to finance and foreign policy. Make no mistake, though, he believes there isn't enough oil or natural gas to sustain the current population or physical makeup of civilization. As a result, population will have to come down, communities will have to power down and make other living arrangements, and, to make this transition bearable, we need to get to work on it quickly. Technology isn't going to save us. Getting better at pumping more oil out of the ground isn't going to save us. And remember: it takes energy to produce energy. If we want to rescale and prepare for renewable sources of energy (i.e., wind, solar), Heinberg argues, then we should start investing our current energy reserves into the project of building wind turbines and solar communities. Instead, Heinberg worries, we'll probably just continue throwing it at the fossil-fuel party whose biggest guests include our gas-guzzling National Automobile Fleet and our Middle Eastern client states who'd love to give us more oil but would like a nice big shipment of guns with which to properly oppress their civilian population. What Heinberg envisions is people embracing egalitarian living arrangements, and local farming and economies. What this will require is detoxification from consumerism and TV watching and the belief that you can get something for nothing. Also, it would help if people would understand that money isn't money; money is simply a medium of exchange to simplify the process of trading one thing for another, so that you don't have to carry around beaver pelts and trade them for large boulders. Money is petrodollars. Money is energy. Without energy, money is meaningless. When I think about Heinberg's book, I still think about my ill-fated attempt at researching and writing a big piece about Peak Oil. My story never saw the light of day. But, as Heinberg's updated and expanded book points out, the issue of Peak Oil increasingly is finding its way into the mainstream. That's good. Then again, the mainstream (whether it's mainstream media, thought, culture, etc.) seems to have a way of dismissing people like Heinberg and their books. I've seen it before. Hell, I've experienced it before. I suppose the best way to think about Peak Oil (and Peak Natural Gas, etc.) is in a local way. That is, what can we do where we live? In my journalism days, at least I tried. At least I tried. Now, with the fundamental problem of the end of the cheap oil age, I'm thinking about what I should do to prepare for the future. Thankfully, there is more than one answer to that question.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-25 00:00:00 Christian Knoche This book will ruin your life. You will never feel confident or sanguine about the future again. But you must read it. Take the blue pill - or is it the red? In any case, best to wake up but it's a harsh awakening. You can never go back.