Reviews for The Middle Path: Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe

The average rating for The Middle Path: Avoiding Environmental Catastrophe based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-27 00:00:00 Barbara Whittam I picked up this book after reading a series of articles by the author, Eric Lambin, a geographer. He's the sort of scientist who is gifted at asking interesting questions and has a very clear analytical expository style if not a wordsmith at least in english. He has authored a number of papers on forest transition - reaching equilibrium in deforestation/reforestation - across countries globally. The book lays out the challenges and thought behind the major strains of environmental policy for an educated popular audience. The middle path is meant to be one between the optimists (mainly certain brands of economists) and the pessimists (environmentalists and often ecologists). Lambin brings in a lot of popular/scholarly (e.g. Jared Diamond's Guns,Germs,and Steel) and scholarly work, and a lot of case histories. If the popular rhetoric doesn't really reflect it, I think we've reached a new, broader mode of thinking about environmental issues and Lambin tries to encapsulate it in this book. Some of the case histories are really interesting. Apparently if was only be happenstance that when refrigeration and air conditioning were developed that CFSs were chosen rather than other similar brominated compounds as refrigerants. This turns out to be very lucky b/c brominated compounds are 100 times more potent catalysts of ozone destruction. Perhaps a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon has been cleared, but the Amazon as a whole still only represents 4% of Brazil's gross national product and half of the Brazilian Amazon region's inhabitants live in poverty. The biggest environmental disaster of the 20th century in his view is the destruction of the Aral Sea. Once the 4th largest freshwater body in the world, it has been reduced by 50% in area and 75% in volume. This was done by diverting freshwater sources to irrigate farmland to grow cotton in the soviet era. The result has been the destruction of a valuable fishery and the salinization of a huge expanse of former range and agricultural land. The resulting feedbacks have changed regional climate and vegetation rendering large areas barren. In contrast, Lambin exposes the supposed advance of the Sahara in the Sahel as an erroneous conclusion based on data from too short a temporal sample. Vegetation shifts over long-term climate cycles are well-documented for the region and seem to have changed little as a result of human activities. However, misguided policy interventions under the belief that the Sahara was advancing - such settlement of formeerly nomadic peoples and their livestock - has exacerbated problems associated with population growth in the region. Lambin goes through and critiques theories of environmental degradation and recovery, e.g. law of diminishing returns, Kuznets curve, stability and resilience, etc. which I found a useful survey of prevailing ideas about environmental change. Basically the perspectives of ecologists and various schools of economists and geographers. I appreciate the brevity of the book, but there were a number of points where apparent contradictions between the author's points were not adequately addressed. And while the writing was usually clear in it's translation from the original French there were occasional problems.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-03 00:00:00 Jay Gonzales Having laboured through this short but very long book, it was difficult to get through to say the least. Having read numerous books focusing on environmental issues, this particular book lacked reader appeal. It was dry, having an essay feel, with small, barely readable font. The issues and the content were appealing but the presentation and layout were not... A delicious candy with thousands of layers of plastic packaging.