After geoengineering : climate tragedy, repair, and restoration / Holly Jean Buck.
Material type:
TextPublisher: London, England : Verso, 2019Copyright date: ©2019Description: vi, 281 pages ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781788730365
- 1788730364
- TD171.9 .B83 2019
| Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Fiction | Davis (Central) Library Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction | 363.7 BUC | Available | T00826376 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
What if the people seized the means of climate production?
The window for action on climate change is closing rapidly. We are hurtling ever faster towards climate catastrophe--the destruction of a habitable world for many species, perhaps the near-extinction of our own. As anxieties about global temperatures soar, demands for urgent action grow louder. What can be done? Can this process be reversed? Once temperatures rise, is there any going back? Some are thinking about releasing aerosols into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the earth. And this may be necessary, if it actually works. But it would only be the beginning; it's what comes after that counts.
In this groundbreaking book, Holly Jean Buck charts a possible course to a liveable future. Climate restoration will require not just innovative technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but social and economic transformation. The steps we must take are enormous, and they must be taken soon. Looking at industrial-scale seaweed farms, the grinding of rocks to sequester carbon at the bottom of the sea, the restoration of wetlands, and reforestation, Buck examines possible methods for such transformations and meets the people developing them.
Both critical and utopian, speculative and realistic, After Geoengineering presents a series of possible futures. Rejecting the idea that technological solutions are some kind of easy workaround, Holly Jean Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that will be necessary to repair our relationship to the earth if we are to continue living here.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [254]-268) and index.
What if the people seized the means of climate production. Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used as technologies of repair, to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralized, or participatory? Is there a scenario where the people can define and enact geoengineering on our own terms? These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a program of geoengineering in the first place.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Introduction. Desperation Point (p. 1)
- Part I Cultivation
- 1 Cultivating Energy (p. 53)
- Flowers (p. 70)
- 2 Cultivating the Seas (p. 75)
- Ghost Bar (p. 88)
- 3 Regenerating (p. 93)
- Part II Burial
- 4 Capturing (p. 119)
- Pecan Tree (p. 137)
- 5 Weathering (p. 141)
- Mountain (p. 153)
- Part III The After-Zero Society
- 6 Working (p. 159)
- 7 Learning (p. 188)
- 8 Co-opting (p. 197)
- Part IV Buying Time
- 9 Programming (p. 211)
- 10 Reckoning (p. 240)
- Acknowledgments (p. 252)
- Notes (p. 254)
- Index (p. 269)