David Wallace-Wells divides his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, into four sections, each dealing with the effects of a warmer planet on human life. The first, “Cascades”, deals with the general notion that every single climate event will trigger a multitude of effects. For human civilization, this will mean a multiplying of stresses all amplifying the seriousness of each other in a “cascade” of complex problems, none of which can be solved without solving all the others. Once problems reach some unspecified level of disruption, they become so interconnected that they overwhelm our ability to address them. This means that we regress rather than progress. And just as progress tends to amplify itself, the same applies to the deconstruction process, until the structure of a civilization is so riddled with dysfunction that it is no longer viable.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: The Uninhabitable Part 2Tag Archives: Books
Cumberland Gold for Frank Mottl
Frank Mottl’s latest novel, Cumberland Gold, takes us to the quaint village of Cumberland BC. This is the same setting as his first novel, The Cumberland Tales, in which Mottl described the community he knew in the 1960s. Only now he is writing about the late 19th century, when Lord Dunsmuir (1825-89) was attempting to recruit Chinese immigrants to work in his coal mine.
Mottle explained, “ I did some research at the Cumberland Museum, and there was an unsolved homicide in the 19th century in the old Cumberland Chinatown. Nobody knew much about it, other than it was unsolved. That really appealed to me, so I just ran with it. Of course I spent a year teaching in China, so it did have a lot of that Chinese influence inside of it.”
Continue reading Cumberland Gold for Frank Mottl
The Quadra Project: Uninhabitable – Part 1
A global temperature review of 2024 confirms the trend that has been so concerning to climatologists. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record, and 2024 has been the warmest yet. The European Copernicus calculation measured 2024 as 1.6°C above the pre-industrial temperature, with most days being above the 1.5°C aspirational target set by the Paris Agreement (COP21) in 2015. Other organizations measured a slightly different temperature for 2024: NASA at 1.47°C, NOAA at 1.46°C, and Berkley Earth at 1.62°C. The differences are technical but the trend is the same. Global temperatures are rising in concert with our greenhouse gas emissions.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Uninhabitable – Part 1
The Quadra Project: Changes Causing Changes
We live in a time of rapid change. Such periods have been recorded in our earlier history, but nothing quite compares to the present. If this change could be represented in a graph, it would indicate a nearly vertical rise in almost everything from technology and population to species extinction and climate change. We are remaking the world, from the micro to the macro, with consequences that are unprecedented.
Two book reviews in the Atlantic magazine of December 2021 by Rebecca Giggs identify some of these changes.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Changes Causing Changes
Jody Wilson-Raybould challenges Canada’s history in new book
By Abby Luciano, North Shore News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
It was a full house at West Vancouver Memorial Library Sunday night in celebration of former Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould and author Roshan Danesh’s latest book, Reconciling History: A Story of Canada.
The book shares the voices of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, touching on Canada’s history of colonization and how that history has been painted.
“We definitely still have a long way to go, and there’s still horrible disparities and realities. But I think we have to take stock in recognizing that there has been constructive change and continue to build on it,” Wilson-Raybould said.
Continue reading Jody Wilson-Raybould challenges Canada’s history in new book