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A review by mburnamfink
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Erik Conway, Naomi Oreskes
3.0
Naomi Oreskes is *pissed*. She has a right to be, after writing of Merchants of Doubt and seeing the same damn thing happen again and again. The framing for this book is a Chinese historian writing about the collapse of Western civilization due to climate change from the year 2300, but the frame is really weak. What this essay actually about is recent events in climate change policies, such as the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and a cold, clinical future history of ice sheets melting, mass migration, plague, famine, geoengineering disasters, and as the title would suggest, the end of Western civilization. The first part, about recent developments, is well-documented with footnotes. The speculation is backed up by scientific papers, but is distant and far from compelling as literature.
Oreskes takes out most of her ire on two groups. The first is the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex, a political, financial, and technological assemblage that profits off of burning fossil fuels, and uses it's ideological muscle to prevent even the slightest preparation for the oncoming disaster. The second group are Baconian reductionist scientists, who's cult-like love of objectivity prevented them from understanding human and planetary systems together, or speaking in the proper tone to alert the rest of humanity. For what it's worth, I think Oreskes is mostly right about the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex as dangerously short-sighted wreckers driving our political system, but Oreskes is a historian of science (and I'm one too, sorta), and slamming reductionism and specialization in science seems very abstruse. It's not even a particularly interesting or heated contribution to the never-ending argument on epistemology and scientific methods.
So yeah, this book is short, angry, oddly balanced, and not particularly literary. It's well researched, but unlikely to be enjoyable or interesting to anyone who doesn't already agree with Oreskes.
Oreskes takes out most of her ire on two groups. The first is the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex, a political, financial, and technological assemblage that profits off of burning fossil fuels, and uses it's ideological muscle to prevent even the slightest preparation for the oncoming disaster. The second group are Baconian reductionist scientists, who's cult-like love of objectivity prevented them from understanding human and planetary systems together, or speaking in the proper tone to alert the rest of humanity. For what it's worth, I think Oreskes is mostly right about the neoliberal carbon-combustion complex as dangerously short-sighted wreckers driving our political system, but Oreskes is a historian of science (and I'm one too, sorta), and slamming reductionism and specialization in science seems very abstruse. It's not even a particularly interesting or heated contribution to the never-ending argument on epistemology and scientific methods.
So yeah, this book is short, angry, oddly balanced, and not particularly literary. It's well researched, but unlikely to be enjoyable or interesting to anyone who doesn't already agree with Oreskes.