The Story of More (Adapted for Young Adults) | Jahren, Hope

Lange Beschreibung
This young adult adaptation of acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren's highly respected nonfiction work is the perfect book for those interested in learning about climate change and how they can contribute to creating a more sustainable future.

Hope Jahren illuminates the science behind key inventions, clarifying how electricity, large-scale farming, and automobiles have both helped and harmed our world. She explains the current and projected consequences of unchecked global warming, from superstorms to rising sea levels, resulting from the unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases being released into our atmosphere.
 
The links between human consumption habits and our endangered existence are very real. Still, Jahren maintains that our ever-broadening science-based knowledge can help us counter these effects. The eye-opening information in The Story of More will help readers understand the path needed. If we collectively make informed choices now, Jahren reassures, our future can be as bright as we imagine it can be.

Rezensierung
[Hope Jahren] leads us on a journey across time and space, outlining thoughts and beliefs from Mesopotamia to her tiny Minnesota hometown. Along the way she discusses the impact of everything from population growth to Norwegian fishing to nuclear power. She takes this approach in order to present climate change as a result of broader dysfunctions having to do with consumption habits that, she says, don t even make us happy.... It s an argument that contrasts with the recent spate of climate books, which opt to pummel readers with facts and guilt. Jahren, who first came to prominence with the best-selling memoir Lab Girl, instead writes delicately, like the whispery scrape of a skate tracing a figure on the ice.
The New York Times Book  Review

If there s one book all of us should read about the state of the environment, it s this one.... [Jahren] pulls off the feat of presenting climate change without emotional baggage through accessibility and humor.
The Washington Independent Review of Books

Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet? The Story of More is thoughtful, informative, and above all essential.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

A concise and personal yet universally applicable examination of a problem that affects everyone on planet Earth.... [Jahren] doesn t use scare tactics or shrill warnings.... She clearly shows how the amount of waste created by the privileged could provide plenty for those less privileged.
Kirkus Reviews

Hope Jahren is an awesome writer and scientist. Her new book, The Story of More, is captivating and compelling. She urges readers to be courageous dealing with global environmental changes and human population growth.
Dudley Herschbach, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

The Story of More is a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years, written in a brilliantly sardonic and conversational style.
E. O. Wilson

Buchausschnitt
1

Our Story Begins

The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)

You have probably been hearing about climate change your whole life. Maybe you ve seen it on the news, or seen movies about it, or read about it in school, or heard people debating about it in your home. You ve probably heard people ask if climate change is real. Is it something we should be afraid of? When will it happen and how bad will it be? You may have heard it called a hoax. You may have heard it called the biggest challenge your gen­eration will ever face. You might even be sick of hearing about it altogether.

You know what? I get it. I m more than fifty years old, and I ve been hearing people argue over climate change for at least twenty years. I am a scientist who studies climate change, and so lucky me I get to hear people argue about it almost every day. But lately I learned that the arguments go back much further than that.

In 1969, more than half a century ago, the Norwe­gian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his col­leagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea. The New York Times picked up the story, and Walter Wittmann of the US Navy immediately disagreed: he had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.

But that s not nearly all: in 1931, Thomas Edison said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. That s right the guy who invented the light bulb (Edi­son) urged renewable energy on the guy who invented the car (Ford) and the guy who invented the tire (Firestone). Almost one hundred years ago these important men were talking about green energy, while at the very same time, they were initiating our modern addiction to fossil fuels.
Let s go back to 1969 for a moment, back when Balchen was fighting with Wittmann. I don t remember 1969 per­sonally, but, like every year, it was full of beginnings and endings, problems and solutions, equal to any that had gone before or have come since.

Most of the trees you see out your window were barely seeds in 1969. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was incor­porated in 1969 and has since become the world s largest private employer. Sesame Street premiered in 1969 and went on to teach millions of children how to count and spell. Big things started out as small things, then grew to change the world.

Way up north, in Mower County, Minnesota, my par­ents weren t paying attention, for I was one of the ten million babies born on September 27, 1969, and the last of their four children. The world would be different for this baby, my parents promised each other, and they made the ancient vow that all mothers and fathers make in the euphoria that follows a happy birth.

I would have all the love that my father could give and all the love that my mother should have been given. She will grow up free, my mother resolved free from hun­ger and from the shame of being taken by the county. My father, for his part, looked forward to a century of technologies that would save us all from sickness and want. Like the millions of couples who had come before them, and would come after, they looked at the world they lived in and thought about the one they wanted. Then my parents turned to each other, in love, and they named me Hope.

Forty years later, in 2009, my department chair called me into his office and asked me to teach a class on climate change. I ll admit that, at first, I was not excited