You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got a great guest on the program, Dr. Michael Svoboda. Great to have you on the show. And Michael, you do a list of great reads for environmental issues, and I thought it would be great to have you on the show to talk about those. We’re in the pre-Christmas holiday season, and these are great gifts to give to friends and family. So thank you for being on the show.

My pleasure. An honor to be among such a distinguished roster of guests. So thank you.

Well, tell us a little bit about your career and what brought you to where you’re at right now.

I have a very mixed career, a couple of different careers, actually, one of which is very germane to the conversation we’re having. I owned a bookstore for 17 years between starting and finishing my Ph.D. At Penn State. And so that kind of engagement across the board, every discipline, paying attention to what’s new, what’s coming out, that shaped who I am and how I think about the world in important ways. After finishing my Ph.D.., started teaching first year writing. I have an interdisciplinary degree, a combination of history, philosophy and rhetoric.

And interdisciplinary degrees are great for the standpoint of doing some interesting things as a researcher, but can be an impediment to getting a job. So I wound up in a composition program that was at first at Penn State, then here at George Washington University, where they have a special university writing program. They hire only Ph.D.s or MAs. It’s a research-based first year writing course, and all of our courses are themed. So I’ve been able to explore different ideas over the course of the almost 20 years I’ve been teaching here. A lot of the time I work on political psychology and other times on environmental issues. And in 2010, started contributing to Yale Climate Connections, a website that is part of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

They’re the ones who do the. Surveys on global warming, six Americas, some of the demographic analysis of belief and opinion on climate change. And then in 2015, I started doing these monthly bookshelves, drawing on my bookstore background. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while. And I would say I have highlighted probably on the order of 1400 books over the course of that time.

Wow. What a wonderful journey and very fascinating. And it’s great how that, I’m sure, informs what you’re doing and how you’re choosing these books. And why don’t we just kind of jump right in as to some of the books you’ve put on your list. First off was Atlas Threatened Planet. And tell us a little bit about that book by Esther Gonstalla.

So we’ve been doing the holiday list for several years now, and you want to choose a range of books that will appeal to a wide variety of interests. And this was the most straightforwardly informative of the group, but also it had its own beauty in that it’s well-designed infographics. So if you want a kind of overview of what the environmental and climate situation looks like right now and how it connects to your everyday life, the infographics in this book, I think, give you a really good overview of the situation we’re in now, both the warning signs as well as the hopeful signs. And it’s an attractive book. So that’s one of the reasons why it leaves the list.

I think I saw this book while browsing through the U.N. Bookstore in New York, you know, among other books there, like Paul Hawkins’ book that, you know, is kind of a classic on regeneration, climate crisis in one generation. So the U.N.. Has a fairly small list, but if you get in the U.N. Bookstore, it says a lot about you. Yeah. So. This Atlas of a Threatened Planet is pretty great recommendation. Take us to maybe the next book on the list, Before They Vanish.

This is by Paul Ehrlich and a co-author. Both have long distinguished pedigrees and somewhat controversial pedigrees in biodiversity. But this is a look at the correlation between habitat and extinction. And so they argue that we need a conservation-based, we need to focus on conserving viable populations rather than focusing solely on species. And so I included it in part as a nod back to the conference on biodiversity that was held in Colombia in Macawber.

Right. I’ve had some guests on the program about extending the amount of wild space that we protect. And I think there’s a movement for 30-30, which 30% of the country by 2030 and then 40 by 40 and 50 by 50. And I think this probably goes along those lines, correct or no?

Yes, but also maintaining the necessary connections between breeding populations. So the choosing of where those lands are, I think, is a critical part of this.

Yeah, and I guess it would also mean protecting all the species kind of in the food chain. Like you can’t just protect one piece of the puzzle. You’ve got to protect kind of the whole puzzle.

Yes, protecting ecosystems can do a better job of protecting species than just focusing on species alone.

The next book that you have on the list is Category 5 Storm by Porter Fox. And Porter was on my show, I think it was two, maybe three years ago. And he’s got a fascinating kind of backstory as a skier. And I think that’s what drew him into being so concerned about nature and seeing the effect of the lack of snowfall because of global warming. Tell us a little bit about Category 5 storm.

Well, Category 5 storm is looking at whether we need to raise the category level and clear exposition of just how damaging Category 5 storm can be and how it connects to what’s happening within the oceans. And we saw that over the summer where several storms, two or three, quickly accelerated from Category 3s to Category 5s. They diminished slightly before hitting land. But that rapid acceleration is part of this relationship between the atmosphere and the ocean that is the focus of Fox’s books.

Just as an aside, there are two made-for-TV movies that go back to 2004 and 2006. One’s called Category 6 and the other one’s called Category 7. And so as soon as global warming was part of popular culture, the first thing Hollywood did was, so what if we just accelerate it? We’re just moving up the numbers. And so if you want, as a Hollywood a break from reading a good book to watch a bad movie, I would recommend either of those.

Well, I was thinking of two guests that I’ve had on the show. One, Melissa Sims, who’s a great attorney out of the great state of Illinois, my home state, who has prosecuted environmental… I’ll call them crimes. And currently is prosecuting one against all the major oil companies for exacerbating the conditions that caused… I think it was Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico so hard. And so she’s pounding away at these giants. They knew it. They absolutely knew it. They had documented it. They knew that if they continued emitting these, the CO2 and the methane, that it would destroy the atmosphere to the extent.

And they just continued doing it, which is one of the great crimes of humanity. Maybe possibly the greatest crime of all time. And why we’re not more outraged about this, I don’t know. What does it say about us as a species? That we could be so blinded and, quite frankly, stupid to not go after these criminals. So shout out to Melissa Sims for the work she’s doing. And then had a climate scientist on, and I apologize, blanking on his name. He is doing some great work on climate attribution to connect the dots to these storms being the pollution that these major oil companies are doing. Attributing the effects to them. So that’s super important work. So I assume that a Porter Fox is kind of connecting those dots too.

Right. Over the years, we’ve highlighted many books that explore this, if you want to call it, the criminal nexus with the fossil fuel companies and various conservative think tanks and the denial of climate change. Naomi Oreskes’ book co-authored with Conway are good overviews of the history of fossil fuel prevarication on climate change.

Let’s jump to Core Samples, another great book on your list.

This was a fun book. I had the opportunity to talk to the author earlier this week. As a matter of fact, it’s an unusual book. It’s a wide variety of writing styles. It’s kind of a memoir, covers her life from high school to the present, including marrying and having two children along the way. So it’s one of several books, a surprising number of books that have been published in the last 18 months. And the intersections between motherhood and climate change, you wouldn’t think that would be a subgenre, but it has become one. And she worked in academia as a researcher, then she moved into policy.

She was actually the environment and climate advisor for Senator Franken, and then worked as the water advisor for Governor Dayton of Minnesota. And she has interesting chapters about what it’s like to be a woman who’s still breastfeeding her child while working. She’s an advisor on the Hill, running between rooms, and has a great chapter on the do’s and don’ts of lobbying. But from the standpoint of, if I’m the one listening to someone coming to make a case to the Senator, what do you need to do and what should you avoid doing?

That was, I thought, a really fun three to four pages to read to just get a sense of what she’s thinking as she’s hearing people misplay their pitch to the Senator in the limited time that they have available. And then she also talks about setting up and conducting a series of town halls for the governor of Minnesota when they’re dealing with important water issues. And she goes into the rural-urban divide and talks about the importance of just listening, the importance of respecting the people to whom you’re listening, and realizing that there are important stakes on both sides in any issue, and there is no simple solution. And the tradeoff. The tradeoffs are going to be complex and difficult. So I thought this was an excellent introduction or overview of what it’s going to be like to sort through these problems while living our daily lives.

It does sound fascinating on a lot of different levels. The first thing that you mentioned, the motherhood piece, I was thinking of a guest that I talked to back a few years ago, and he was an advertising exec, and he had been urged by his son to get involved in the environment. His son came to him and said, hey, what are you doing about the environment? Your generation caused this thing and said, hey, don’t leave the house this weekend until you figure out what you’re going to do. And so he thought about it and he said, hey, well, I’m an ad guy. Let me talk about what’s something that I could do.

So he contacted a bunch of his ad guy friends and they started an organization which focused on mothers who were scientists. Because, hey, if we could get mothers engaged on this issue and pissed off about it be similar to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. We might really get some traction in the halls of Congress and state legislatures and wherever else across the country. So I really like that angle. And it’s great that Anna Farrow Henderson is writing this book, Core Samples, about that. And then I just wanted to kind of give a shout out to my cousin, who is a environmental scientist working for the Department of Natural Resources in Minnesota.

He does this work on a day-to-day basis and probably has dealt with these guys and kind of has communicated to me that there is has to be a lot of listening because there are people who are working up in these mining communities. And they are reliant on these jobs. And many times they are willing to kind of accept a level of pollution that we might think is completely unreasonable. But for them, it seems like, well, it’s survival. And so we’ve got to be able to speak to those folks and hear their concerns and find a way to get them good jobs that aren’t polluting.

I should add one footnote. She does have a short chapter on the controversy surrounding L. Franken. And she and others in her office, they canvassed all of the women who worked for L. Franken. And none of them had experienced any problems with them. None of them had experienced any untoward behavior or remarks. And so she was very saddened by this outcome. And sadly, it also has kind of tainted the people who are involved with this office. But she does account for and respond to the accusations against Franken.

Well, it’s a fascinating process and being involved in litigation regarding those things. I am very attuned to those issues, which we could go down that rabbit hole, but we’re going to move on to Blue Plate.

The first and most important is that it’s published by Patagonia. This is the outdoor clothing company and gear company. They have a book arm and they do incredibly beautiful, sustainable books. And so this is an example. The cover is beautiful. It’s a laminated cover. They eliminated book jackets because that just resulted in wasted books that had to be pulped. It’s an account of different aspects of the food system and their intersections with climate change. What are the impacts of climate change going to be on that sector of the food system? What does that sector of the food system do to the climate? And beautifully illustrated, nicely written. I love Patagonia books and so I wanted to include one in this holiday list.

Certainly a shout out to Patagonia and its founder who has essentially donated his entire fortune to the environmental movement and then also started 1% for the Planet, which has 6,000 members. I interviewed the head of 1% for the Planet and they do great work donating to millions and millions of dollars to environmental causes. And that’s certainly a model for all of corporate America.

And in their book arm, they also periodically decide, okay, we need a book on this. And so they will find the author, commission the author to do it, and then create the books that they want. So they did one on salmon, another really beautiful book, really well done. They commissioned Mark Kurlansky who had written a book called Cod, the Fish That Built Maternity, something like that. They will also save books that are going out of print and update them. So they did a textbook on wind and waves and there they did another book on the history of the forests. They only publish a small number of books each year, but what each one of them that they publish is a gem.

Great to hear and marvelous work on their part. So shout out to Patagonia. Let’s move on to Metamorphosis and tell us a little bit about that book.

For your listeners may or may not be familiar with the environmental website, Grist. There’s a lot of fantastic environmental reporting, but they also run a contest each year where they invite readers with established authors and amateurists to submit stories that address climate change in some way. Lately, they’ve been trying to imagine futures where we successfully address climate change. And so Metamorphosis is a collection of stories about the ways that we will have to change Metamorphosis in order to address the problem and what kinds of possibilities might be opened up by that.

So if you have someone on your list who likes short stories or can only read in short bursts, this would be an appropriate gift. There’s also a collection of short plays in my list. And then there’s a new novel by Richard Power. We got here wrote over a story. So if someone wants to read at length, that would be the choice there.

Let’s jump off the list to a favorite of mine, Van Gogh. And you’ve got a book that’s not on the list, but maybe coming to the list, Van Gogh and the End of Nature. Tell us a little bit about that.

I expect that a double review of this and another book will post at Yale Climate Connections by the end of the coming week. See if, as I saw the title advertised in the Yale University catalog, I knew we had to do something with it. The key to this is if you look closely at a wider variety of Van Gogh’s paintings, you will notice that there are lots of smokestacks in the background. So although the close-up of his work feature domesticated, I mean, agricultural settings, wild settings, wildflowers, some interesting interiors.

If you look into the background and you consider a broader range of his work. You see that the industrial age is part of his world and saturates it. And this author does a systematic study. He looks at the role of smokestacks. He looks at the hidden references to mining. He looks at the connections to water pollution. So some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings. Some of the night scenes also have images of trenches dug to deliver. Gas lines to streetlights.

Or they show waterways that he can document from Van Gogh’s own notes and articles at the time are severely polluted by the factories that line the streams farther up or this raw sewage that’s flowing into them. So it gives you a completely different image or completely different sense of Van Gogh’s work. A lot of his paints and some of the brighter colors were the result of derivatives of coal tar, which were becoming more common as a result of increased use of coal for industrial activities.

Some of them were quite poisonous. So some of Van Gogh’s favorite paints had toxic levels of metals in them. There’s some indication or at least a suggestion that pollution from some of these paint factories may have also artificially colored the rivers that were then being painted by figures like Manet and Van Gogh. So this book is just a real head-spinning history lesson that I strongly recommend. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah, that sounds fascinating. I’m a huge Van Gogh fan. So I just was thinking that maybe it caused some of his health problems and exacerbated his mental illness if he’s putting his fingers in toxic substances.

Possibly. The author also points out that Van Gogh actually moved around, surprisingly. I was not an aficionado of Van Gogh. I’ve sort of sold my requisite number of calendars and date books, but hadn’t really explored him. But according to this author, he lived in several different places, was exposed to mining, was exposed to industrial explosions, and actually spent some time in London during one of its toxic fogs, where the weather conditions were such that the smoke from all of the factories and the coal-burning households could not escape. And several thousand people died as a result of the smog that was created and just sat over the city for a few days. And he speculates that Van Gogh might have been in the midst of one of those.

That is a story that needed to be told, and so thank you for that recommendation. I really appreciate that. Let’s talk about entropy and why you included that in your list. It’s not on the list yet, but it’s going to be there.

Initially, the photographs that are on the cover of this book by Diane Tuft is an aerial photographer. Does landscapes from helicopters. And she chooses her landscapes with environmental messages in mind. And the cover is a picture of a section of Great Salt Lake with a road running over part of it. And you get this stark blue on one side and red on the other. And so if Van Gogh has a kind of connection to Impressionism, some of the images in Diane Tuft’s book almost look like abstract Expressionism. And that was the thing that led me to pair the two up.

But there are other interesting connections that run through them. Toxic metals being one of them. A section of this book is devoted to what’s happening to the Great Salt Lake as one drought has endured for much longer than usually, possibly much longer than ever in the historical record, almost certainly due to climate change. And then as the streams that feed or used to feed the Great Salt Lake have been diverted for agricultural purposes. So more and more of the lake bed is exposed, drying out. And the dust of the lake bed contains arsenic, lead, strontium, and that dust can be picked up by strong windstorms. And then it blows over the towns that are bordering the lake. And is now a factor in the health of the communities that surround the lake.

I was going to say, I had read some articles about this about a year or so ago when the drought was getting bad and the lake was shrinking. And then they. Kind of miraculously had a good rainstorm that refueled the, or put a lot more water into the Great Salt Lake, but still at risk.

Very much so. And then the other two-thirds of the book are pictures from around the world where rising sea levels are, or extreme storms are reshaping the landscape. And she has images from above that show how those landscapes are being reshaped in Bangladesh, in the Pacific Islands, and in the Chesapeake Bay. All of the images are beautiful, but they are, once you realize what’s going on, kind of daunting. One definition of sublime was beautiful but terrifying.

So everybody go out and get a copy of entropy if you’re ready to kind of be shocked. And I recall reading about a great kind of Russian art collector, and he only collected pieces that kind of shocked him. And this is probably worth collecting to shock ourselves a little bit. Wake up.

Yes, indeed. Photographs. I think I ended that essay by saying, you know, maybe these images can help us see what we’re doing so we can stop it before it’s too late.

Let’s turn to one last book before we wrap this up. Love the Foods That Love the Planet. Tell us a bit about why that one made the list.

The cover was a big factor. The title is a big factor. You want to be able to appeal to a wide variety of readers who look to holiday books for different reasons. And so something that was very practical, a cookbook that connected with climate change, was ideal. And then the book of photographs that was next to it in the list was kind of in the vein of Diane Tuff’s book, entropy. It just made a nice triptych. So if you go into a bookstore and you ask a bookseller about the book, booksellers cannot read every book. In their collection. And I don’t make claims to do that. I make a judicious selection based on a quick survey of what is available.

I get that. It’s hard to read everything I’d like to read. So we kind of have to hit the highlights. But I greatly appreciate having you on the program, Michael. And maybe you can tell us where viewers, listeners can find you, find this list, follow you and all the good work that you’re doing over there. At Yale Climate Connections and everywhere else.

I am still social media illiterate. So one and only place that you can find me would be the Yale Climate Connections. And there is a possibility of signing up for a newsletter there. I think that would be the best spot.

Well, everybody check out Yale Climate Connections and follow Michael and all the great work that he’s doing. Then buy these books for friends and families for the holidays. These are great gifts to give because they’re meaningful and they add to the conversation. And we don’t know where these ideas will lead, but certainly planting these seeds for friends and family is a great thing to do. And it’s a great thing to share with our friends and family. What a beautiful holiday gift to give somebody something that’s so powerful. So please go out and buy some of these books and give them to your friends and family. Obviously, these are important ideas and ideas are what will change the world. So thank you, Michael, for doing all this work and curating and really keeping these issues at top of mind for all of us.

My pleasure. Anything I can do to move more books, I am proud to do.

Thanks again for being on the show. Everybody follow Michael at Yale Climate Connections, and everybody have a great holiday. We can change the world if we do it today.