By John R. Platt
April, goes the old saying, is the cruelest month, so perhaps it should be no surprise that one of the most anticipated books being published this month is about the infamous death-by-dentist of Cecil the lion. But that's not all, and the rest isn't necessarily cruel—April will also see the publication of fantastic new books about living a zero-waste lifestyle, taking back our public lands, how fossil fuels hurt indigenous peoples and a whole lot more.
Honestly there are more environmental books coming out in April than any one person could read, but we've tried to pick what looks like the best of the bunch for you. The full list—14 amazing titles—includes books for just about every reader, from dedicated environmentalists to Earth-friendly kids. There's even one for poetry fans. You can check them all out below—links are to publishers' or authors' websites—and then settle down in your favorite reading chair for a month of great page-turning.
Wildlife and Endangered Species:
Lion Hearted: The Life and Death of Cecil & the Future of Africa's Iconic Cats by Andrew Loveridge — Advance word on this book is already reigniting the complex emotions around this case. Written by the scientist who studied Cecil the lion for eight years until the big cat was shot by American dentist Walter Palmer, Lion Hearted is about more than just Cecil and Walter; it's about the plight faced by all of Africa's disappearing lions. This gets our vote for the book of the month.
The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World's Rarest Species by Carlos Magdalena — It's a sad fact in conservation that endangered plants often don't get enough attention, whether it's from the general public, governments or even researchers. Maybe this impassioned memoir from Magdalena, a globe-trotting horticulturalist who spent his life saving endangered plants, will help to turn that around a little bit.
Back From the Brink: Saving Animals From Extinction by Nancy Castaldo — Here's one for younger readers, the true stories of how humans came close to killing off species like wolves, alligators and the California condor, as well as how we kept them from disappearing forever. Good lessons if we want the next generation to succeed in saving the species around them.
Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen — Wildlife and cities don't mix, right? Well, not so fast. Some species are adapting to live in urban environments, either by changing their behavior or by evolving new physical characteristics. It's never going to be as good as living in natural habitats, but for some species life goes on, as this book reveals.
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil — Poetry about a planet in peril. This isn't strictly about wildlife—it covers a lot of environmental topics—but many of the poems in this thought-provoking volume are about animals, including Bengal tigers, bees and a whole lot more.
Green Living:
Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things by Elizabeth R. DeSombre — An academic book, but one that asks some important questions we should all be considering if we hope to change our own behaviors or those of the people around us.
Trash Revolution: Breaking the Waste Cycle by Erica Fyvie— What's the impact of the stuff around us, and how can kids make informed decisions about the products they buy? Fyvie and illustrator Bill Slavin provide the answers in this book, which comes our way from the delightfully named publisher, Kids Can Press.
Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash by Shia Su — Did you know the average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day? Yikes. Well, here are 168 pages of tips on how to reduce your trash footprint all the way down to zero. Not a bad goal!
The Parents' Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night's Sleep by Mary DeMocker — Sleep is a good thing, as is having a planet on which to sleep. Bill McKibben provides the foreword to what sounds like an essential book.
Public Lands:
This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back by Ken Ilgunas — The perfect book for the times we live in, when public lands are increasingly under assault and even national monuments are at risk of disappearing.
Energy Development and Indigenous Rights:
Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael L. Cepek — For half a century, the indigenous Cofán nation of Ecuador has struggled under the ecological destruction of the fossil-fuel industry. Cepek, who has worked and lived with the Cofán for more than 20 years, tells their story, revealing how oil extraction has threatened these marginalized people but also how they have remained resilient.
Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam by Wendy Holm (editor) — A massive, $10 billion hydroelectric dam project on British Columbia's Peace River could threaten the First Nations peoples who live nearby. This volume dives deep into the potential impacts and decades of governmental cover-ups related to this long-planned project.
Climate Change:
Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze — We all know now that the Arctic is melting, but how did we come to find that out? Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, provides a firsthand account of how scientists first observed and understood these changes and how they will affect the planet.
Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change by Mary Beth Pfeiffer — Ticks like warm places; climate change is making more places warmer. That's already causing tick-borne illnesses like Lyme to travel to new areas and hurt more people, a situation Pfeiffer explores. (For more on this topic, check out our article and interactive maps, "Climate Goes Viral.")
Looking for even more new eco-books? Check out our previous "Revelator Reads" columns for dozens of additional recent recommendations.
18 Great New Books About Climate Change, Sustainability and Pioneering Women Environmentalists… https://t.co/RQ6NEk6Cdc— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1520253170.0
Reposted with permission from our media associate The Revelator.
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.