Ralph's Book Reviews

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For me this is an important book at an important time. The author uses the analogy of the Roman empire's collapse to show the warning signs facing global civilisation by explaining how, like an ecological system, a complex civilisation is dependent on energy flows.  And the more complex it becomes, the more energy it requires to maintain that complexity, but with diminishing returns. He uses Buzz Holling's "adaptive cycle" model, developed through study of forest ecology, to explain how a system increases its complexity and potential over time and eventually loses its resilience, its ability to withstand shocks. At this phase in the cycle the system is vulnerable and either catastrophically collapses into lower states of complexity - like the Roman empire - or deliberately does so in a more controlled manner in order to increase resilience. The latter path is the author's advice to us.

He lists the following "tectonic stresses" that he believes are building inexorably below the foundations of our societies: 1) population stress - not only growth but differing rates of growth between rich and poor societies; 2) energy stress - above all "peak oil" which seems to be almost upon us now; 3) environmental stress; 4) climate stress; and 5) economic stress resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening wealth disparities within and between societies. Homer-Dixon's argument is that our global societies, tightly coupled and interdependent as they are and testing the limits of the ecosphere as they are, are vulnerable to synchronous shocks along any of the five fault lines outlined above.

The last chapters' posture is optimistic, but the project to restore resilience that he proposes is daunting, requiring global co-operation on an unprecedented level. Example: "...a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us", but "growth, even in already obscenely rich societies, is sacrosanct." Can you envisage our political and economic elites willingly leading our societies into a different paradigm? I can't.

The Tsavo Story by Daphne Sheldrick

I read this book immediately prior to participating in a walking safari across Tsavo West and East National Parks in Kenya. Although the style is dated Daphne Sheldrick's account of the creation of Tsavo East, her life as the partner of the first warden, David Sheldrick, is both inspiring and sad. David passed away not many years after the book was published and Tsavo was wracked by two major poaching wars in the '70s and the '80s that hammered the elephant and all but wiped out the black rhino.

The Tsavo Story was essential to understanding the place and I am grateful that it was the first book that I read about the area (many have been written).

As we in South Africa discuss "the elephant problem" yet again, it is instructive to note that the Sheldricks had intuitively decoded the elephant-human dynamic and elephants' role in the ecosystem more than thirty years ago. Tsavo is the story of the two great mammal species on the planet and their sometimes fraught relationship. The story continues.

I was delighted to learn that Dame Daphne still re-introduces orphan elephants into Tsavo to this day and that the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust continues to be vital to Tsavo's survival and funding.

Sometimes sad, but ultimately inspiring. A testimony to lives well lived.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Collapse is an important book of our time. In highly readable prose the author integrates diverse disciplines to study and compare the failures (and few successes) of both ancient and modern societies. Common to all the studies is the creeping onset of ecological crisis and how these societies adapted, or failed to adapt, to the threat. Diamond uses a five-point framework in which to examine them: environmental damage and resource depletion, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners and fifthly, the society's response.

Collapse is brilliant in the way it considers a vast volume of evidence from many different fields to sound its warning. A central theme is the rejection of "environmental determinism", that societies' fates are irreversibly determined by their natural environment, and that given visionary leadership and timeous changes in lifestyle, culture and society, sustainable modern civilisations are possible. As such it is an optimistic work, but I couldn't escape the feeling that "what to do" about the new globalised society's ecological crisis was skirted to a degree. Perhaps the author was wary of being labelled "political" in his home country, as messengers who warn of anthropogenic climate change and "energy crisis" often are.
Africa's unfortunate contribution to Collapse is the Rwandan genocide. Besides conventional reasons of "ethnic hatred" and "tribalism", Diamond reveals supplementary causes such as population pressure in a confined area in an agricultural economy, colonial injustices, economic crises and others. His message of hope here is that "Malthusian population pressure" is a necessary condition for genocide, but not sufficient - if the right choices are made.

For those who are concerned about our planet's fate, you must read Collapse; for those who are yet to be concerned, it is essential reading.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller has a unique voice. You can smell Africa in her writing. The people are familiar to anyone who grew up in Southern Africa in that era.

The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Flannery succeeds in explaining the science behind climate change and humanity's recent effect in an understandable manner. He traces the history of climate change on civilisations and ecologies, how scientists model the future and what it could mean, delves into the reasons why we, our governments and corporations have not responded yet and suggests future solutions. Flannery is in no doubt that we are tweaking the earth's climatic systems to such a degree that we are close to a tipping point, and that an inevitable momentum is already built into the them. The call to action is unmistakable and urgent. I live in one - and close to another - biodiversity hotspot that are both queued for extinction, namely the fynbos and succulent Karoo biomes - unless the vegetation can migrate..... The implication is clear - I may yet witness their passing.
 

Midlands by Jonny Steinberg

Midlands is a scary book - if you're a South African. Steinberg investigates the murder of a young, white farmer in the deep, rural KwaZulu-Natal midlands. The killing happens in the late '90s, a good few years after the democratic transition, against the background of a spate of particularly brutal farm murders. Midlands is scary because the police are dysfunctional and the killers are still at large, but particularly because it unblinkingly traces the fault lines of a riven society. The peasant Zulus, mere tenants on what was formerly their land, appear to be engaged in a century-long war of attrition with the white landowners. The cultures are so different that any perceptions about the same event are worlds apart; they send signals to each other that are regularly misinterpreted; a chance remark by the former landowner is accepted as a de facto transfer of ownership by the tenants; the protagonists inhabit different ethical and legal frameworks. And so it goes. It seems that even the killing is merely a signal to the father, the landowner. To the tenants it appears to be a perfectly acceptable signal, a logical consequence, a simple message. Similarly, the (white) police kill a suspect with seeming impunity.

As Steinberg presses an old Zulu about the possible reasons for the farmer's assassination, the old man remarks that it would not have happened during the apartheid era. Why? "Because the people still had hope", he says. Nothing emphasises the vast gulf between black, rural expectations and current reality more that this statement. Clearly, the saga of land restitution has a long and bloody road to run yet.

With this week's assassination of David Rattray, an Anglo-Zulu war historian, friend of Prince Charles and much-loved raconteur, at his Rourke's Drift home, the issue has once again been rammed into the South African consciousness. The ANC government, having recently denied that "crime is out of control", is under fire. The difference is that David Rattray was famous and a respected person amongst white and Zulu alike...