Alison’s 2024 Summer Book List
Some of the best emails I receive are ones in response to my monthly newsletter, in which I recommend books, articles, reports, podcast episodes… really, any media that I have consumed over the previous month that I want to pass along. The recommendations section of my newsletter is the most conversation-inducing and often inspires email chains filled with suggestions reciprocated from subscribers too.
This month, I decided to publish my recommendations publicly so that everyone can read them. Enjoy! And, of course, if you have any of your own to pass along to me, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
What I Read Recently
📝A Climate Disclosure Framework for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) from CDP provides a nice, accessible overview for smaller entities interested in getting going on climate, but cognizant of balancing the effort between measurement/reporting and action. For those who feel even this level of reporting to be too burdensome, just start with your fuel and electricity invoices. Focus your money and efforts on taking action based on the measurements your fuel and electricity suppliers already send you each month with their invoices. Reducing those emissions will bring the co-benefit of reducing those invoices.
📝TNFD’s latest brand new additional sector guidance for food and agriculture. Released at the end of June, this final document replaces the draft released in December 2023. This guidance builds from the SASB sectoral standards, which define material issues for companies based on their activities and based on input from sector actors who published the guidance. Sub-sectors as defined by SAS covered include meat, poultry, dairy, agricultural products, processed foods, food retailers and distributors, and restaurants. The guidance promotes a sequential and iterative “LEAP” assessment method – Locate, Evaluate, Assess, and Prepare – to guide companies in the sector through identifying interfaces between the business and nature and opportunities to improve interactions at those interfaces. If you read no other sections of the guidance, the process flow diagram on page 4 is a great summary of the full 86-page protocol.
📖Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende is largely set in the French colony of St. Domingue as it becomes the independent nation of Haiti. The novel features a diverse slate of characters to explore their divergent experiences of the American, French, and ultimately the Haitian revolutions on the island, as well as the places they go to escape or wait out the violence – Cuba and Louisiana. As violence is once again rattling Haiti, this novel provides some important explorations of its deep roots and connections to policies and people far beyond the island – in Europe, North America, and Africa. What’s the connection to food and agriculture? At the time that this novel is set, Haiti produced about 60% of the world’s coffee and half of the world’s sugar, making it the “most valuable” colony in the Western hemisphere, thanks to that agriculture. How that wealth was generated (by the unpaid labor of enslaved people) and who held it (mostly the French, specifically the French in France), has lots to do with why Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere now, heavily dependent on imports, and as a state that exists in name only. The book offers an engaging introduction to these issues’ genesis, with lessons for just food system interventions needed today.
📰As Haiti crumbles around us, we hold our communities together. Haitians from all walks of life must take ownership of the political transition. Monique Clesca, a Haitian journalist and former U.N. official wrote this powerful account of the Haitian state’s collapse this spring. Her telling is as strong an indictment of the many actors, internal and external, who were responsible for the hollowing out of Haiti, as it is an inspirational call to communal action, or “konbit” in Haitian Creole. She fled Haiti in April and returned in June, committed to the reconstitution of democratic government in Haiti.
📖Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. Another historical novel that feels like it offers important tendrils of truth relevant to today, this one starts in 1930s Spain, with the civil war between the republicans and fascists that ultimately resulted in Franco’s takeover. But, like many of her other novels, this one meanders through the Pyrenees to the brutal and inhumane French concentration camps where fleeing Spanish republican refugees were interned (and many died), to Chile. Then, her characters experience the rise and fall of a democratic republic to Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship all over again, fleeing to Venezuela and back to Spain after Franco’s death, where they find they feel foreign in the land of their birth. Allende’s exploration of how American corporations’ interests in/control of Chile’s primary industries (copper mining, agriculture, and fisheries) contributed to these political convulsions of the 20th century, has perhaps even greater relevance today. The US still relies on Chile for 64% of its copper imports, more than 10% of its fruit, and more than 10% of its seafood from Chile. Fruit imports have increased 45% in the last 4 years alone. And Chile continues to live under the long shadow of Pinochet’s dictatorship-era constitution. Despite shifting to democratic rule in the 1990s, as of December 2023, the country has still yet to vote to accept a new constitution, instead rejecting both liberal and conservative versions put forth in the last two years.
📰A Rising Fortress in Sinking Land. This nicely done interactive feature in the Washington Post describes how billions of dollars are still being invested in NEW fossil fuel infrastructure that sits in locations at imminent risk of disruption due to climate change-related sea level rise.
📝Circular food system approaches can support current European protein intake levels while reducing land use and greenhouse gas emissions. Published in Nature at the end of May, this paper reports on some dietary scenario analyses undertaken through a modeling study that relied on the biophysical Circular Food System (CiFoS) optimization model in Europe. Results support a nuanced approach to livestock agriculture, particularly one that enhances circularity, which can result in diets with sufficient protein while minimizing nutrient deficiencies that commonly emerge in vegan diets AND cutting land use up to 60% and emissions up to 81%. How’s that for hopeful science?
📰General Motors to pay nearly $146 million for excess car emissions. While not nearly the same scale of Volkswagon’s dieselgate, which cost ~$20B in fines, this case is just the latest in the large file of evidence that unfortunately regulators and regulatory enforcement compile to make sure private companies are meeting society’s expectations for pollution, product safety, and labor protections.
📖Project 2025: Department of Agriculture. On a flight back from Chicago last month, I decided to give the agriculture chapter of this “mandate for the incoming conservative administration” a read. The full document is about 1,000 pages, so I have not read it all, but the policy recommendations for agriculture begin on page 293. Some of Project 2025’s recommendations include repealing the ARC and PLC programs. It was interesting to find this in this conservative policy document since the senate version of the current draft Farm Bill goes in the opposite direction – further ballooning payments through these programs. Many environmental and left-leaning groups like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Environmental Working Group also advocate for at least strongly reforming if not entirely repealing the ARC/PLC programs. Perhaps there is some opportunity for common ground, at least on this one issue.
📝2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. Honestly, this is quite a sobering read. New fossil energy grew faster than renewables again last year and any bending in the emissions curve driven by COVID has been completely reversed. I cover the findings in more detail in my FoodFix piece. Keep an eye out for next month’s newsletter to read my insights.
Books in My stack
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. This 1935 book explores the rise of fascism in America through a novel set in the future (late 1930s) is one dystopian classic I somehow never read. After dives into iterations of fascism under Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet covered in the Allende novels, I decided it was time to read this one. I’m only a few chapters in, but so far it does not disappoint.
Utopia, New Jersey: Travels to the Nearest Eden by Perdita Buchan. I found this nonfiction volume in my local library and snapped it up. Last year, I enjoyed reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered which draws inspiration from one of the communities covered in this book. Planned communities and why they fail has long fascinated me and I’m enjoying learning more about the many attempts here inNew Jersey in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Land by Simon Winchester. Sarah and I have traded books on the pivotal importance of the conceptualization of land as capital in explaining our current financial and agricultural systems. This is her recommendation after hearing me go on about Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which a Penn State professor insisted I read after a talk I gave there last year.
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. I really loved Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse. As a physical scientist, I often under appreciate the social dimensions of environmental issues. Ghosh fixed that for me. After mentioning my love of The Nutmeg’s Curse to several people, who in turn have recommended this book, I am now going to see if I like his earlier work as much.
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger seemed like a must-read for me, the kid who did every single one of her childhood science experiments on plants and can still be found most mornings out drinking coffee, looking at wonderous plants, and listening to the birds that also delight on the plants in my garden.
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This novel will be my first Coates’ book. Are there others you’d recommend?
Monopolized by David Dayen. This month Michelle Klieger and I are kicking off a new project on the role of markets in diversifying American ag land. One of the big barriers is the degree to which market structure has become unhealthy due to monopolies. I’ve taken a bit of a break from similarly themed books, but this one, published in 2020, looks to be well-written and has some good ideas – not just a diagnosis of the corpse.
Want more recommendations?
Find more of my recommendations in this blog post from last summer. If you’d like a list like this delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe today.
