The Story of More

Hope Jahren Vintage (2020)

In 2009, palaeobiologist Hope Jahren was required to teach climate change. Initially reluctant, she soon conceived a vocation. Her compelling book uses statistics brilliantly to provoke self-examination. In sections on ‘Life’, ‘Food’, ‘Energy’ and ‘Earth’, it illuminates subjects from population growth to melting glaciers. If the whole planet consumed resources on the US scale, carbon dioxide emissions would be more than four times higher, she observes: “Using less and sharing more is the biggest challenge our generation will ever face.”

The Incredible Journey of Plants

Stefano Mancuso (transl. Gregory Conti) Other Press (2020)

About 400 metres from ground zero in Hiroshima, a weeping willow and other plants regrew from their roots. Revered, they are labelled hibakujumoku, “trees that suffered an atomic explosion”, an elderly Japanese diplomat translates in flawless Italian for visiting plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. Later, he confesses he is a hibakusha: he survived the strike because his classroom was protected by a curtain of trees. Such anecdotes enliven Mancuso’s quirky little global history, which argues that plants “are more sensitive than animals”.

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

David Farrier Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2020)

Fossil footprints unmasked by a 2013 storm on the English coast revealed that hominins walked beside an estuary 850,000 years ago. Although quickly erased by the tide, they inspired David Farrier to consider modern civilization’s future footprints, including Neil Armstrong’s marks on the Moon and the nuclear footprint: a geological repository for Finland’s spent fuel. This is designed to be forgotten — unlike its US equivalent, which proposes to use warning signs modelled on Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream.

The Future of Brain Repair

Jack Price MIT Press (2020)

In 1996, neurobiologist Jack Price, then at a major pharmaceutical company, was invited to fund academic research into stem-cell therapies. He declined. Now an academic himself, he is more hopeful. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka discovered how to make ‘pluripotent’ stem cells, enabling brain-like tissue to be generated in a dish — “albeit small, misshapen and underdeveloped”, as Price notes in his clear, honest but intellectually challenging account. Today, several therapies have entered clinical trials. But how to make them affordable?

Radical Uncertainty

John Kay and Mervyn King Bridge Street (2020)

When Christopher Columbus sought a westerly route to the Indies, “whatever counted as cost–benefit analysis in the Spanish court took no account of the possibility of a New World”, say economists John Kay and Mervyn King. They refreshingly criticize their discipline for not recognizing that its use of ‘risk’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘rationality’ doesn’t match that of lay people. Odd, then, that their far-ranging book on “radical uncertainty” mentions Max Planck’s dalliance with economics but not Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.