inexpensive, and daunting geoengineering scheme of all, what Kintisch calls “the
Pinatubo option”— regularly loading tons
of sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere to
reflect more sunlight back
to space. A single nation
or even a very wealthy individual (and Bill Gates is
funding geoengineering
research) could undertake such a project, but
the political and ethical
considerations are many
and fraught.
Both authors give the
general reader the basics of
geoengineering, enough
that one can emerge from
either book well acquainted
with the field. However,
Goodell’s may appeal more
to Orion readers, given its
personable voice, clear
prose, and frequent moments of lyricism and
dark humor. Discussing
the post-2007 IPCC predictions for ocean-level
rise, Goodell says of his native Silicon Valley, “If my
grandchildren want to
visit my hometown, they’ll
have to put on diving gear.” When he
brings his inquisitive son along during
his interview with iconoclastic Scottish
inventor and engineer Stephen Salter, it
becomes a fetching and illuminating
scene. Goodell’s visit to Keith’s prototype
CO2 air-capture machine also shows his
good eye for detail. How to Cool the Planet
is, I think, the most important book of
environmental reporting at least since
The End of Nature, possibly since Silent
Spring. Yes, geoengineering is that big a
deal, and Goodell is a thoughtful and likable guide.
Kintisch’s book is the more journalistic of the two, and Kintisch, a reporter
for Science, has a reporter’s penchant for
inventing catchphrases. Geoengineering
becomes planethacking — an interesting
term, though Kintisch doesn’t unpack
the connotations as he
might have. The leaders
of geoengineering are the
Geoclique. There’s a Red
Team and a Blue Team,
and I had to keep flipping
back to remind myself
which color was the pro-
planethacking group and
which was not. Distract-
ing as this can be, Kin-
tisch is especially strong
on the stories of scientists
gathering to grapple with
geoengineering ideas and
ramifications (such as the
e=ects of geoengineering
on regional precipitation)
and on the right wing’s
interest in climate inter-
vention as a substitute for
the hard but achievable
work of deeply reducing
emissions. He notes in-
sightfully that “strategies
that involve blocking the
Sun turn a pollution prob-
lem—there’s too much
carbon dioxide in the air—into a tem-
perature problem—it’s too hot. That fits
with a longtime argument among climate
denialists that global temperatures rise
primarily from solar activity or natural
cycles, and not carbon dioxide.”
Both books should be read. And at least
two more books on geoengineering and/
or weather modification are forthcoming:
James Rodger Fleming’s Fixing the Sky,
and a title from the respected British sci-
ence writer Oliver Morton. With all of this
work available, environmentalists have no
reason to be blindsided by or ill informed
about geoengineering.
—Christopher Cokinos
Memory Wall
BY ANTHONY DOERR
Scribner, 2010. $24, 256 pages.
cHARAcTER by cHARAcTER and page
by page, Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr’s
collection of two novellas and five stories,
inscribes an unstated but ever deepening
connection: our interior memories are inextricably interwoven with the living places
of our lives, and both are equally fragile
and transmutable. In most of the stories a
talismanic thing is being uncovered or buried, sinking beneath the surface or being
slowly flooded— a 2-million-year-old fossil
in South Africa, a presumed-extinct sturgeon in a Lithuanian River, a dead crane
in the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, a small Chinese river town with ancient roots. And the characters who find,
flee, float, bury, or uncover are all at the
same time confronting the mystery of their
memories, which flood in on them or dry
up and blow away like dust.
What may be most remarkable about
the collection is the vast imaginative perspective that Doerr evokes. Memory Wall
enacts an authorial point of view at least a
step or two beyond omniscient — perhaps
the postmodern, satellite omniscient.
These stories move from China and Korea
to Idaho, Kansas, and Ohio, from Lithuania now to Hamburg in the 1930s to
South Africa, twenty years in the future.
The uncanny feeling is that Doerr channels these characters: a teenage girl who
moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live
with her grandfather, an old woman who
is the seed keeper in a Chinese village
intentionally being flooded behind the
Three Gorges Dam, a wife and husband
in Wyoming trying all available fertility
technologies, and two entirely disparate
characters in the title story, a young black
boy and an old white woman, whose skulls
have been bored and implanted with experimental memory access ports in the
