I don’t tend to read many “green” books these days – not because I think I know it all, but because I’m topping up my knowledge everyday simply by doing my job, so sitting down in the evening and opening a weighty tome at p1 is less than appealing. However, I had heard a lot about these two titles so I read them back to back. On the face of it the two cover similar ground – charting the scale of the environmental challenge and what we need to do to fix it, but they go about their jobs in quite different ways.

Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman is a few years old now (I picked up my copy in a second hand book stall at my son’s school), but I had somehow managed to avoid the works of this pillar of US green thinking. The book is very well researched and covers a huge amount of ground including some concepts I was unfamiliar with such as “Dutch Disease” – the negative impact of sudden discoveries of natural resources – and the link between human rights in OPEC countries and the price of oil. Friedman’s main thesis is that while the US is addicted to oil it will never free itself from the threat from militant Islam and will end up getting crushed by the Chinese economic juggernaut. Maybe it was Friedman’s assumption of a US readership, or the reliance on lengthy quotes from the good and the great from around the world, but frankly I found reading Hot, Flat & Crowded a bit of a trudge.

You can’t say the same about Mark Lynas’ zippy new book The God Species. The thesis here is that as we are wreaking biblical levels of destruction on the planet, we’d better use our ‘god-like’ technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power, to stop the damage before it is too late. Lynas uses the Planetary Boundaries Group’s set of 10 9 global environmental pressures to assess the threat from everything from climate change to loss of freshwater before proposing the most effective way of dealing with each problem. While doing so he lays into right-wing anti-environmental libertarians and left-wing greenies with equal abandon, arguing that the former ignore the science on the problems, but the latter similarly ignore the evidence on the most promising solutions. Not content with lauding the green bogeymen nuclear and GM, he delights in proposing water privatisation, carbon offsetting and geoengineering techniques – all anathema to the green movement.

Overall I found The God Species refreshing, entertaining and informative – certainly enhancing my knowledge of the nitrogen cycle and ocean acidification to name but two. Lynas (and indeed Friedman) is one of an emerging breed of what I call ‘rational environmentalists’ who say “forget the politics and the sacred cows, look at the facts, find the solutions that work”. I too have long believed that while the political green movement may have done great work flagging up problems, they are hamstrung by their own dogma when it comes to solutions – nothing is ever good enough for them. That’s not to say I’m swallowing Lynas’ conclusions wholesale just yet – there is a faint whiff of wilful contrarianism about the book that makes me want to seek out second opinions – but he has certainly made me challenge some of my own shibboleths, and that’s never a bad thing.

Verdicts:

The God Species: a must read.

Hot, Flat & Crowded: ideal for American students of geopolitics.