Captain Moore showing some plastic debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with his research crew and catamaran, Alguita. Image courtesy of Marine Environmental Research Institute.

The Alguita, a research catamaran boat, was adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Plastic nets had wrapped themselves around the propeller. Captain Moore dived down into the ocean at 4:15 a.m. to cut the net loose, a dangerous task given the darkness and sharpness of the propellers. He managed to cut it loose and signaled to his crew to try the engine again.

Luckily, the engine caught. Captain Moore and his research crewmembers could continue their four-month long expedition collecting plastic samples from “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”—a swirling gyre of garbage formed by the ocean’s currents. This was in 2009, during Moore’s third research study on marine plastic pollution in the North Pacific.

In Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans, Captain Moore, with researcher Cassandra Phillips, describes this research and how exactly so much plastic has managed to get where it does not belong.

In 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” on a sailing competition from Honolulu to Santa Barbara. Though unintended, this expedition actually set Moore on another course—a course that led to Captain Moore researching this “garbage patch” for over fifteen years.

Moore said after this life-changing trip, “There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.” That is why Moore thinks of it more as “plastic soup” rather than as a “garbage patch.”

This discovery also led to Captain Moore founding the non-profit organization Algalita, whose mission is to research and resolve this plastic pollution problem. Moore still leads Algalita today.

In chapters that combine seafaring research adventures with the history of plastic proliferation, Moore weaves together a compelling account of our obsession with plastic and its ecological impacts.

Compared to their first study in 1999, the results are astounding and scary. Moore and his team found that plastic outweighed plankton six to one in 1999 and twenty-six to one in 2009, showing how quickly the amount of plastic has increased in only a decade.

Plankton is the foundation of the marine food web and makes up 98% of all life in the ocean. Yet plastic, a recent human invention that was never meant to even be in the oceans, has far surpassed even the amount of plankton in this “garbage patch.”

The consequences of our obsession with plastic are becoming all too evident today. On social media and in the news, videos and images are constantly surfacing of turtles with straws in their noses and dead albatross with stomachs full of plastic bottle caps and disposable lighters. As consumers of these products, it is easy to feel guilty for these deaths and this environmental destruction.

In Plastic Ocean it is refreshing to hear Moore argue that the industries making these goods should bear the responsibility for solving this marine plastic crisis. Moore presents an intriguing timeline for how we have become such a consumerist society and industry’s surprising role in this outcome.

For example, during The Great Depression, in order to spark economic activity, corporations began creating products that would break down after a certain amount of time, forcing consumers to buy more—a practice called “planned obsolescence.”

“Planned obsolescence” led the way to throwaway living with new products and new models of products coming out every year, many made of plastic. The first company to do this was General Motors, which purposefully engineered cars not to last to promote sales.

More products means more plastic packaging and plastic waste from production. All of this—the products themselves, packaging, waste—can end up in the sea, whether from littering, being blown off of a garbage truck, or being knocked off a shipping vessel by a wave.

Using his prized Catamaran, Alguita, Captain Moore has ventured 100,000 sea miles witnessing and quantifying plastic pollution through his research. Through Plastic Ocean, Moore testifies to the impacts plastic has on the marine environment and its creatures.

Plastic Ocean will hook you and reel you in. But beware.

After reading Plastic Ocean, you may start to look at the world around you differently. Our consumer “throwaway” society and plethora of “new and improved” products may not look so enticing anymore. Especially since they and their packaging are more likely than you might have thought to end up as condiments in our plastic soup—oops, I mean our oceans.

To any Canadian living near a First Nations reserve the Sun Peaks protest in British Columbia in 2001 would be a familiar scene. It was a peaceful road blockade with a couple dozen protesters holding signs, camping out and shouting for recognition. Developers fumed because their trucks couldn’t get by, news crews are scuttled about for the story, and everyday motorists searched for alternative routes to get to work.

Sun Peaks Protest in 2004. Source: Skwelkwek’welt Protection Center

The problem comes down to this: the provincial government gave a chunk of prime mountain land to Sun Peaks Resort to turn their small ski hill renovation into a $70 million mega-resort. It was going to be a boost to the economy worth the destruction of key spiritual and hunting grounds for the Secwepewc indigenous peoples. But they forgot one little detail: it’s not their land.

Police beat and arrested protesters on the spot. Chief of the reserve, Arthur Manuel’s own daughter was arrested and detained for 60 days simply for protesting. To Manuel, who had to drive his 4-month old granddaughter to visit her mother every week in jail to nurse, the whole episode was but yet another example of the Canadian governments racist and colonial approach to his people. He had to continue upon his own activist path.

Manuel’s co-authored book Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call, released in 2015 shines a light on Sun Peaks and the entrenched injustice. Beginning with a brief history of the settling of Canada and the treatment of Indigenous peoples the two authors, lifelong activist and former regional chiefs, Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson dive into a detailed retelling of the uphill battle the indigenous rights movement has been – and continues to be – in Canada.

Author and former B.C. Chief Arthur Manuel. CBC News

The Canadian government follows two guiding principles when dealings with Indigenous peoples today that originate from settlers first contact with Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago: 1) Make them go away and 2) take their land and profit from it.

Never have more qualified men told the Canadian indigenous story. Both men are founding members of some of the most powerful national and international Indigenous rights groups, and played key roles in when the major UN declarations, nationwide movements, and local protest plans were penned. They have spent time working with the government, working for the government and most frequently against the government. But they experience, witness and suffer the injustices the system has created first hand. The book echoes this in weaving powerful personal stories into a very detailed and political history.

The first attempt in making indigenous people ‘go away’ was the creation of reserves hundreds of years ago. Land was set aside formally by treaties for Indigenous peoples to live separate from the rest of society. The system actually inspired the apartheid system in South Africa. The out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach created chronic poverty and racism that continues today. Early 20^th century activists called the reserves, the fourth world. Meaning they were place where people lived in third world conditions within a first world country.

The crushing poverty and racism drove apart families, Manuel’s included. The heartbreak bleeds through the pages as he recounts the shoddy health care and employment opportunities that lead to the separation from his parents and siblings at the young age of 7.

The 1970s brought upon the formal policy of ‘extinguishment’ of indigenous peoples in Canada. The Canadian government wanted to dissolve anything that made Indigenous peoples any different than other ethnic groups, like Italian-Canadians. This meant dismantling land treaties and forcing all indigenous children above the age of five to attend residential schools. The goal was to dismantle the indigenous culture one child at a time. Notorious for abusing children, the last of the residential schools didn’t close until the 1990s.

Even the kids of activists couldn’t avoid residential schools to get the ‘Indian taught out of them.’ Due to the lack of employment opportunities and proper health care for his injured mother, Manuel and his siblings had no other option for survival.

Sun Peaks protest in 2001. Source: Skwelkwek-welt Protection Centre

The second guiding principle take their land and profit from it allows Canada to reap economic benefits from their racist approach to indigenous peoples. The land most reserves sit on are rich with natural resources. So for centuries Canada has simply started taking the resources without permission or paying for it and giving it to corporations to use.

It’s extremely profitable and the Canadian government is banking on the system continuing. Over $650 billion worth of investments in resource extraction are expected to pour into Canada within the next 20 years and most of that development is targeted towards Indigenous lands.

Unsettling Canada includes many examples of this happening for resorts, forestry, tar sand development and much more and how the practice varies from the government simply claiming the land as their own, to setting up expensive negotiations for land that put indigenous reserves in millions of dollars in debt. However, the fight against the major abuses of land rights is strong and getting stronger with youth participation.

The likelihood of government support for the Arctic North is slim due to its very high percentage of indigenous people. But Unsettling Canada demonstrates that the Indigenous Rights Movement in Canada already has major players in its corner it can lean on in the face of climate change. Such as to environmental NGOs like the NRDC, and economic power houses like Standard & Poor’s, and the World Trade Organization to support their land treaty disputes.

Furthermore, indigenous people across the globe are finally being recognized for their invaluable roles in protecting the environment. Even the World Bank sees a major role for indigenous peoples in protecting the environment.

The book is about Unsettling Canada on two levels. It shares the indigenous movement’s goal of unsettling the Nation or undoing the colonist mindset towards indigenous peoples, like no other publication has. Prominent author and activist Naomi Klein forwarded the book and it has been awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Canadian Aboriginal History Prize.

Yet the book is unsettling to any reader, especially Canadians. Canadians pride themselves on living in a just and fair nation.  Yet Unsettling Canada shakes that understanding to its core. We aren’t just to the indigenous peoples within our own borders – still! It is a wakeup call to our unsettling reality and a battle cry to the Canadian public. The real question is: will we finally answer?

One thousand feet above the bustling city of Mumbai, the Palais Royale shines as a model of modern sustainability. As one of India’s LEED Platinum buildings, the residential and commercial skyscraper boasts efficient material use, a composting system that uses worms to break down organic waste, a rainwater harvesting system, and a large indoor garden filled with lush plants and towering trees.

Digital rendering of Palais Royale Source: http://colorlibrary.blogspot.com/2012/08/tallest-building-in-india-palais-royale.html

But strip away this veneer of flashy green features and underneath lurks the massive waste of a fundamentally flawed building.

Out of the building’s two million cubic meters of space, there are only 120 apartments. With tennis courts, three swimming pools, a seven-level parking garage, and one of the world’s highest indoor atriums, the Palais Royale grossly wastes space in a densely developed city and diverts valuable resources to excessive features that pander to its wealthy residents, effectively outweighing any environmental savings the building’s design can offer. The Palais Royale’s ‘green bling’ markets the building as sustainable while ignoring the deeper philosophical intentions of the sustainability movement and excluding lower socio-economic classes.

Examples like these are used in Designing for Hope: Pathways to Regenerative Sustainability to astutely illustrate how the mainstream approach to sustainable built environments is problematic. Authors Dr. Dominique Hes and Dr. Chrisna du Plessis, professors of Architecture at the University of Melbourne and of Construction Economics at the University of Pretoria, respectively, explain that the modern lens through which we often view sustainability is flawed: it becomes a checklist of unconnected elements to be studied and resolved without consideration of large-scale impacts on the environment and community in which a building is constructed.

As the title suggests, Hes and du Plessis believe that an ecological worldview and a shift in our approach to design can cure our sustainability and climate change woes.

Designing for Hope aims to redirect the global community towards methods that are leading the way to effective ecologically integrated buildings and landscapes. With a textbook-like style, the book synthesizes the up-to-date ideas and practices of leading environmental experts and design practitioners. Each chapter focuses on a different philosophical and practical approach to environmental design, such as biomimicry, Positive Development, and regenerative design.

The Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore is a model for environmental progress in the built environment. It demands one third less energy than its peer hospitals, uses 100% renewable energy sources to heat its water, and features ample green space that boosts biodiversity, but that’s just a drop in the bucket. The building goes beyond minimizing its environmental harm and strives to add value to its patients and the surrounding community.

Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore
Source: yoursingapore.com

The hospital improves the health of its patients through biophilic design elements. Biophilic design is based on the idea that humans are attracted to and are healthier in natural environments, and encourages the incorporation of natural elements and materials into building design. With a large interior garden, rushing streams, and fish filled ponds, Khoo Teck Puat’s grounds provide a peaceful place for patients and community members to interact with nature.

Vegetation that surrounds hospital’s central courtyard.
Source: www.tropicalenvironment.com.sg

The hospital’s design also embodies aspects of the Positive Development approach, which aims to have developed land contribute more value to the local biological and human communities than the original undeveloped land did. The building hosts an organic roof-top farm that local community members can tend. The produce from the farm is used for inpatient meals and is also available to local residents, strengthening the social ties between the hospital and the community.

Khoo Teck Puat is just one of many case studies in Designing for Hope that demonstrate the potential for holistic environmental design in the real world.

Filled with case studies and photographs, the book explains nuanced environmental concepts in simple, clear prose that is accessible to the everyday reader. Those with more advanced knowledge of sustainable design will be stimulated by the book’s emphasis on micro- and macro-scale design perspectives and its systems-thinking tool-kit for regenerative design. One downside of the book, however, is its cost — the paperback version is $60.00, and e-book version is not much cheaper.

Designing for Hope offers a refreshing perspective on how design can positively impact humans and the environment. It is reassuring that experts like Hes and du Plessis believe that the problems we face can be addressed through practical and achievable means. The bright future that they believe is possible dispels the dark pessimism and fear that have long dominated the discourse about climate change. Climate change poses a challenge, yet it also offers an opportunity for imagination, creativity, and innovation to take place. Humans can shape society into something new and utterly different from what this world has ever seen before. Indeed, there is hope.

Why did Margie Richard have to travel 4,797 miles to get her next-door neighbor to knock on her door? Steve Lerner explains why in his book, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.

Margie Richard, regarded as a hero of environmental justice, fought against Shell to protect her community in Diamond, Louisiana. Louisiana Bucket Brigade

Margie’s home in Diamond, Louisiana, is sandwiched between a Shell chemical plant and oil refinery—her next-door neighbors. Streams of toxic chemicals spew out of these plants and poison neighboring residents. Lerner was so compelled by Margie (photographed on the right) and her community’s story that “he felt the need to preserve their voices.” What began as a short oral history project became a compelling book that tells the story of this community’s fight against a powerful multinational corporation.

Citizens of Diamond formed grassroots campaigns and filed local lawsuits to be relocated, but Shell would not accept responsibility for the dangerous conditions. Shell officials from the local levels in Diamond to the headquarters in London all denied, as Lerner explained, “their facilities were hazardous to the health of neighbors.” Margie realized that the Diamond community alone could not successfully fight a huge multinational corporation.

She needed to expose Shell in front of an international audience to see improvements in her community.

Fortunately during her community organizing, Margie Richard gained enough recognition for CorpWatch—a nonprofit organization that monitors corporate behavior—to fund her attendance at the UN Conference on Climate Change at the Hague in the Netherlands in 2001. After Shell’s presentation, Margie confronted them about the situation in her neighborhood. When the chairperson of the Conference opened the floor for questions, Lerner describes that Margie held up a bag of polluted air from Diamond and asked, “Sir, would you like to breathe this air?”

Two weeks after this public confrontation, Shell finally knocked on Margie’s front door.

Unfortunately, such corporate negligence is not unique to Margie’s neighborhood. Robert Bullard, often described as the father of the environmental justice movement, states that “all communities are not created equal.” Diamond residents had to fight hard to improve their living conditions. All they wanted were their basic human rights to clean air and water.

Lerner describes the concentration of poor and black communities surrounding heavily polluting industrial plants as a form of “spatial segregation.” This pattern traces back to a long history of racially biased land-use planning. Zoning rules classify white neighborhoods as residential and black neighborhoods as commercial or industrial. In effect, these laws prevent industries from developing polluting plants in white neighborhoods.

The 70 mile stretch of the Mississippi River dubbed as “Cancer Alley.” Wesley James

Diamond is among dozens of African American neighborhoods in Louisiana located in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This stretch of the Mississippi River is so polluted by the oil, gas, and chemical industries that it has been nicknamed “Cancer Alley.” Low-income communities, largely black, like Diamond have chronically suffered the worst consequences of poorly managed industry.

This form of spatial segregation raises the question: whose lives are considered valuable? This question is crucial to the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights at large. Black Lives Matter has rightfully brought racially charged police brutality into the public spotlight; meanwhile, spatial segregation in the form of selective zoning continues to quietly affect entire communities outside of the public eye.

Lerner illuminates the reality of living along the fence line with a polluting industry by weaving together stories and strife of individuals living in Diamond, including a lifetime resident named Josephine Bering. As a witness to skin problems, unexplained allergies, asthmatic grandchildren, and premature deaths prevalent within her family, 87-year-old Josephine is fully aware of the negative health effects of living three blocks from the fence line of Shell. She laments “I don’t have enough money to get out of here, so I just have to stay and suffer with it.” Many residents do not have the means to move away, especially because the Shell plant dramatically reduces property values.

Residents face chronic exposure to toxic chemicals, and many live in on-going fear of explosions. Many of the chemicals processed within the Shell plant are highly explosive. In 1973 a pipe leak at the oil refinery caused an explosion. The flames caught an elderly woman named Helen Washington’s house on fire while she was napping inside. She was burnt alive. Her grandson ran inside to get her and witnessed the horror of her death. This wasn’t the only such accident. A 1988 explosion released over 159 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, forcing 4,500 people to evacuate.

Following these tragic events, residents turned to Margie Richard, who at the time was a local schoolteacher, to lead a grassroots group in 1990. Margie is in the fourth generation of her family to live in this region of Louisiana. Her family’s roots were deep in Louisiana long before Shell built an oil refinery in 1929 and a chemical plant in 1953. She blames Shell for pollution that damaged her daughter’s lungs and killed her sister prematurely at age 43.

These women—Josephine, Helen, and Margie—matter.

This book is not for the light-hearted. The powerful stories of Diamond residents reveal the petrochemical industry’s ugly underside, the costs it imposes on its neighbors, and how they have fought back. Shell eventually provided Diamond residents with funds for relocation. But these funds do not right the wrong committed against Diamond residents. This community faced far too many obstacles for their most basic human rights to be respected. Racial discrimination in the form of corporate negligence cannot continue to fly under the radar.

This painting, The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus by Joseph Wright of Derby, was finished in 1795. A picture of this painting is included in Emsley’s book, while the actual painting currently resides at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Photo credit: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0706/fig3.jpg

Like many of the things necessary for human life, it is really hard to get people excited about phosphorus. It provides the backbone of DNA and is essential in fertilizer (artificial or organic), but most people, even if they know that, probably don’t care. Similarly, it’s hard to get people interested in the perils of phosphorus, despite the fact that they are increasingly relevant in the modern world. When too much phosphorus gets into a body of water, it causes algae to grow rabidly, in a process called eutrophication, exhausting all the oxygen and making them “green and smelly, devoid of fish, unfit as sources of drinking water and unimaginable as places of recreation.”

That common apathy is why it’s so refreshing to read a book about phosphorus containing scheming alchemists, labor unions, spontaneously combusting countesses, smoke bombs, and firestorms. The 13^th Element: the Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus by John Emsley details the history of phosphorus since it was first isolated in 1669 to the present in chapters organized by themes.

The history of phosphorus was dramatic from the very beginning. The element, the 13^th to be isolated, was first discovered by an alchemist named Hennig Brandt, who was doing experiments by heating residues from his urine at the time. The sample he was heating burst into flames. At the time, “phosphorus” was just a generic term for a substance that gave off light, and like the philosopher’s stone, new “phosphoruses” were in demand. This new substance was a better “phosphorus” than many others since it did not have to absorb sunlight in order to glow. The discovery could have made Brandt a very rich man if he hadn’t hidden his manufacturing method. Instead, Brandt teased another alchemist, Johann Kunckel by acting like he would give him the method, and then sold the method to someone else. However Kunckel used Brandt’s hints to develop his own method and as a result, he is often mistakenly credited with the discovery.

Phosphorus was quickly adopted for a number of uses, some of them valid, all of them potentially disastrous. The fact that phosphorus glowed was taken as proof-positive of its medicinal value, and “despite the fact that it is one of the most toxic of the chemical elements – and never cured anyone of anything” doctors prescribed phosphorus for some ailments as late as 1923.

Perhaps more disastrous were the times when phosphorus worked. Phosphorus had been used in matches as early as 1791, but in the 1800’s phosphorus-containing matches took off. These matches were as effective as they were unsafe. The lucifer, a strike-anywhere match, was so volatile that Archduchess Matilda of Austria one caused one to ignite just by accidentally stepping on it. She caught fire and died shortly after. In response to these types of accidents, people developed safety matches, the kind that could only be struck on the box. However, these matches were slow to catch on since lucifers were still seen as more convenient. Accidents continued.

Even for the people who made them, matches could cause horrible health problems. In the 19^th century, factory workers exposed to phosphorus fumes sometimes developed phosphorus necrosis or “phossy jaw” a condition where the gums would rot and pieces of the jaw would break off. In bad cases, the jawbone would have to be surgically removed. To highlight the dangers of phosphorus, Salvation Army Colonel James Barker would lead tours of match making factory, which ended with a visit to a family who made lucifer matches. When Barker turned out the lights, the family would glow in the dark.

Sometimes the damage was more deliberate. Another chapter treats the use of phosphorus as a murder weapon, particularly as an ingredient in rat poison. One near-miss story involves a wife poisoning her husband’s soup with rat poison. He discovered the poison in time to avoid death, because he happened to walk through a darkened hallway with the food and noticed it glowed in the dark. In less fortunate cases, a coroner could detect phosphorus poisoning in a corpse simply by turning off the lights.

Emsley also explains the role phosphorus had in numerous weapons of war, from smoke bombs, to the incendiary bombs that caused the Hamburg firestorm. (Hamburg, ironically, was the same city in which phosphorus was originally discovered). Emsley also discusses organo-phosphates (OPs) and their use in nerve gases, poisons that act by preventing the nervous system from re-using messenger chemicals. At the end of the Second World War, the Nazis had amassed enough tabun, a phosphorus-based nerve gas, to kill 12 trillion people. That’s more than 1,700 times the current world population. This particular part of phosphorus’s legacy has endured. Much of the research once directed at developing weapons like tabun and sarin directly led to milder compounds used widely today as insecticides in agriculture, and this connection to nerve gas perhaps undeservedly frightens people to this day.

The 13^th Element is not uniformly exciting. Emsley’s focus is chemistry, and sometimes he takes a break from the action to indulge in long descriptions of chemical processes. But those moments of calm are the price paid for an informative and mostly very engrossing book. This is the closest phosphorus will ever get to being beach-reading, and for that reason Emsley deserves respect.