The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

by Hope Jahren Narrated by Hope Jahren

Overview

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. ¿ “Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" -Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction

"The voice that science has been waiting for.” -Nature

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions-from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles-that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming-from superstorms to rising sea levels-and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren's inimitable voice, The Story of More is*“a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years" (E. O. Wilson).

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2021 - AudioFile

In careful, measured tones, author/narrator Hope Jahren offers listeners an accessible—and sobering—assessment of how and why we are facing what she sees as our current inflection point in climate change. Pointing out that we’ve become increasingly practiced at not listening to scientists’ warnings, she notes, “Only by seeing where we are can we ask ourselves if this is where we want to be.” Full of data and memories, the audiobook’s four sections, further broken into short chapters, make Jahren’s message easier to absorb and ideal to listen to. She offers steps listeners can take toward positive change—small changes that can have beneficial impacts. Balancing careful, credible research and stories of human experiences, Jahren makes hard truths palatable and personable, offering hope to those who choose to act. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Kendra Pierre-Louis

…present[s] climate change as a result of broader dysfunctions having to do with consumption habits that, [Jahren] says, don't even make us happy…Jahren writes delicately, like the whispery scrape of a skate tracing a figure on the ice.

From the Publisher

[Hope Jahren] leads us on a journey across time and space, outlining thoughts and beliefs from Mesopotamia to her tiny Minnesota hometown. Along the way she discusses the impact of everything from population growth to Norwegian fishing to nuclear power. She takes this approach in order to present climate change as a result of broader dysfunctions having to do with consumption habits that, she says, don’t even make us happy.... It’s an argument that contrasts with the recent spate of climate books, which opt to pummel readers with facts and guilt. Jahren, who first came to prominence with the best-selling memoir “Lab Girl,” instead writes delicately, like the whispery scrape of a skate tracing a figure on the ice.”
—The New York Times Book ​Review

“If there’s one book all of us should read about the state of the environment, it’s this one.... [Jahren] pulls off the feat of presenting climate change without emotional baggage through accessibility and humor.”
—The Washington Independent Review of Books

“Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet? The Story of More is thoughtful, informative, and—above all—essential.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“A concise and personal yet universally applicable examination of a problem that affects everyone on planet Earth.... [Jahren] doesn’t use scare tactics or shrill warnings.... She clearly shows how the amount of waste created by the privileged could provide plenty for those less privileged.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Hope Jahren is an awesome writer and scientist. Her new book, The Story of More, is captivating and compelling. She urges readers to be courageous dealing with global environmental changes and human population growth.”
—Dudley Herschbach, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

“The Story of More is a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years, written in a brilliantly sardonic and conversational style.”
—E. O. Wilson

Library Journal

★ 03/01/2020

Geobiologist Jahren (Univ. of Oslo, Norway; Lab Girl) shares material she gathered for a course on climate change in this fascinating, easy-to-understand read. With the earth's population burgeoning to seven billion, advances in agriculture and meat and fish production allow farmers to produce more food. However, these improved crops and animals necessitate the ever-growing use of pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics. Using a plethora of facts and figures, Jahren traces the history of fossil fuel formation and usage, carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, evidence of a warming world, and melting ice and rising sea levels, all leading to a possible sixth mass extinction. The pursuit of more, explains the author, especially from the Unites States, the UK, Japan, and Australia, causes residents of these countries to use a disproportionate amount of resources relative to their population size. Jahren concludes by asking readers to define their values and make changes to the way they live to help ameliorate continuing damage to the earth. Citations for statistics are included. VERDICT A well-researched if sobering introduction to the history and causes of climate change that should be read by all.—Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL

FEBRUARY 2021 - AudioFile

In careful, measured tones, author/narrator Hope Jahren offers listeners an accessible—and sobering—assessment of how and why we are facing what she sees as our current inflection point in climate change. Pointing out that we’ve become increasingly practiced at not listening to scientists’ warnings, she notes, “Only by seeing where we are can we ask ourselves if this is where we want to be.” Full of data and memories, the audiobook’s four sections, further broken into short chapters, make Jahren’s message easier to absorb and ideal to listen to. She offers steps listeners can take toward positive change—small changes that can have beneficial impacts. Balancing careful, credible research and stories of human experiences, Jahren makes hard truths palatable and personable, offering hope to those who choose to act. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2019-12-29
Following a critically and popular debut, the lab girl turns teacher in a course on climate change.

As most readers know, a bestseller gives a fledgling author a bigger megaphone. In her follow-up to Lab Girl (2016), Jahren (Geosciences/Univ. of Oslo) uses it to show how issues that are clearly important to her are crucial to all of humanity and the survival of the world as we know it. She doesn't use scare tactics or shrill warnings; unfortunately, "we kind of stopped listening. By now we're quite practiced at not listening to things scientists say over and over again." The author cites warnings about the dangers of fossil fuels dating to the 1950s and the linking of fossil fuels and the threat of global warming "as early as 1856." Few listened then, and now the crisis is urgent. In matter-of-fact detail and conversational prose, Jahren interweaves biographical information about her Midwestern girlhood and takes readers on a journey with her to her current home in Oslo, where she moved in 2016 "because I am worried about the future of science in America." She methodically takes us through discussions of food, especially regarding changes in production and consumption, and energy and the planet as a whole, emphasizing one central point: "What was only a faint drumbeat as I began to research this book now rings in my head like a mantra: Use Less and Share More." Over and over, the author shows how the world divides between those who consume and waste more and those who live on much less. She explores not only food scarcity, but also lack of electricity and sanitary water conditions. She clearly shows how the amount of waste created by the privileged could provide plenty for those less privileged. "The earth is sick," she writes, "and we suspect that it's something bad," and a cure begins with individual action but will require significant shifts in values and practices.

A concise and personal yet universally applicable examination of a problem that affects everyone on planet Earth.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177046853
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	912,989

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Our Story Begins
 
The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
—Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)
 
Important men have been arguing about global change since before I was born.
 
Almost ninety years ago, the guy who invented the light bulb urged renewable energy on the guy who invented the car and the guy who invented the tire. I imagine they nodded politely, finished their drinks, and went straight back to motorizing the planet. During the decades that followed, the Ford Motor Com­pany manufactured and sold more than three hundred million motor vehicles that burned upward of ten billion barrels of oil and required a minimum of 1.2 billion tires, also partially made from oil.
 
But that’s not all. Back in 1969, the Norwegian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his colleagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea and that this could change weather patterns such that farming would become impossible in North America ten to twenty years hence. The New York Times picked up the story, and Balchen was promptly shouted down by Wal­ter Whittmann of the U.S. Navy, who had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.
 
As is the case with most scientists most of the time, Bal­chen was both right and wrong in his claims. By 1999, the sub­marines that had been cruising the Arctic Ocean since the 1950s could clearly see that polar sea ice had thinned drastically during the twentieth century—thinned by almost half. Nevertheless, it’s been fifty years since Balchen graced the pages of the Times and American agriculture has yet to feel the full effect of any melting. Which, technically, means that Whittmann was also both wrong and right.
 
We shouldn’t be surprised when scientists are wrong. All human beings are a lot better at describing what is happening than at predicting what will happen. Somewhere along the way, however, we began to hope that scientists were different—that they could be right all the time. And because they’re not, we kind of stopped listening. By now we’re quite practiced at not listening to things scientists say over and over again.
 
For example, giving up fossil fuels is not a new sugges­tion. Starting in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell Oil started writing passionately about America’s need to embrace nuclear energy before our “inevitable exhaus­tion of fossil fuels.” Hubbert believed that mining uranium from the bedrock of Colorado was more sustainable than burning oil and coal, which he reckoned would hit peak production by the years 2000 and 2150, respectively. He was both wrong and right.


Let’s go back to 1969 for a moment, back when Balchen was fighting with Whittmann and Hubbert was still on his soapbox. I don’t remember 1969 personally, but, like every year, it was full of beginnings and endings, problems and solutions, equal to any that had gone before or have come since.
 
Most of the trees you see out your window were barely seeds in 1969. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was incorporated in 1969 and has since become the world’s largest private employer. Sesame Street premiered in 1969 and went on to teach millions of children how to count and spell. Big things started out as small things, then grew to change the world.
 
When the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, every single fish between Akron and Cleveland died, and Time magazine’s coverage led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. That same year, an offshore oil platform dis­gorged more than one hundred thousand barrels of crude oil onto the beaches of Santa Barbara, California, killing every sea creature in its path and spurring the organization of Earth Day, which is now observed around the world.
 
Way up north, in Mower County, Minnesota, my parents weren’t paying attention, for I was one of the ten million babies born on September 27, 1969, and the last of their four children. The world would be different for this baby, my parents promised each other, and they made the ancient vow that all mothers and fathers make in the euphoria that follows a happy birth.
 
I would have all the love that my father could give and all the love that my mother should have been given. She will grow up free, my mother resolved—free from hunger and from the shame of being taken by the county. My father, for his part, looked for­ward to a century of technologies that would save us all from sickness and want. Like the millions of couples who had come before them, and would come after, they looked at the world that they lived in and thought about the one that they wanted. Then my parents turned to each other, in love, and they named me Hope. And they were both right and wrong at the same time.
 
Forty years later, in 2009, my department chair called me into his office and asked me to teach a class on climate change. I groaned and slouched down into my chair. Convincing peo­ple to examine their energy use is like trying to get them to quit smoking or to eat more healthfully: they already know that they should do it, but there’s a billion-dollar industry working round-the-clock, inventing new ways to make sure that they don’t. I also couldn’t help thinking about Edison and Ford and Firestone and Balchen and Whittmann and Hubbert and Sagan and Gore and all the important men who had already tried to raise the subject and, quite frankly, wouldn’t have thought much of a lab girl like me. I thought about the car I’d driven to work that morning, and how it leaked oil terribly, and wondered what business I had in telling anybody anything.
 
I left my chair’s office and went back to my lab, where I con­ferred sulkily with my coworker Bill. I asked him, after detailing the futility of it all, why I should even try. He listened patiently until I was finished and then gave me his usual pep talk: “Because it’s your job. Shut up and go do your job.”

Bill is the exception to many rules, not the least of which is that he’s right far more often than he’s wrong. As usual, he had a point. I was making too much out of this. I would go do my job, I decided, by taking my boss’s orders at face value. I sat down at my desk, turned on my computer, and began to research change. Over the next several years, I cataloged the data that describes how population has increased, how agriculture has intensified, how energy use has skyrocketed over the last half century. I accessed public databases and downloaded files of numbers and spreadsheets. I searched through the data for patterns across the decades of my own life. I set out to quantify global change in the most concrete and precise terms that I could apprehend, and I learned a lot by doing it.
 
This research became the foundation of a course that I taught many times. Each week during the semester, I’d pick up the chalk and teach a room full of students the numbers describ­ing how planet Earth had changed since I was a kid back in the 1970s. I taught them what has happened. Not what I think might happen. Not what I think should happen. I taught them the things that I had taught myself. And as I did my job, I finally began to understand why I was doing it: because only after we see where we are can we duly ask ourselves if this is where we want to be.
 
Right now, I see the country of my birth moving backward. It has dumped the Paris Agreement, it’s close to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture is in very bad shape. The United States Department of Energy, which funded my lab for more than a decade to study greenhouse gases, has shut down most of its work on climate change, and NASA is under pressure to do the same. I left the United States in 2016 and moved to Norway because I believe that my laboratory will have more support here and because I am worried about the future of science in America.
 
All of this has convinced me that it’s time to bring global change out of my classroom and into this book. Not because I am a scientist who thinks she’s right, but because I am an author who loves both words and numbers and a teacher who has something to say.
 
So if you’ll listen, I’ll tell you what happened to my world, to your world—to our world. It changed.

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