During this five-day family holiday, I finished one book and started another one (that I also finished in fast-reading mode). Was the first reading sprint of my Sabbatic and felt good. I love books and I will probably add a section on this website dedicated to them.

The takeaway from combining these two recent and quite popular books is that we have invested and we do understand the historical reasons and technological choices that led us to face now Complex Challenges in Sustainability, Climate Heating or Inequality. On the other hand, when authors try to apply that complex understanding to future scenarios and support decision-making, each tries to propose “his vision”, creating an infinite “one per book” scenarios that can confuse the reader.

Apart from my expectations managing (also a topic in other posts) I have learned a lot and recommend these books to anyone interested in sustainability and economic theory. In the end of the post you have also a list of more books on this topic. Enjoy!

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020, Jason Hickel)

Excellent historical explanation of how Growth has become a harmful obsession but lacks the link I was expecting to individual accountability and possible changes.

This was a surprise. I was expecting a book on individual approaches to Sufficiency or Minimalism but no, this book is on Degrowth on a global scale….is obvious I didn’t read the full title 😁.

The book is organized on a strong assumption: our obsession with growth (mainly GDP growth) is not backed by science or beneficial logic and is actually damaging our ability to opt for more sustainable, equitable and happier futures, so we must follow a process of degrowth avoiding traps of Green Growth and others deconstructed in the book. You can get full book reviews on the web.

Was the first time (and I read many books on this topic) I heard of the enclosure process and historical steps from feudalism to capitalism and from animism and dualism that occurred from 1300 to 1700 and together changed our relationship with land, nature and its resources. Feels like it was not so long ago and not far away, so maybe we can recover from it quicker than we think… I left the book with a strengthened feeling that our political and economical system is now protecting growth because it believes in it but also no longer knows how to do anything else. To back the feeling I saw a video of Portugal’s Prime Minister saying “Growth is like riding a bike, once you stop, you fall. We must all keep pedaling”… Case closed!

Since I am not a prime minister, policymaker or planning to fund a new party, I was half-please by the book not linking the promises of degrowth with my life choices (again, this was my expectation when picking this book). Of course I can use this knowledge to influence others and support degrowth through voting, but that looks really insufficient when the stakes are that high!

Link to book in GoodReads

How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (2022, Vaclav Smil)

This book was read in fast-mode. Since in the introduction the author resumes each chapter focusing on separate challenges (energy, food, environment), I navigated some of them and then jumped to the conclusion so maybe some deep info got lost but I can come back to a specific chapter if I need it in the future.

By chance, this book is a very good complement to the previous one. It basically says, based on crushing numbers and pieces of evidence (the best part of the book) from the near past and assumptions into the future, that our current solutions to feed and support life standards are so efficient and have scaled so much that it will take 20 to 30 years to replace by any disrupting “way to do things”, even with all public and political will. This presents a real problem to the scenarios built to keep Climate Change under 1.5ºC heating, to eliminate emissions by 2050 or to reach a sustainable use of earth’s ecosystems.

Toward the end of the book, there’s a section on why decade-reaching forecasts fail and how that opens some space to optimistic explorations but this is not the strongest part of the book. Is really about the change inertia inherent to the enormous scale of globalized solutions and supply chains and the sheer size of the population. Point made backed in numbers… another piece in the complexity presented to each of us!

Link to book in GoodReads

Other books on the same topic (by recommendation priority)

1. The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet (2018, Charles C. Mann) see more

2. There Is No Planet B (2019, Mike Berners-Lee) see more

3. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (2015, Andrea Wulf) see more

4. Road To Survival (1948, William Vogt) see more

5. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2014, Byung-Chul Han) see more