The Pacific

Books: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Food. How can you get more basic than that? Last summer after I blogged about the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Program and the importance and joy of eating locally grown produce, Rachel loaned me a book: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. “Read it,” she said. “I think you’ll like it.” It looked great but sat on my shelf for months until I begin to feel guilty about not reading it. So I started and found that I could not stop. Periodically during the nights that followed I would literally shout out loud about some tidbit of information. After finishing the book and returning it to Rachel I ordered a copy for Bob to read and for us to have. Also ordered copies for our children. Even recommended it to the book club I participate in.

So what is it about this book? First the topic. Yes, food is important. Maybe more important than we realize as we consume industrialized versions of it. In addition, it is very well written. Reads almost like a novel as Pollan tells the story of four meals. To do this he divides the book into three sections: industrial food, both big and small organic food, and finally the food we get by hunting and gathering. At the end of each section Pollan prepares a meal from the food he has followed.

In the first section I was surprised to discover the extent to which the American diet of fast food is based on corn. Corn, it seems is a part of almost everything produced by the giant agribusinesses that have productized everything from beef to breakfast cereal. One of my shouting out loud moments occurred when I read:

“If the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.”

This book does not summarize easily. It is filled with just such insights and tidbits. It is an important book for all of us who have thought that agricultural policy had to do with those who grow food. It also has an impact on those of us who eat it. Read it. I think you'll like it.

Image: Taro fields on Kauai, taken January 2008.

Books: The Nine Nations of North America

Just back from a trip to Miami I am reminded of the now classic book The Nine Nations of North America in which Joel Garreau describes North America as nine regions with cultures so distinctive that they seem to be independent nations. Although parts of the book (originally published in 1981) are dated and I still want to quibble about some of the boundaries, I couldn’t help feeling that Miami is as different from Seattle as Paris is from Berlin. Indeed Seattle has far more in common with Vancouver than it does with Denver, Chicago, or Boston.

The nine nations according to Garreau are:

• New England
• The Foundry
• Dixie
• The Islands
• MexAmerica
• Ecotopia
• The Empty Quarter
• The Breadbasket
• Quebec

He also identifies three aberrations:

• Washington DC
• Manhattan
• Hawaii

Having lived in four of the nations and two of the three aberrations I believe that Garreau’s approach has much more to recommend it than the red state/blue state division that has become so popular. Miami (capital of The Islands) sounds, smells and feels like an island. Atlanta, capital of Dixie, would never be confused with Detroit. It’s more than the look and feel of the places, it’s also the values and attitudes of the people.

The Garreau Group maintains a website that describes the regions in detail and adds “new stuff.” As useful as I think the book still is, I wish Garreau would do a complete rewrite. Thinking only about Ecotopia, the last 26 years have brought a technology driven economy, an Asian looking culture, and a new emphasis on education with Seattle housing the most educated populace in the US. Yes, we still care about the environment and enjoy the magnificent land but other elements have been added. I’m guessing that a new study would reveal an intensification of the characteristics that make each region so distinctive. After all, on this trip Miami seemed even more like an island than it did the last time I visited.

Image: Taken by Bob, Miami, May 2007.

Books: Wanderlust, A History of Walking

Seattle is almost always listed as one of the best walking cities in the US. In fact it is one of the things I find most appealing about living in downtown Seattle. Within minutes we can get to the new Olympic Sculpture Park, the Myrtle Edwards Park that edges Elliott Bay, and Seattle Center – home of every festival ever invented.

But walking in a city has more to recommend it than parks and gardens. It is, in fact, the city itself with its tall buildings and rushes of people that I find most seductive. I love the practical benefit of walking to baseball, football, ballet, symphony, rock concerts, grocery stores, shopping, great restaurants, and more coffee shops than most of us really need without firing up the car and searching for a parking place. I love the community and connectedness of seeing familiar faces and discovering new ones, of waving to the shop keeper down the block, picking up bread at Macrina’s, and stopping in for a few words with my favorite barista. Instead of moving anonymously from one point to another as you do in a car, I love connecting the dots to make a coherent whole of the landscape.

Books have been written on what makes for a good walk and a good walking city. One of my favorites is Wanderlust, A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. Among many other things, she says: “I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”

There is much more in the book. She describes city walking and walking in the wilderness, the history of walking as a pastime, and the place that walking has held in literature. She writes about pilgrims, women of the night, and those of us who just like to wander through cities. She even wonders, as I often have, why so many people will climb on a treadmill (essentially a mind numbing activity) while avoiding a walk around the block.

Image: Walking lets you go your own way, April, 2007.

Books: Reading Like a Writer

We all read and we all write. It’s just that some folks do it better than others. Francine Prose’s eloquent new book is subtitled: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them. For many of us who read the classics too long ago or too quickly Prose hits just the right note.

She reminds us to read slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Using works by some of the world’s great writers she demonstrates how a writer develops character or uses detail and dialogue to convey an important part of the story. She discusses rules for writing quality prose and then shows how great writers may ignore the rule to great advantage.

She concludes with a reading list of “books to be read immediately.” The list is so enticing after the snippets quoted in the book that it makes me want to rush out and read them all, starting with Ryunosuke Akutagawa and not stopping until I finish Richard Yates. It made me want to reread Chekhov, finally read Proust, and discover Mavis Gallant, Henry Green, and Heinrich Von Kleist.

Image: A blue/white bird-of-paradise taken in Kauai, December 2006.

Books: The Wisdom of Crowds

Over 50 years ago Pierre Teilhard de Chardin published a seminal work, The Phenomenon of Man, in which he theorized that for mankind to survive it was necessary for the species to evolve into a global human consciousness called the noosphere.

Now comes James Surowiecki with his The Wisdom of Crowds, subtitled “Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations.” In an age that glorifies and rewards individual achievement, this book causes us to rethink conventional wisdom about individual versus group performance.

Some of his observations and conclusions are easier to accept than others. I couldn’t help wondering, for instance, how some of our crazy election results demonstrate any wisdom at all, collective or otherwise. And he explains away market bubbles and other distortions as the result of a herd mentality.

Fair enough. He is careful to define crowds with the potential for wisdom as having four characteristics: diversity, independence, decentralization and aggregation. In other words, it is not large groups of people working as a conscious collective, but large groups of people that are diverse and independent working as individuals. Wisdom is the result of the aggregation of their individual efforts.

On the face of it this can be hard to achieve but two examples provide a compelling picture of what can happen. Scientific advancement is the product of individual effort spread among many scientists working on problems that are most interesting to each of them as individuals. Results are aggregated through scientific publications. Surowiecki uses the case of the international search for the SARS virus to demonstrate how scientists working in a diverse, independent, decentralized environment were able to collectively crack the code and identify the virus.

A more popular, and controversial, example of collective wisdom is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by volunteers, many of whom are not specialists in the field they are writing about. Amazingly, a recent survey by the science journal Nature found that science entries “are not markedly less accurate” than those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In the same vein, an organization called Shared Insights is teaming with Wharton, MIT, and Pearson Publishing to create a “network book” tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me. Place your bets and stay tuned.

Image: Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam. Taken May 2004.

Books: Freakonomics

Years ago I had the great good fortune to study economics with Thomas Schelling. Last year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to Tom for his work in game theory. Reading Freakonomics reminded me of those long ago days when Tom would hurry into the classroom with observations some of us hadn’t thought of as part of the study of economics. Why and when do drivers change lanes? Is the impact of the change positive or negative given the additional amount of time and possible disruption of the change itself? Why, in a word, do people behave as they do in so many important and unimportant contexts?

In Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner take a similar irreverent look at unexpected consequences. They use statistical information to debunk conventional wisdom and challenge the reader to think in fresh and unexpected ways. Who would have thought that one of the effects of Roe v. Wade would be the reduction of street crime? What is the impact of school choice on individual student performance? What, if anything, can a parent do to raise more perfect children?

The fun of this surprising book is not in the answers so much as it is in the questions themselves. I found myself having aha moments on one page while wanting to argue with the authors on the next. The result is a lively and provocative romp.

Image: An iceberg in Tracy Arm, Alaska, July 2006.

Books: Blink

If we define intuition as the combination of observation and experience, then Blink is about intuition - how to develop it and when to use it. In discussing the book on his website, Malcolm Gladwell notes that he doesn’t use the word intuition in his book because it suggests an emotional rather than rational process. Whether you like the word intuition or not (and that probably depends on how you define it) Gladwell points out convincingly that all of us make judgments on very thin slices of information. Some of these judgments are accurate; others are not.

The ability to know what indicators to look for and to process them quickly by seeing well-established patterns is often the result of years of working in a given discipline. Snap judgments based on conventional wisdom, on the other hand, are too often the result of bias.

In both our business and personal lives it is often necessary to make rapid decisions on the basis of what feels like insufficient information. This book provides insight into that process. I recommend it highly. It is well written, provocative, and entertaining.

Image: Taken at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC, May 2006.

Books: The Soul of Money

Stu Weibel, a friend and fellow blogger, recently recommended The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist to me as the most important book he has read this year. His review describes the scope and thrust of the book as it examines how our most important values are expressed in our behavior with and relationship to money.

For me the book raised a provocative question that I have asked myself frequently in the past. The book does not address it directly but the overall thrust of the book suggests it. The question is: if money were no object, that is, if each of us had all the money we could possibly imagine, and you had to pay to work, what would you choose to do? How would you spend your money to give meaning to your life? If productive work became the scarce commodity, how much would we be willing to sacrifice to do it? Each of us would, no doubt, answer the question in our own way but it seems to me that the answer would tell us a great deal about our most important values. Or, in the terms of Lynne Twist, it would tell us about our soul.

Image: Downtown Seattle construction at full moon. Taken May, 2006.