Albemarle County Government has way too much time and money at its disposal. To wit: the spring 2024 “Community Read,” sponsored by the county’s Office of Equity & Inclusion (a nearly $400k enterprise).
The Equity Office selected, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, as the featured read—a book that checks several intersectionality woke-boxes.
The county’s buzzword-laden press release clunkily touts the selection as an “intersection between the historically significant contributions women have made to improvements in our society and environment.”
Also promised to event partakers:
- Learn about resources related to climate work
- Opportunities to celebrate “women”
- Explore ways to equip and inspire our community to imagine a more inclusive and equitable world
Community Partners for this indoctrination fest include the usual hard-left suspects:
- Charlottesville National Organization of Women [sic]
- City of Charlottesville
- Jefferson-Madison Regional Library
- Piedmont Environmental Council
- Releaf Cville
- Resilient Together
- Sierra Club: Virginia Chapter Piedmont Group
Predictably, the Read will exclude science-based rebuttals to the presented climate hysteria paradigm and the obligatory gender-hyping. However, an Amazon.com reviewer has done that work for those open to hear it:
This book is *awful*. Instead of having actual solutions to our mounting climate crisis, it is full of preachy leftist boilerplate, much of which could have come from a Markov chain generator trained on trendy platitudes. Its authors’ intro attributes the beginning of climate science to a woman named Eunice Newton Foote. If their claims are correct (I have no access to the journal in question to fact-check them) she did publish something a few years before John Tyndall did. BUT: there’s no claim that Foote ever did more than one experiment or publish further papers, nor any proof that Tyndall ever read her paper. As a seminal achievement, it seems to have been vasectomized. This is not unknown; the pioneering work of Gregor Mendel was only rediscovered after modern genetics got going. But it does have a bearing on who should get credit for kick-starting the field.
The authors attribute practically every ill to “patriarchy” and other buzzwords. A quote: “The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women and nonbinary people* (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition–these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way.” You just have to laugh at this, because otherwise you’d have to cry. Women are just as competitive, comfort- and status-seeking as men, and have gleefully accepted every labor-saving, energy-sucking device that’s come out of the efforts of men, from the electric light bulb to the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator, and everything else that makes life more comfortable both in and out of the home. Women are anything but blameless for the climate crisis, and are perhaps more to blame for being a major force behind the stalling of nuclear energy. If the USA had been run by technocrats (like France) instead of pols driven to pander to slogans like “You can’t hug your child with nuclear arms”, we’d be a lot better off today.
The intro goes on: “All around the world, women and girl are making enormous contributions to climate action: conducting research, cultivating solutions, creating campaign strategy, curating art exhibitions, crafting policy, composing literary works….”
Curating art exhibitions? Composing literary works? How about the heavy lifting of coming up with the engineering and infrastructure solutions we need, at the blistering pace we need them? Conspicuously absent, and Greta Thunberg is blatantly on the wrong side of THAT.
A collection curated by women with such hard-left politics and obvious axes to grind against men can be expected to be filled with more of the same, and it is. “Calling In” by Xiya Bastida contains this gem: “As a descendant of the Otomi-Toltec people, I feel my elders have the kind of guidelines and principles that humanity needs in these critical times. I was raised with the philosophy of my ancestors: that you take care of the Earth because she takes care of you.” Now, I’m no archaeologist, but I recall reading about a civilization around her region which fell when its agricultural practices turned the soil into sterile laterite. How’s that taking care of the Earth? Her people made the same kind of mistakes, just smaller.
“Reciprocity” by Janine Benyus actually has some worthwhile knowledge in it, and notably avoids all the trendy buzzwords. This is probably because it is written by a student of forestry rather than a Marxist activist. She goes into the research showing that, rather than being competitors, plants often are mutualists and that soil nutrients were much higher in the vicinity of blue oak trees than the rest of the Sierra Nevada grassland. Of course, this was discovered by Ray Callaway, probably due to patriarchy. Benyus redeems herself with the story of Suzanne Simard, whose work with isotope tracers proved that Douglas firs and paper birches exchange nutrients. Of course, HER discovery was only made possible by the work of George de Hevesy. If you want to find the origin of a scientific breakthrough, almost every time you must cherchez le homme.
“The Big Picture” by Ellen Bass is the opposite extreme. It tries to be verse, but would work much better as prose. Not worth reading.
“Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth” by Sherri Mitchell (“Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset, Penawahpskek Nation”) is what got me to put the book down. It includes this stinker: “Indigenous knowledge is based on millennia-long study of the complex relationships that exist among all systems within mention. It encompasses a broad array of scientific disciplines: ethnobotany, climatology, ecology, biology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, ethnomathematics, and religion.” Ascribing these things to people who hadn’t invented writing is simply ludicrous, and publishing such claims disqualifies the publication and its editors from consideration as anything other than deluded fools.
On the off-chance that I’d missed something, I picked it up again and flipped through the entirety of section 4, “Reshape”, hoping for something better. Aside from an essay which suggests aiming at the private capital of wealthy families (what about eliminating inequality?), I saw no solid suggestions and only one vague number: $2.4 trillion/year. I gave up again.
This book deserves zero stars.
* Previously known as “mentally ill”, and given the laundry list of associated pathologies including suicide risk they should definitely still be. They might not be so messed up if they were properly medicated and given cognitive therapy instead of normalizing their delusions.
Sadly, as Albemarle County “struggles” to fund its priorities in the midst of multiple tax increases, underrepresented taxpayers are forced to subsidize blatant leftist propaganda at mindless, bigoted, anti-science events such as the Community Read.
