Dec 15, 2022
Suggested reads: The interplay of technology, environment and ecology
John Mulrow of Purdue Environmental and Ecological Engineering has wide-ranging intellectual interests, driven by concern for the state of our one, shared planet. Mulrow, a visiting assistant professor, creates analytical tools that consider both environmental and economic effects of technology. He also is an engineer officer with the U.S. Army National Guard. Here are some of the books he has enjoyed and recommends:
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). This book weaves together plant science, ecology, and the history and current state of indigenous land management practices. The chapter “Honorable Harvest” is by far the favorite reading I assigned to students in my class on technological efficiency and environmental impacts.
The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
Georgescu-Roegen was a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, with a focus on agricultural productivity. He observed that economic models take physical equations as their inspiration — economies are systems that take inputs, create outputs, and seek equilibrium. However, economists have largely missed a reality with which physicists long ago reckoned — the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law. This book explores how modern assumptions about the benefits of economic growth would shift if economic models incorporated entropic realities. Essential reading for graduate-level environmental engineering and environmental economics students alike.
Energy and Equity (Ideas in Progress), by Ivan Illich
Illich was a Catholic priest who became an intense critic of infrastructure and development projects being implemented in Mexico, where he spent the later part of his life. He describes technology and its cultural interactions, focusing on the effects of increasing speed and power in energy/transportation. This is a theologian-philosopher’s commentary, not an engineer’s. It’s more poetry than technical analysis, but it uses the language of energy innovation.
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, by Evgeny Morozov
I was working as an environmental consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area when I read this book. I believe it was ahead of its time, and there are now numerous commentaries on the risks of assuming apps and automation will solve such major societal problems as climate change. This is a seminal work in that area.
The Efficiency Trap: Finding a Better Way to Achieve a Sustainable Energy Future, by Steve Hallett
Written by Purdue’s very own Steve Hallett (professor of horticulture and landscape architecture)! This book describes the role that efficiency improvement plays in driving resource exploitation and environmental damage. It’s an often-paradoxical relationship, which Hallett puts in historical and actionable terms.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
You may have seen the awesome movie on Netflix, but of course, the book is better. The book gives you a much deeper history of the political, agricultural and ecological context in which Kamkwamba, a teenager living in rural Malawi, built a wind turbine from a bicycle dynamo, wood, and scrap metal.
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies, by Ginger Strand
This is the best combination of history, engineering and comedy I’ve ever read. Strand takes us through the history of Niagara Falls and the development of electrical generating stations (that made Nikola Tesla famous), associated industries (such as aluminum smelting), and tourism promotions (including the ability to turn the waterfall flow rate up and down to accommodate boat tours and light shows).
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914 (the French and Americans’ quest to build the Panama Canal)
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (the 15-year saga of constructing the Brooklyn Bridge)
The Wright Brothers (the story of two bicycle mechanic brothers who were the first to fly)
The Johnstown Flood (Breaking of the South Fork Dam on the Conemaugh River that devastated Johnstown)
These four books are by David McCullough, one of the best writers of American history, who passed away this year. He is most-known for presidential biographies, but he was really a civil and environmental engineering buff! These four histories will take you on an awesome ride through technological change in transportation, energy and environmental infrastructure.
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Butler is an epic ecological-sci-fi writer — one of the most famous!! And this is her seminal work, about a young girl who leads an earth-centric spiritual revolution after modern industrial society collapses in the face of extreme socio-environmental change along the West Coast of the United States.
The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, by Daniel Quinn
If you’re an environmental thinker and you haven’t read Quinn’s Ishmael, go read it. But if you have read Ishmael, you need to read the sequel, Story of B, which follows a student of Ishmael’s who builds a following in Europe. Many of the philosophical ideas established in Ishmael are fleshed out through this book.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, by Omar Khayyám, 11th Century CE
Khayyám was a Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet. His writings are nearly a millennium old, but they are full of modern humor, and lessons about the planet and our place in the universe. Some of his verses are very ecological, reminding you that we are constantly working against biodegradation and entropy. Because we will become dust, and that dust may become clay pots, and those clay pots may hold gallons of wine, we might as well have a glass of wine while we’re at it.
John Mulrow, PhD
Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental and Ecological Engineering
College of Engineering
Purdue University
