Category: Book Reviews

The trite phrase applies – this is a tapestry of the time of Louis Brandeis. It is well worth the time both for the insights it delivers and for the historical perspective. I was familiar with Brandeis in a supporting role in reading I did on Oliver Wendell Holmes, for his quotation that the states are the laboratories of democracy and for his role in the sick chicken (Schechter) case that put the brakes on some of the more radical new deal overreaches. There is a lot more. I have broken these notes into sections of things I learned.

Jewish in America a century ago
Brandeis was the son of Jewish-German immigrants. He was very aware of being Jewish, but his culture was also heavily German, and he was proudly an assimilated Jew. The events of the Holocaust have forever changed how we view history, but we should probably consider history as it was seen at the time. The German-American Jews were not always enthusiastic about the arrival of Russian Jews, who were culturally different. During WWI, before the USA got into the conflict, American Jews were generally in favor of the Central Powers. The German origin Jews shared cultural affinity with Germany. The Russian origin Jews considered the Russian Czar the bigger enemy.

Of course, there was also no Israel in those days and no Palestine. Brandeis became an active Zionist, and evidently just did not see it as a challenge is Jews moved to Palestine. He seemed to think that the local Arabs would welcome the new settlers, as they would improve the local economy. Recall that there had never been an independent Palestine. Before WWI, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and it became a British mandate. Zionist intended that the Jewish homeland be part of the Ottoman Empire and later as part of the British mandate.

The book goes into some detail about Zionism.

Scientific management
The early 20th Century was a time of great confidence in science and engineering, even in places where it did not really apply. Scientific management was developed by practice and theory at that time. The most famous proponent of scientific management was Fredrick Taylor. Historians and business students still learn about scientific management (sometimes called Taylorism and even Fordism, after Henry Ford). The idea was to apply engineering principle to production, and it was effective as far as it went, but it did not account for humanity. It treated people like machines or parts or machines and was a machine age ideology. Today we tend to associate it with the unpleasant conformity.
Brandeis embraced scientific management and applied it in his law practice and his work as a judge. He figured out, for example, the firms like railroads could run more efficiently and so pay workers more or cut fares. He really did not understand the business, but it seemed logical and science. This sort of arrogance was characteristic of progressive ideas on management of the economy. It is easy to criticize them now, but at the time it seemed to make sense. This was, after all, a machine age and so much seemed to be made better by scientific analysis. It is like the adolescent who discovers some of the rules of life and thinks they can be applied universally. Assembly lines worked. They just were not pleasant places to work and just expanding them to society was not sustainable.

Conservation and the environment
The early 20th Century was an origin time, a kind of heroic age of conservation, with heroes like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. As in the earlier theme, it was also still part of the machine age and most people thought in terms of production. The science of ecology was not well developed, and the dominant ideas were of a top-down management or exclusion. Brandeis was not much into this debate, but he did get involved in a major conservation case – Pinchot v Ballinger. I was unaware of this. Brandeis was not much interesting in the conservation aspect, but it was subsequently seen as a conflict between use and conservation aspect of the movement.

Free speech
Back in Brandeis’ day, progressives were the ones fighting for free speech. Most of the cases in those days were against leftist and/or related to censorship during World War I. Brandeis and Holmes went with the “clear and present danger” criteria, i.e. speech should be free unless it met that criteria, narrowly defined. It was later to be modified to make speech even less restrictive. It is only recently that progressives have turned on the concept. Holmes and Brandeis believed that even “wrong” speech should be protected, since it helped find the right.

Personal life
There was fair amount about Brandeis’ personality. He was evidently very detail oriented, always checking the facts and the background. He complemented well his friend and colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was interested in the broader context and had little desire for the details. Holmes was a superb writer and could well put his idea out. That is one reason we remember him better. Holmes also drew on a wide variety of sources. He sometimes quoted poetry in his decisions and read Greek classics in the original.
Brandeis was rich, but he always lived simply. He explained that it didn’t matter how much you earned but how much you spent and went on that when he was young and relatively poorer, he decided to live simply. He just kept it up as he got richer. He bought expensive suits, because they lasted longer, but he did not buy many. And when he replaced them, he just got the new version of the same one he had.

The Brandeis often entertained at home and these were stunning intellectual affairs. Brandeis would talk about anything except cases he might decide. The attraction was the thought, not the food. People commented that they went away hungry. The food was good quality but there was not much.

Life & times
This is a good life and times book about a man who lived a long life in interesting times.1

The author started off telling us that we overlook the big impact of the Spanish in America, which is true. She then elides to “the Americas,” implying that the Americas were Spanish. As an old Brazil lover, I think more attention should have been paid to Portuguese. The author mentions Brazil only to not mention it again. A history of South America that leaves out Brazil is seriously incomplete. As my Ambassador used to say, “South America is a Portuguese dominated continent with a periphery of Spanish, English, Dutch & French. Of course, that is also a bit of an exaggeration, but Brazil is indeed about half the population of South America (which does not include Central America and Mexico, BTW). In fairness, however, the book is not really about the Americas. It is mostly about Spanish exploration, conquest and administration in what became Mexico and the USA. In this part she does a competent job of telling the history, but I don’t believe it is as “unknown” as she implies. I recall that we learned the history of the Spanish in America in HS history class. The names of the conquistadors and explorers are familiar to a reasonably educated Anglo-American, at least to the extent that we know history at all.

I think the author missed making stronger an important point that she wanted to make. Spanish culture and heritage are big parts of USAs heritage and culture. she wanted to tell the Spanish story so much that she missed the melding of culture. Anglo-American cowboy culture, so much or our heritage, is largely rooted in Spanish-Mexican soil, for example. I think she also underestimates the power of assimilation and merging. Cultures merge and immigrants from Spanish cultures are merging into mainstream America. The process usually takes three generations in the USA. The reason we have not seen this happen in the Spanish-speaking community is that for a long time the community was localized.

The book was interesting and there were certainly details of history that I learned from it. I think it lacked a theme, however. Maybe I was looking for the wrong things. I thought it would be a book about the history of Spanish influence in the USA and about Spanish influence today. That was one of the themes, but it got lost a little, in the first part in the simple telling of the history and in the last part in the telling of stories. The book is worth reading. It could have been better.

audible.com   El Norte Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great dep…..     1

I feel mildly uncomfortable about emergence. I like to think there are reasons why things happen. Daniel Dennett does not come to the rescue when he explains that there are always reasons FOR somethings but that we should not confuse that with reasons BECAUSE. The distinction is one of agency and you have to be careful with the language and it is confusing. Say a pigeon craps on your car. You can figure out what happened. The reason for the crap on your car is the pigeon. But the pigeon crapping was not because of your car. Despite what it sometime seems, the pigeon did not crap because of your car, i.e. develop the plan to crap on your car. It just did.

We humans look for patterns, and we find them even when they do not exist. For a long time, most of human history, our philosophies and religions specifically told us that there were reasons. “Nothing happens by accident,” was an remains a common phrase. But most things do.

Dennett explains how Darwin and Alan Turing (the computer genius) produced the counterintuitive logic that brilliant design can come from ignorance. People or things or something can be competent w/o comprehending what they are doing. A good example is a termite mound. Termites have no idea what they are doing. There is no plan. Yet they produce well designed castles, complete with a type of air conditioning. They “learned” the behaviors that make this happen by variation and selection, evolution. Each step building on the last in terms of its appropriateness. The process is purposeless, blind, slow and very wasteful. Most of innovations fail and are thrown away. But there is a lot of time and the system is not random. If something has a one in a million chance of happening, it implies that there is a good probably it will happen if you have lots of millions of chances. If it is a useful adaptation, it has a better chance of survival. It just goes on like this.
BTW – the idea that a million monkeys typing for millions of years would produce the worlds of Shakespeare is not a part of this. That would be mere randomness.

Alan Turing’s insight was along these lines but related to computers. The computer did not need to comprehend math. All computers needed do was follow a set of rules and do that fast and accurately. It is worth pointing out that when he described computers, he was not talking about the thing you are reading. Computer in those days was a job title. There were people who did nothing all day expect do arithmetic. Bob Cratchit in the Dickens’ story was a computer. That is the job he did for Scrooge.

On a personal note, this is how I learned math. I could not do math until I needed it in grad school. I had always been told that you needed to be smart or have math skills. This is not true. I finally learned to do math simply by doing math – over and over. I did not try to make sense of it, just follow the recipes. Comprehensive came AFTER competence, not before.
Dennett says that the key to human success is that we essentially can install apps on our brains. By apps he means technologies of thinking – behaviors and cultures. An individual human brain is not very smart, but we tap into thinking of others around us, far away from us in space and even people who are long dead. He talks about how memes pass like viruses to change our thinking and change our culture.

Our cultures started by means of a natural selection process. Useful habits persisted and developed, while bad ones disappeared. But now that we have cultures and technologies of thought, we can and do design intelligently. Compare the termite mound to Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona. They resemble each other, but Gaudi had a plan and could vary and innovate. With our capacity to think, we can go beyond the simple emergence. It can be less wasteful and faster.

Natural selection does not much act on humans anymore. We do change genetically, but the natural environment is not selecting. We develop and adapt through cultures and technologies. Dennett makes some (lots of) comments about where that is going. He is suspicious of artificial intelligence. He warns that we need be sure that it enhances our human intelligence and does not replace it. Reminded me of a book a read a couple years ago called “The Inevitable” where I think the author Kevin Kelly does a better job on considering AI.

“Bacteria to Bach” is a good book and very thought provoking. I had the audio version and I listened to a lot of it while I was working on farms making the environment more favorable for longleaf pine and white oak. I thought about the choices I was making on the land and how much of it was emergent. My intelligent design will play a big role in what the land will be like decades hence, but most of what happens is emergent. If I am not using power tools, I just keep my phone in my pocket and play the audio book in such a way that I can hear both the book and the ambient sounds. As I was working and listening to the book, I could hear Bobwhite quail, their very distinctive call. One of “my” goals is to help create and maintain quail habitat. I think I have been helpful, but the quail showed up by themselves.

audible.com   From Bacteria to Bach and Back Check out this great listen on Audible.com. What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett’s brilliant answer, extending perspe…..

Need to manage complexity in a holistic way. Need to change how we practice agriculture to restore soil and sequester more carbon in them. Create policies holistically and revolution in institutions.

Addressing complexity is hard. Need to recognize difference between complex and complicated. What we make is complicated; what we manage is complex.

Animals are important to good soil management. Grasslands co-evolved with large grazing animals. Cattle spread out over the land are destructive. That is why conservationists have often seen cattle removal as a key to grassland restoration but taking all the grazing animals off grasslands leads to soil degradation and desertification. The key is doing grazing right. In natural grasslands, grazers move constantly and in tight packs in order to avoid predators. Using this principle, we should use mob grazing. Large number of animals go onto a limited area. They eat most of the plants and trample others. This looks very bad, but the hoofs push seeds into the ground and produce depressions where water can be absorbed. The land quickly recovers when the animals move, and the biotic communities are more robust. The action for the animals, along with their manure, builds the carbon in the soil and makes it absorb more rain. It is a virtuous cycle. Savory makes a distinction between brittle and non-brittle landscapes. The difference the amount AND the timing of the rain. Some places get plenty of rain distributed throughout the year. These are not brittle. Some places get enough rain, but it is seasonal. These can be brittle. Some places don’t get enough rain at all. They are often desert but can be managed.

In non-brittle places, it helps to “rest” the soil, i.e. take animals off and let it be fallow. This is almost exactly the wrong thing to do in brittle environments. Brittle grasslands will degrade if animals are not present for a long time. This is clear in protected parks, which do worse when they are protected.

We are easily fooled by short term observations. When we remove animals from a degraded pasture, the grass gr

ws back strongly. It recovers. And we look at that and think the problem is addressed. But in the longer term, it declines. Experts rarely return to see that, and if they do, they blame other factors. It is counterintuitive to think that putting animals back will cure the problem of overgrazing, but it does help when properly done using holistic principles.

“Holistic Management” is a good book, but it drags a little. You can get the gist of it from Alan Savory’s TED Talk on the same subject. I finished a similar book called “Dirt to Soil” a couple weeks ago. The author of that book applies some of Savory’s principles to his farm in North Dakota.

audible.com   Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Fossil fuels and livestock grazing are often targeted as major culprits behind climate change and…

A lot of detail and some good history, but I didn’t like it. The tone bothered me. The story is told as a narrative of loss. In that it is like many such books and that is certainly a perspective you can take.

But I think narratives of loss miss the important parts. The world is perpetually changing, with some things bursting into existence and other flickering out. You emphasize the comings or the goings and it makes a very different story. Similarly, there is struggle that leads to success or failure. This can be framed as worthless energy spent or a growth. Another theme was what I might call the stolen land idea, which depends on zero sum thinking. This says that if you get, you must take from others. There is sure enough a lot of that.

However, in California’s case we need to take much more account of the creation. There is no such thing as a “natural” resource. There are potentials that depend on human effort, intelligence and innovation to get. California is blessed by nature, but the California we appreciate mostly results from human interaction with that blessed land. It is not just a gift or a lucky throw of the dice.

Another book I read about this was “Water to the Angles” about the construction of the Los Angeles aqueducts. I liked that book better. It was more hopeful. LA is a desert. It is prosperous because of human effort.

Nothing lasts forever and yesterdays solution is often today’s problem. This is something I like, BTW. Having challenges is what makes life interesting. What I don’t like is pessimistic tone. I felt this book had too much of this.

California is a wonderful place. We can easily imagine how it might be better, but we owe a lot to those who made it what it is today.

audible.com   The Dreamt Land Check out this great listen on Audible.com. A vivid, searching journey into California’s capture of water and soil – an epic story of a people’s defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought “A stunning history of power, arrogance, and greed.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred) M…      

fancied myself a classical scholar for a few years. I spent many hours in libraries. During my grad school years, I literally spent many more time at Memorial Library than I did at home. The idea of finding and preserving the wisdom of the ancients was more than exciting. The idea of scholarly centers had a spiritual significance. I got over that the extreme case, but not completely and I am still very much interested in centers of innovation, which is similar but not the same, as I will explain below.

“The Map of Knowledge” came as kind of an echo from my past both because of the subject and because I found it at a physical bookshop, the new Barnes & Noble near our house. I have been buying mostly at Amazon lately, although I have determined to buy at the physical location more often. Must support what I think is good.

As the title implies, the book maps the movement of centers of scholarship from around AD 500-1500 and describes centers of learning, such as Alexandria, Baghdad, Cordoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo & Venice. I was a little surprised that the author left out Constantinople, but the author explained that Constantinople was an imperial capital and a place where lots of texts ended up but was never particularly a center. Beyond that, her narrative sort of depends on the idea of the moving center that preserved the wisdom of the ancients.

Alexandria was the home of the great library. It was partially destroyed when Julius Caesar attacked Alexandria, but restored, but it fell into decline even before the fall of the Roman Empire. The problem was Christianity. We rightly think of Christian monasteries are centers of learning, where monks copied manuscripts to preserve knowledge, but when Christianity was still competing with Paganism, Christian leaders viewed ancient wisdom with less enthusiasm. It was associated with paganism and in fact the great literature WAS pagan. Many of the books were destroyed by a Christian riot in AD 415, where the mob also killed the famous female pagan philosopher Hypatia. The Muslim conquest finished the job. Alexandria stopped be a center of learning.

Bagdad was a true center of learning and they assembled the largest library up to that time. The catchment area was larger than Alexandria’s, since Baghdad pulled in wisdom from the East, from India, as well as from the West. It was at this time that the Hindu-Arabic numbers we use today were developed, along with the widespread use of zero. It was an organized “House of Wisdom.” It was all destroyed when Mongol armies destroyed the city in 1258. The Mongols burned and tossed manuscripts into the river. It was said that the water turned black from the ink, mixing with the red from all the blood. It was probably the worst destruction of knowledge in human history. Many of the texts were lost forever.
Cordoba was a wonderful and diverse place with Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars. In addition to texts, the rulers of Cordoba developed practical arts like the use of water, irrigation and agriculture. The Muslim rulers of Spain brought in seeds and seedlings of arid adapted plants, and semi-arid Spain was one the most productive places in the world. Cordoba’s time in the sun was bright but brief. A coup brought an aggressively narrow minded ruler. He came under the influence of Muslim fundamentalists and destroyed all the texts they could get, except those associated with medicine or mathematics. Some books survived when scholars fled with them to neighboring cities like Seville, Granada, Zaragoza & Toledo.

Toledo became the center translation and transmission to the West. Scholars from Western Europe came to look for old texts and translate them from Greek or more often Arabic.

Salerno and Palermo became centers for learning largely due to the influence of the Normans. The Normans were among the most interesting people in the middle ages. They were the descents of Vikings, given land by the King of France in return for keeping other Vikings out. Most of us know them from William the Conqueror and his 1066 conquest of English, but other branches of the family were active in the Mediterranean. They ruled Sicily and Southern Italy for nearly 200 years and were very open to all sorts of influences.
The last center mentioned in the book is Venice. Venice for a long time was the link between east and west. When the Turks finally conquered the Byzantine Empire, many of the scholars fled to Venice. Of course, the Venetians already had a fair amount of Byzantine stuff both from trade and from their pillaging of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade. The famous bronze horses at San Marco were plundered from Constantinople.
After the development of printing, knowledge was more widely distributed and the centers for learning and copying became less important. Experience of Alexandria, Baghdad & Cordoba indicate that a better strategy is to spread texts out rather than concentrate them in one place where they might be destroyed all at once.

The centers of learning idea beg a question of whether it was always a good idea to preserve the knowledge. I am talking about the science here, not the literature or art. Ancient science was wrong, and its persistence may have held back innovation and progress.

Medieval people had too much respect for authority. Most would accept the anatomy of Galen or the astronomy of Ptolemy w/o checking it themselves. This was a problem even before the fall of the Roman Empire, when the texts were easily available. Science stagnated. When you think you have found the final truth, you stop looking, and people thought they had found the final truth.

Near the end of the book, the author quotes a German scholar called Paracelsus, who in 1527 told his medical students to throw away the old books and instead turn to the “great book of nature,” i.e. look for themselves.

Maybe that goes too far. It would be better to use the old texts skeptically and critically. But when you treat books as precious, a type of dogmatism develops. It is possible to be too respectful.

Anyway, the book is worth reading and it got me thinking.

amazon.com   The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found

Robert Caro has been criticized for writing this book, not for anything in or about the book itself, but rather because critics don’t want him to divert his time and energy from finishing his series on Lyndon Johnson. His final volume is in the works and has been for many years. Caro’s books on Johnson are nothing short of superb. But he is getting older. The Grim Reaper may be unimpressed by the need for a few more years to finish his life’s work. Maybe Caro is thinking along these lines, at least metaphorically. It must be frightening to be so close to finishing something so monumental. There will be no coda.

“Working,” however, is a great book just by itself. Caro talks a lot about how and why he writes and fills in lots of interesting information about Johnson and Robert Moses, the subject of his first great book, “The Power Broker.” Caro says that he found his purpose when studying Moses. His purpose is NOT biography. Biography is the means to the end of understanding power, and in Johnson and Moses he shows how that works.

Power does not always corrupt, according to Caro, but it always reveals. Johnson & Moses were great men in what they achieved. They were also selfish, cruel and ruthless, as well as often petty, although it is sometimes hard to know whether that pettiness was just that or a technique of power.

Johnson, for example, has especially soft chairs installed for guests in his office. The guest would sink way down, and Johnson could enjoy a higher position. It was also awkward to get out of those chairs, which put the guest in embarrassing situations. In his swimming pool at the Johnson Ranch, Johnson would stand just at the deep end. He was a tall man taller than most of his guests. The shorter guests would have to gulp for air or tread water, while Johnson could stand above them in majesty.

A key to Johnson, Caro says, was his inferiority complex. Johnson grew up very poor, the kind of poverty that really does not exist anymore in the USA. As a young man, he had a job on the road crews. Since he was big and strong, he would pull a kind of plow along the dirt roads, the kind of work that could be assigned to horses or mules. He never forgot that. I will not repeat the details that are in Caro’s other books.

Enlightening for me was when Caro discussed his interview style and method of working. Caro advises in-depth work, get to know the people well. He actually moved to the Texas hill country to get to know Johnson’s people and country. He says that you a researcher cannot be afraid to ask the same questions over and over. Answers vary. And it might be useful to get them into different settings. He describes how he got Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, to open up by taking him to the Johnson house and having him sit at the family table. The memories came back, and he was more open.

Caro has no outside pressure to do his work, which is good and bad. He needs to self-discipline, so each day he dresses in a tie and blazer to go to his office for work. He has a quota of words, i.e. he does not wait for inspiration. He still writes much of his work with pencil or pen. Putting on paper, he says, is an adjunct to thought.
This book is sure worth reading, especially if you have read Caro’s other work. I just hope he gets that last volume of the years of Lyndon Johnson done before he himself goes off to glory.

audible.com   Working Check out this great listen on Audible.com. From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and the Years of Lyndon Johnson series: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. For…..     Like

Walkable cities are more pleasant even for those who do not walk much. These cities are cleaner, safer and more sustainable than others, since the factors that make it walkable are very often just good.

Why don’t we have these cities more often?

Maybe the biggest reason is that cities are planned in pieces. Traffic engineers want to make the roads convenient and safe for cars, so they develop roads that move cars faster and more efficiently through cities. Pedestrians, houses, trees and stores are things that get in the way of traffic. By making the cities easy for people to get in and out, they are essentially draining the life blood from the city. The car is hard on the life of a city. The traffic engineers do their job well, but their piece is not the only one. Another piece are architects. They like special or beautiful buildings. Beautiful buildings are good, but the life of the city depends on the places between them. This they often ignore.

Density is an important factor for walkability and transit. All transit trips begin and end with a walk. If people cannot walk to and from, they must drive. Density does not always mean very tall buildings. In fact, smaller cities often cannot support high rises. But the density much be closer and maybe average 4-6 stories. A simpler fix is to allow more people in given areas. This might include so-called “tiny houses” and grandma or mother-in-law apartments. These allow homeowners to share living space. What is holding this back are zoning laws.

The author talks about “prospect and refuge”. Our species grew up on the savanna and we have a natural propensity to like those sorts of landscapes. Prospect refers to being able to see far. We want open space so that we can see danger coming or opportunity available. This is the open, grassy prospect. Refuge is that place we can go for safety – trees to climb or rock outcroppings to hide. Most people like a combination of open and closed spaces. We want “defensible space. This is why we dislike large empty squares of long straight highways.

There are some paradoxes of planning.  For example, laws forcing better gas mileage tend NOT to save gas because people drive more when they get better gas mileage.  Worse, it encourages sprawl.  Driving an efficient car matter less than driving less in general.
We can make our cities more inviting by keeping this in mind. People like colonnades, porches and overhangs. Cities that have these kinds of things on the edges of the streets attract walking. Defensible space is important too. No matter how wide the sidewalk, we don’t like to be near the fast passing cars. This can be remedied by allowing on street parking or by planting trees.

Trees are the street amenity that all pedestrians like. It is less popular with traffic engineers. For them, a tree is a dangerous hard barrier that might cause injury if a car gets out of control. Of course, it is ironic that they prefer soft pedestrians to hard trees.
Trees are safer than non-tree lined streets. Sure, if you run into a tree it is hard, but the presence of the trees calms traffic. People drive slower in tree-lined places. They change behavior. Drivers respond to wide open spaces and they drive faster. So, if you goal is rapid driving, by all means clear the space. But that is not the usual goal in a pleasant city.
Our cities are shaped by choices, many of them not made consciously in context. The cities we most love are often not the ones we choose to build, as we focus on simple efficiency. The car is the enemy of the pleasant city and its benefactor. We have to decide when and where we want them, not just default to everywhere.

audible.com   Walkable City Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestria…..

Soil is a living community, not just a pile of dirt. The best insight from this book is that plants and fungi are developing in the soils, and it is useful to think of the microbes as livestock. They have to be fed and kept healthy.

Unfortunately, some of the things we do to increase productivity can harm the life of the soil. More on that later, but first a little more on healthy soil.

Healthy soil does everything better. It is more fertile, absorbs and holds water better, erodes less easily and holds more carbon. The last aspect is salient these days. Good soils can be 7-9% carbon. Most of our soils today less than 2%. Soils alone cannot solve the problem of climate change, but there is a lot of capacity for carbon storage in soils. The big positive in this equation is that adding carbon to soil is just plain good for many other reasons.

We can add carbon to soil directly by mixing in biochar and organic materials, but this is not the most interesting part of what the author says. He talks about carbon being released by plants in a symbiotic relationship with soil fungi and mycorrhizae. The discovery of mycorrhizae is relatively recent and not all the relationships are well understood. I don’t know how much he is talking science and how much he is talking about his own experience, so the details might differ, but the general concept is sound and very interesting. The plants are essentially feeding the fungi and the fungi help feed the plants. In the process, they build soils and sequester carbon.

We can disturb these relationships with herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizer. Let me start with the caveat that the author does not oppose the use of all agricultural chemicals but says that we should use less and use them in more targeted ways. It is easy to understand how pesticides and herbicides would have negative impacts, but what about fertilizer? Artificial fertilizers impact the soil community by letting plants “cheat” on growing. They no longer need to draw so much from the mycorrhizal environment, causing the mycorrhizae to decline or die.

The main thrust of his book, however, involves five principles.

Limited disturbance. Limit mechanical, chemical, and physical disturbance of soil. – Tilling disturbs the structure of the soil. It cuts the roots and the mycorrhizae, makes it dry out faster and creates strata, where a hard layer is under the soils that prevents water infiltration.

Armoring the soil is one way to be resilient. The armor is the residue from a previous cover crop and a cash grain crop is growing through the armor. There should be little bare ground. This was one of the causes of the dust bowl. When soil is exposed, it washes or blows away. The author makes an interesting, almost poetic analogy. He says that what plants do is harvest sunshine. When there are no plants, all that is wasted and even becomes negative in drying.

Diversity. Different species of plants and animals occupy different ecological niches. A diverse community can support more total life and that life may be complementary. A diverse community is also more resilient against diseases, pests and stress in general. I drought will affect different communities differently.

Living roots. Keep living roots in soil as long as possible. This is related to the tilling above. Living roots help maintain soil integrity.

Integrated animals. This is a key point. We should probably eat less meat, since that is better for the environment, but eating no meat is bad for the environment. We need livestock to maintain healthy soils. Grassland ecosystems require grazing animals. There are better and worse ways to do this. Over grazing can destroy grasslands, but no grazing also destroys them. Best is “mob grazing” where large numbers of animals are put on the same place for a short time. They eat most of the grass and trample a lot more of it. You would think this is bad, but it puts the carbon into the soil and allows for better regeneration. The author is a fan of Alan Savory. I have written about him before.

Working in any natural system requires constant effort and constant learning. The author is someone like that. I learned a lot from the book and I also enjoyed a lot. I listened to the audio book on my way to and from a conference about clean water in Charlottesville. It was appropriate listening and complemented insights from the conference.  

Some summer reading and maybe finding patterns that do not exist.

I am usually reading a few books over the same period, so I get them confused. This is not helped by the fact that I tend to read related books, since the interest in one leads me to the others. Amazon is complicit in this, with their “people who bought this also bought these” hints.

I finished four books this week. “The World According to Star Wars” by Cass Sunstein, “In Pursuit of Elegance” by Matthew May, “Peak” by Anders Ericsson, and “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly. I highly recommend all of them, and it is not a bad idea to read them around the same time. I found lots of commonalities. Maybe I just imagined them, but they have helped me put things in context.

“Peak” for example, is about getting really good at something through deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is the source for the “10,000 hours rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. This is the idea that anybody gets to be an expert at something with 10,000 hours of practice. Ericsson says that this formulation is way too simplistic. While you cannot find any real experts in anything who have not put in the time (the idea of spontaneous genius is a myth) just putting in your time is not sufficient. Natural abilities do play a role and there is some question about whether it requires a certain natural ability just to put in the time, i.e. the capacity to practice that much might be an indicator of ability as well as a creator. He also wrote that the skills are not fungible. Playing chess very well does not teach you to be logical in other realms, although a person attracted to chess might have the predilection to be logical. Cause and effect are difficult to sort out, even in simple cases. Deliberate practice works where the process can be understood and there are measurable goals. Reading this made me think of computer or mechanical processes. If you understand all the steps in a process, you can make a machine or program a computer to do it better than a human can. Which fit in well with my next book, “The Inevitable.”

“The Inevitable” is a great book and I will write more about it on its own. In this context, however, I was interested in what the author had to say about cognition being a type of utility. He said that there is really no single type of intelligence and that it would be less useful if there were. This fits well with the idea in “Peak” that skills are no easily fungible. The chess playing program does not also play football. But most parallel was when the author, Kevin Kelly, described how they have made machines that learn to play games. This is different from a chess playing program when the moves are programmed into the software. This newer cognition is where the computer is programming with rules to learn. He described how a computer learned to play Pong (recall that primitive video game). At first, the machine did poorly, but it got better with each try until it could beat any human player AND had devised a strategy to get around the boundaries that no human player had contemplated. This was deliberate practice and an iterative, evolutionary process. The difference is that the machine did not forget as humans might. To repeat what I said above, if you understand all the steps in a process, you can make a machine or program a computer to do it better than a human can. Can and are doing.

Building on that brought me to “The World According to Star Wars.” This is a light-hearted book but it explores serious issues from Sunstein’s earlier work on “choice architecture,” that he explained in “Nudge” and goes into more detail in a book I am reading now called “The Ethics of Influence.” Choice architecture is simply the circumstance, environment of choice. For example, stores put candy near the checkouts. You have a choice to buy or not, but the architecture encourages a particular outcome. When we “add cognition” as Kevin Kelly says, we must choose a particular choice architecture and that will greatly affect outcomes. Kelly devotes a whole chapter to filtering. We have so much going on and so many choices available that we must use filters to get through the day. Filters are useful, but dangerous. We increasingly live in a peculiar and idiosyncratic world created by filters which we may or may not have set up or even be aware about.

Which led me inexorably to my fourth book, “In Pursuit of Elegance.” I rarely have read a book that is so much like what I think. Elegance consists of doing the right things and doing them smoothly. Instead of thinking about what can be added to a process, a wise person looks for things that can be subtracted. There is the old joke that it takes a lot of planning to be spontaneous and it takes a lot of understanding of complexity to be simple. The choice architecture should be simple based on a deep enough appreciation of the complexity so that we know what to leave out, what to leave alone and what to leave to others.

Returning to “The Inevitable,” Kelly does not lament that machines may be “smarter” than humans. Of course they are. A calculator is much smarter, but only in the calculations. Humans can delegate to the machines those parts of cognition most appropriate for them. The machines will be tools, cognitive tools that increase our intelligent advantage much as a physical tool increases our muscle power. Humans integrate well with their devices. When I ride my bike, it feels like I am doing the movements and I am. The same goes for cognition. Humans will have the capacity for elegance working with machine cognition.
I am not sure my books were really very closely related, but I think I did find a path among them useful to be and that is why I bought the books and took the time to absorb them, so it worked.