The Story of More

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Our Story Begins
 
The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)
 
Important men have been arguing about global change since before I was born.
 
Almost ninety years ago, the guy who invented the light bulb urged renewable energy on the guy who invented the car and the guy who invented the tire. I imagine they nodded politely, finished their drinks, and went straight back to motorizing the planet. During the decades that followed, the Ford Motor Com­pany manufactured and sold more than three hundred million motor vehicles that burned upward of ten billion barrels of oil and required a minimum of 1.2 billion tires, also partially made from oil.
 
But that s not all. Back in 1969, the Norwegian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his colleagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea and that this could change weather patterns such that farming would become impossible in North America ten to twenty years hence. The New York Times picked up the story, and Balchen was promptly shouted down by Wal­ter Whittmann of the U.S. Navy, who had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.
 
As is the case with most scientists most of the time, Bal­chen was both right and wrong in his claims. By 1999, the sub­marines that had been cruising the Arctic Ocean since the 1950s could clearly see that polar sea ice had thinned drastically during the twentieth century thinned by almost half. Nevertheless, it s been fifty years since Balchen graced the pages of the Times and American agriculture has yet to feel the full effect of any melting. Which, technically, means that Whittmann was also both wrong and right.
 
We shouldn t be surprised when scientists are wrong. All

HOPE JAHREN is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996. Recognized by Time in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, she is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and served as a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the isotope geobiology laboratories. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.

[Hope Jahren] leads us on a journey across time and space, outlining thoughts and beliefs from Mesopotamia to her tiny Minnesota hometown. Along the way she discusses the impact of everything from population growth to Norwegian fishing to nuclear power. She takes this approach in order to present climate change as a result of broader dysfunctions having to do with consumption habits that, she says, don t even make us happy.... It s an argument that contrasts with the recent spate of climate books, which opt to pummel readers with facts and guilt. Jahren, who first came to prominence with the best-selling memoir Lab Girl, instead writes delicately, like the whispery scrape of a skate tracing a figure on the ice.
The New York Times Book  Review

If there s one book all of us should read about the state of the environment, it s this one.... [Jahren] pulls off the feat of presenting climate change without emotional baggage through accessibility and humor.
The Washington Independent Review of Books

Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet? The Story of More is thoughtful, informative, and above all essential.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

A concise and personal yet universally applicable examination of a problem that affects everyone on planet Earth.... [Jahren] doesn t use scare tactics or shrill warnings.... She clearly shows how the amount of waste created by the privileged could provide plenty for those less privileged.
Kirkus Reviews

Hope Jahren is an awesome writer and scientist. Her new book, The Story of More, is captivating and compelling. She urges readers to be courageous dealing with global environmental changes and human population growth.
Dudley Herschbach, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

The Story of More is a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove