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The last speech in the book ends on a note that is both challenging and upbeat: “We are the change and change is coming.” The edition published in Britain earlier this year contained 11 speeches this updated edition has 16, all worth reading.Ī tiny book, not much bigger than a pamphlet, with huge potential impact.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence. Congress, she knowingly calls to mind the words and deeds of Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes it is the rousing “our house is on fire” approach other times she speaks more quietly about herself and her hopes and her dreams.
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Thunberg varies her style for different audiences. Although this inevitably makes the text rather repetitive, the repetition itself has an impact, driving home her point so that no one can fail to understand its importance. And then I want you to act.” In speech after speech, to persuade her listeners, she cites uncomfortable, even alarming statistics about global temperature rise and carbon dioxide emissions. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. With clarity and unbridled passion, she presents her message that climate change is an emergency that must be addressed immediately, and she fills her speeches with punchy sound bites delivered in her characteristic pull-no-punches style: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. General Assembly, Thunberg has always been refreshingly-and necessarily-blunt in her demands for action from world leaders who refuse to address climate change. Speaking in such venues as the European and British Parliaments, the French National Assembly, the Austrian World Summit, and the U.N. Would that industry and governments take heed.Ī collection of articulate, forceful speeches made from September 2018 to September 2019 by the Swedish climate activist who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Readers have likely heard this song before but perhaps not so exhaustively and well-referenced as in Lieberman’s opus. At best, he offers a “soft paternalism”-e.g., government controls of children’s environments (more physical education and better lunches) and taxing the unhealthy choices of adults. Alas, he is the first to admit that changing human behavior is notoriously hard. By no means does Lieberman discount all the good that modern society has achieved, but that message is nearly drowned by the constant admonition to do right by your body. The repeated emphasis on all the bad things humans do is wearying. Lieberman calls these diseases of “mismatch” (of biological evolution and culture) and medicine’s emphasis on treating symptoms, “dysevolution,” which means perpetuating the diseases instead of preventing them. Analyzing today’s creature comforts, processed food (with addictive amounts of sugar, salt and fat) and lack of exercise, it is no wonder we are seeing rises in obesity and risks for heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and the like. Lieberman examines energy balance-calories taken in vs. Thus we remained until the agricultural and industrial revolutions spurred population growth, changed diets, and introduced new infectious and chronic diseases-while little altering our hunter-gatherer anatomy and physiology. In time, humans spread across the globe in hunter-gatherer groups.
#The story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease paperback driver
The Evolution of the Human Head, 2011, etc.) writes authoritatively about the fossil record, crediting bipedalism as the driver that freed hands to learn new skills, enabled foraging for diverse diets and chasing prey, and ultimately built bigger brains. Lieberman (Human Evolutionary Biology/Harvard Univ. That is the core message of this massive review of where we came from and what ails us now. Six million years of biological evolution have produced a human body ill-adapted to the diets and lifestyles that cultural evolution has wrought since modern humans emerged.