Ending Global Poverty or Coal

Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works

Author: Stephen C Smith

Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over ten million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grass-roots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.

Foreign Affairs

This book grew out of the author's effort to respond to a question his wife posed to a development economist: How should they allocate their charitable giving among the numerous worthy-sounding groups that aim to reduce poverty? There has in fact been an enormous reduction in world poverty in recent decades due to rapid economic growth in some very poor countries, most notably China and India. Smith contends that although growth creates a favorable environment for reducing poverty, it does not automatically ensure it; too many poor people are caught in poverty traps of various kinds. His book offers sensible guidelines to both individuals and corporations about how they can help, but its main contribution is to describe the successes of many programs on the ground, ranging from programs to improve nutrition to those working on education or microcredit, often run by local nongovernmental organizations, which have emerged to fill the gaps left by incompetent or corrupt governments. Many of these success stories rely on women, who are determined that their children should have better lives than they have; the men who typically control governments do not fare well in these accounts.

Table of Contents:

1	Understanding extreme poverty : poverty traps and the experience of the poor	11
2	The keys to capability : eight keys to escaping poverty traps	31
3	Health, nutrition, and population	49
4	Basic education	61
5	Credit for poverty reduction, and insuring opportunity	75
6	Bottom-up market development : assets and access for the poor	89
7	Entitlement to new technologies and the capability to benefit from them	103
8	Sustaining the environment for ending poverty	115
9	Social inclusion and human rights for the poor and voiceless	127
10	Community empowerment and development	139
11	Ten strategies for innovation in ending global poverty	155
12	First steps	161
13	Further questions	171
14	Stepping up	181
15	What businesses can do	205
16	Some closing words : the end of global poverty	213

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Coal: A Human History

Author: Barbara Frees

In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins hundreds of millions of years ago and spans the globe. Prized as "the best stone in Britain" by Roman invaders who carved jewelry out of it, coal has transformed societies, expanded frontiers, and sparked social movements, and still powers our electric grid. Yet coal's world-changing power has come at a tremendous price, including centuries of blackening our skies and lungs-and now the dangerous warming of our global climate. Ranging from the "great stinking fogs" of London to the rat-infested coal mines of Pennsylvania, from the impoverished slums of Manchester to the toxic streets of Beijing, Coal is a captivating narrative about an ordinary substance with an extraordinary impact on human civilization.

New Scientist

An absorbing book that never loses its grip. Barbara Freese is a splendid writer...fascinating.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

[Freese] enlivens her meticulously researched history with anecdotes and surprising facts...[she] is a strong story teller who captivates with detail.

Desert News

An interesting and revealing book on the history of coal as it affects human lives.

The New Yorker

As the hunt for alternative fuels intensifies, the world finds itself looking to the past to secure the future. Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History offers an unflinching history of life in the mines: "Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark," an eight-year-old mineworker told a parliamentary commission on child labor in the eighteen-forties. During a visit to Manchester, Alexis de Tocqueville found that sulfurous smoke reduced the sun to a flattened "disc without rays." But in the industrial revolution, coal was also seen as "our species' salvation." It still provides more than half of the electricity in the United States, and, according to some estimates, ninety new coal-fired power plants are in planning stages.

Bituminous veins in Appalachia may have fed industry, but strip mining has also caused erosion, stream pollution, and mud slides. In 1945, the governor of Ohio, Frank Lausche, called the practice "sheer butchery." To Save The Land and People, by Chad Montrie, chronicles resistance to surface mining in Appalachia, as companies left behind gutted communities that were no more than "rural slums."

The average American mining town lost between twenty-five and fifty per cent of its population after the Second World War, Ed Dougert notes in The Black Land. His photographic essay on Pennsylvania's anthracite region collects scenes from the scarred country: a shack built of Hercules gunpowder crates, spindly white trees stitched into a blackened hillside. In an empty park, a valentine-shaped sign with "We Love Centralia" hangs on a tree. Centralia's residents had to evacuate their town in 1980, fleeing a coal fire that had burned for twenty years and, even now, is expected to continue for fifty more.

(Lauren Porcaro)

Publishers Weekly

Coal has been both lauded for its efficiency as a heating fuel and maligned for the lung-wrenching black smoke it gives off. In her first book, Freese, an assistant attorney general of Minnesota (where she helps enforce environmental laws), offers an exquisite chronicle of the rise and fall of this bituminous black mineral. Both the Romans and the Chinese used coal ornamentally long before they discovered its flammable properties. Once its use as a heating source was discovered in early Roman Britain, coal replaced wood as Britain's primary energy source. The jet-black mineral spurred the Industrial Revolution and inspired the invention of the steam engine and the railway. Freese narrates the discovery of coal in the colonies, the development of the first U.S. coal town, Pittsburgh, and the history of coal in China. Despite its allure as a cheap and warm energy source, coal carries a high environmental cost. Burning it produces sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide in such quantities that, during the Clinton administration, the EPA targeted coal-burning power plants as the single worst air polluters. Using EPA studies, Freese shows that coal emissions kill about 30,000 people a year, causing nearly as many deaths as traffic accidents and more than homicides and AIDS. The author contends that alternate energy sources must be found to ensure a healthier environment for future generations. Part history and part environmental argument, Freese's elegant book teaches an important lesson about the interdependence of humans and their natural environment both for good and ill throughout history. (Feb.) Forecast: General science readers as well as those interested in the environment will seek this out, informed about it by a four-city author tour and a 20-market radio satellite tour. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Coal has been used for decorative, heating, and manufacturing purposes since prehistoric times. This is the story of the role played by this energy source in the human history of English and American life. Coal's importance to medieval manufacturing guilds, as a source of energy for the Industrial Revolution, as a longstanding source of urban blight, and as a politically divisive, potentially life-destroying pollutant are discussed in detail. Less attention is given to technical achievements such as the critical interaction between coal and iron needed for smelting and high-grade steel production. Prehistoric (pre-Roman) and, except for China, non-Western cultures are omitted. Those looking for a more global work about coal itself should look elsewhere. While much more limited in scope than the title suggests, this book is an amusing example of "lite" nonfiction. Shelly Frasier gives a competent reading, and the author's writing style is admirably suited to the audio format. Recommended for larger public and moderate to large academic libraries.-I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The history of coal, that unglamorous substance that environmental attorney Freese manages to buff until it shines like its distant cousin the diamond.

Coal's heat-giving qualities weren't what first attracted people to it, explains Freese, but jet--a type of hard, shiny coal--was prized for use as ornamentation. It wasn't long, though, before coal became known as the genie bearing the gift of warmth and power, with all kinds of strings attached. Freese concentrates her story on the evolution of coal in Great Britain, the US, and China. It was used in what became Wales during the Bronze Age to cremate the dead and in Stone Age China as jewelry, but its world-changing properties weren't tapped until later, when it warmed the hearth and drove the engine of industry. Freese's writing is a bit like coal--smooth and glinting, burning with a steady warmth--though with none of its downsides, for coal also contributed to miserable air quality, black-lung disease, scarred landscapes, and outrageous working conditions, along with "social and economic policies that tolerated and exacerbated the suffering" that gave rise to both the Molly Maguires and the Pinkerton Agency as well as a whole distinct class of "social outcasts who faced astonishing dangers in providing an increasingly vital commodity." Freese gives ample space to coal's polluting nature (as Assistant Attorney General of Minnesota, she became involved in investigating its effects both within and outside the state), the consequences it wrought on London and continues to heap on China, as well as its role in acid rain, smog, disease, global warming, and possible influence on natural climatic jolts, all the while keeping the storylively with a wealth of fascinating coal-related oddments.

It's dirty, it's cheap, and its past--in Freese's hands--makes for an intriguing, cautionary tale. (Photo insert)