February Not Fiction Book Discussion

1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann describes how the world we take for granted--"the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world"--came to be. While 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus serves as a prequel to Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola in 1492, this work serves as a sequel. Continuing the work of geographer and historian Alfred W. Crosby, Mann describes the economic and environmental effects of what Crosby calls the Columbian Exchange. Christopher Columbus and other Europeans traveling the globe in search of economic advantage sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently carried with them plants, animals, and microorganisms that, Crosby and Mann argue, "reknit the seams of Pangaea," the original single landmass that comprised the world 250 million years ago. Through storytelling rich in detail yet grand in scope, Mann helps us understand how we came to live in the current era, the Homogenocene, in which, for example, tomatoes that originally only grew wild in Peru came to be a staple of Italian cuisine and people of European descent form the majority of the population on at least three other continents. While economists and environmentalists debate the ultimate value of this exchange, Mann takes a broader, less polemical view: " . . . as I learned more I came to suspect that both sides may be correct. From the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains." He helps us see that many of our most fervent current debates, such as those over global warming, immigration, and trade policy, have their roots in this original connection, or re-connection, of the disparate parts of the earth. This is history as we should have learned it and perhaps even suspected as we read simplistic narratives in school about the Europeans' divinely destined "discovery" of a naive and untouched world: "In some respects this image of the past--a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics--is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires acquired by dint of technological and institutional superiority. It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization's equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet."

Do you share Mann's equanimity about the effects of globalization? What are the implications of this more complex world view--economically, environmentally, politically, and ethically--as the future inevitably becomes the present?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, February 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, February 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.