Two Degrees - Book Club Suggestions
[Spoiler Alert – It would be best NOT to read these questions before finishing the book]
1. I am fascinated by the use of tradecraft in cold war spy movies. In Two Degrees the environmental activists employ tradecraft, reflecting the actual behavior of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. Was the tradecraft interesting? Was it credible? What other means might Anthro have employed to avoid surveillance or capture?
2. On June 29, 2020, the temperature in Lytton, British /Columbia, reached 49.6 degrees Celsius and the area was devastated next day by fire. On July 9, 2020, the temperature in Death Valley reached 54.4 degrees Celsius, equaling the highest recorded temperature recorded in the world since at least the 1930s. Do you believe the warming of the earth will lead—or has already led—to an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, along with more frequent and destructive wildfires, and a worldwide rise in sea-level? Did Two Degrees lead to any change in your thinking about these impacts?
3. Assuming human behavior is accelerating climate change, where do you come out on the debate among climate activists on the best way to sound the alarm?
4. Radical environmentalists in the 1980s and 1990s protested industrial civilization itself. One criticism of this movement was that it neglected social issues and denied that social differences impacted the human relationship to the natural. Critics charged that this kind of ecocentric environmentalism, originating in and privileging the US, glossed over social differences, cultural complexity, and economic inequality. Does the imperative of fighting climate change justify sidelining questions of social justice and economic inequality, or how can these issues be reconciled in an approach to climate change?
5. “Deep ecology” ascribes an equivalent value to human beings and nature and rejects the premise that people should occupy a privileged place in any moral reckoning. This moral system conflicts with the concept of personal freedom in that, like any authority external to the individual, it calls for suppression of the individual’s will. Does nature deserve protection in its own right, apart from an impact on people? How does individual freedom stack up against today’s environmental imperatives?
6. Eco/Kristof talks about the need for balance in our world, citing the humoralists of ancient Salerno and the concept of yinyang from China. Deep ecology ascribes an equivalent value to human beings and nature. What is the proper balance between humans and nature?
7. Climate activists have targeted property involved in depleting nature or contributing to global warming, but no one has died as a result of their actions. Nonetheless, following years of intensive lobbying by the Americans for Medical Progress, the Fur Commission, the National Board of Fur Farm Organizations, the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and the American Feed Industry Association, and in reaction to the 9/11 attacks by Muslim extremists on the World Trade Center, the FBI classified radical environmental groups as the nation’s leading domestic terrorist threat. Do you agree that eco-activists should be labelled “terrorists” and that they pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat to the United States?
8. Several characters in Two Degrees undergo changes in the course of the story. Daniel converts from champion of the oil lobby to eco-warrior. Mia begins as a hardened partisan for the earth who trusts no one and gradually softens to widow and expectant mother. Joss starts the story aimless and looking for purpose, throws himself in with activist environmentalists, and then returns to his personal pursuits and relationships. Zeke starts as a young lawyer doing the work assigned to him but comes to question the morality of this work and the people who employ him. Are these changes credible or are they Damascene, that is, too sudden and complete to be believed?
9. Like many stories of crisis and upheaval, Two Degrees begins in the setting of a fabulous River House on the gentle Guadalupe River in the Hill Country of Texas. Did this setting feel real? How important is a vivid setting to the reading experience?
10. Aquaphobia, combining “aqua,” the Latin for water, and “phobos,” the Greek for fear, is basically a fear of water. Did you find credible Daniel’s sudden experience of aquaphobia, his suffering under the weight of this phobia, and his just-as-sudden cure? Did this is add to or detract from the story?
11. A reoccurring biblical allusion in Crime and Punishment is to Lazarus. Recounted in John 11:1-38, the raising of Lazarus from the dead was arguably one of Jesus’s greatest miracles. The story of Lazarus contains parallels to Dostoevsky's work, from the scene of Marmeladov's death to the “death” of Raskolnikov’s former orthodoxy. In Two Degrees, Daniel Lazaro suffers a kind of death in sympathy with the fate of his family, which lands him in a hell of guilt and suffering, but his spirit is rekindled, and he is revived to begin the journey from a place of horror to atonement. What other books explore Lazarus-like reawakenings?