SURPRISE, surprise, the Global Environment Facility probably won't save the
planet. If you have never heard of the agency, this book won't persuade you
that you have been missing much.
Its friends say the GEF is a fund administered by the World Bank to carry
out green works around the globe. Its enemies say the GEF is a
billion-dollar sticking plaster to protect the planet from the bank's worst
excesses, and to protect the bank from its critics.
But if the inner workings of climate change and biodiversity conventions
set your juices flowing, then this is the book for you. Film-maker Zoe
Young has stuck to her task of dissecting the agency, wading through
mountains of paper and tramping miles of corridors to interview dozens of
bureaucrats. And she has maintained an impressive independence.
But she has read, spoken and tramped so much that the book rather loses
touch with the world beyond the bank's plate-glass Washington windows.
Almost every noun is abstract, almost every verb describes the doings of
some pen-pusher, and almost every thought is guarded by footnotes. What
does it all mean to the rainforest dwellers, fishermen or scrub farmers
whose lives may or may not be made better by the agency's works? They are
never asked.
Fred Pearce
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23765
THERE is a story of a woman on a train who was intrigued by a fellow
passenger reading a book and laughing out loud from time to time. He left
his seat and the book behind. She snatched the chance to look at it. It was
page after page of calculations. She concluded that it was best to find
another seat.
Karl Sabbagh's book aims to show that mathematicians are human. His central
topic is Riemann's hypothesis, a famous and intractable problem that has
been keeping mathematicians' brows knitted for about 150 years. It concerns
the distribution of prime numbers - those that can be divided only by 1 and
themselves: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and so on. There are strange features to their
pattern of occurrence, tantalising prospects of finding an order that can
allow them to be predicted, but which is always beyond reach.
There's a million dollars waiting for anyone who can find and prove a
solution to Riemann's hypothesis. Every now and then someone announces the
latest huge number that has been found to be a prime, but the hypothesis
itself remains unproven, a mathematical lure of obsessional attraction.
Sabbagh packs around the story a discussion of the properties of numbers
that fascinate the indefatigable solution seekers, their work and
personalities - satisfyingly eccentric in many instances. Whether this is
enough to carry an ordinary reader through is hard to decide. It is
certainly worth a try and there is an excellent section called "Toolkits"
to help anyone who is rusty on the basics.
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23764
