A guide to living a life kinder to the environment offers solutions to everyday challenges.
A grassroots do-it-yourself guide to environmentally friendly living.
“How do you, dear reader, find out if you really are an eco warrior or an unwitting eco poser?” asks popular YouTuber Paul Wheaton and co-author Klassen-Koop in their lively and engaging debut. Wheaton is a practiced communicator who relays lessons about the environment in clear, simple terms, and he acknowledges that a great many people react to dire world news by getting angry at the people they perceive as the bad guys in any situation when they’d feel better if they took positive action themselves. “For nearly every global problem,” he writes, “there are solutions we can implement in our backyard that save us money and help us live more luxuriant lives.” Wheaton hopes to counteract companies’ “greenwashing” of gullible consumers who want to do the right thing. Toward that end he lays out in great detail all kinds of ways people can drastically reduce waste that harms the environment while actually improving the quality of their day-to-day life. His suggestions include thought-provoking ideas about being a vegan versus an omnivore and about recycling, easily the most immediately pragmatic advice for general readers, including a tip on what do to with pizza boxes: “use the cardboard as a fire starter.” Heating costs, which Wheaton sees as the most important element of his plan, will present readers with challenges they might be unwilling to take up. For instance, Wheaton advocates keeping a home cold in winter except for discrete spots that people are using at the moment, and he also strenuously recommends a device called a “rocket mass heater” that he claims is much more effective than a wood-burning stove. But even if readers don’t buy into all of his solutions, they’ll find an enormous amount of useful information about living a greener and simpler life, generously illustrated with black-and-white artwork.
A guide to living a life kinder to the environment offers solutions to everyday challenges.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9991714-0-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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