Green Goes With Everything By Sloan Barnett - Green Book Review

Green Goes With Everything by Sloan Barnett - Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet is another great green household book if you don’t have one already.

Sloan is the Green Editor for KNTV in San Francisco, and wife of the CEO of Shaklee (prepare for lost of endorsements!), and the book is very interesting, from when her son was diagnosed with chemically induced asthma and what steps she took to remove the toxins from her home.

The book is well researched, and has a great comprehensive directory in the back that I will be using to help stock up and decorate my new house. It is a little wordy, sometimes just wishing she would get to the point, and when she does, not hammer it home quite so much. It’s similar to many other green lifestyle/household books I’ve read, but if you don’t have one and are looking for one single book to use as a resource for greening your household then this is excellent. Each chapter (such as Clean Body, Clean Baby, Clean Food) has Five Green-Hot Tips at the end that makes dipping in and out easy. Also ideas to make going green cheaper and save money are also useful.

You can watch a 6 minute video about Green Goes With Everything below, where Sloan explains the principles behind her book and what made her to discover what she discovered. It’s actually a pretty good short video that will explain what the book is about and quick tips for you to get started.

Overall it’s useful, I would imagine eye-opening to the average consumer, has great short tips and a very useful resources section. It costs around $13.57 in hardback from Amazon, or $9.59 for the Kindle version.

ACME Climate Action Book Review

I’ve briefly written about the ACME Climate Action book before and have included the video again at the end of this post. The book is available to buy from today (1 September 2008) and costs £15. As there’s the video and the website to explain what the book is about, I thought I’d write down my thoughts in bullet points for a change. Here we go:

• Written by a guy called Joshua Blackburn and designed by his strategic communications agency, Provokateur, the book is a little different from the ordinary. Designed to be ripped up, pulled apart and given to friends it makes a big change in not only book design but also the way of getting an environmental message across.
• It really is a change to read a book like this. The inside cover not only welcomes you to the book but encourages you to rip off the front and back covers, get the scissors out and make the covers into a photo frame. This book is going to be something different…

• The next page is actually about eight pages put together in a little booklet for you to rip out. Brilliantly designed, retro and modern at the same time, it’s easy to see it as a gimmick. But if you actually read this booklet you’ll realise while it’s still lighthearted, there’s a serious message and there are serious points it’s trying to get across.
• Then the next pages are made up of stickers, games, postcards, things to go in your wallet, posters and much more. It’s hard to review this as a normal book, it’s not. It’s a call to action. You can’t really read it without doing something. It draws you in and gets you involved, even if it is only to put a sticker on the kettle to remind the missus not to overfill it.
• I find myself showing friends the book when they come round and give them a part of it to take home with them. It’s almost a shame to rip it apart as I like the book so much, but it’s actually quite fun once you start.
• Getting everyone involved is part of the theory behind this book and it works wonderfully. I really am in love with this book, it makes some great points along the way too. Grab a copy online at places like Amazon and Play, or it will be available in most bookshops in the UK after today.

ACME Climate Action Video - Helping You Be Green

While I was working on the review of a lovely book sent to me called ACME Climate Action, in an email the publishers (HarperCollins if you’re interested) also included this video which features the book and has a bit of information on why the book exists. I almost didn’t bother with the rest of the review as this does the job quite nicely and saves me doing a video of it. It’s quite a remarkable book and the video is cool too. It certainly makes a change from traditional environmentalism.

The Ethics Of Climate Change Eco Book Review

The Ethics Of Climate Change (right and wrong in a warming world) by James Garvey argues that climate change is actually a moral problem, one that can be informed by economics, politics, science and society, but what we do is actually down to us.

It’s a very interesting read, though a little heavy-weight for those not 100% interested in the topic. Serious, but never patronizing, Garvey presents his views in a series of nicely structured chapters and sub-chapters. Discussing the science and the facts and then moving quickly onto moral beliefs and ethics, the book is a detailed examination of what the options available to us are, who’s responsible, and ways of thinking about them. A lot of it I had never really thought about much before and it’s enlightening that a “green” book can provide something new and thought provoking.

I liked the author’s style, and the way the book was structured and presented. One of the reviewers on Amazon summed it up for me when I was looking for some final thoughts: “Witty without being frivolous, explanatory but never condescending, it is engaging and challenging in equal measure.”

Here you can read a good interview with the author, James Garvey (Secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and you can buy the book from Amazon.

The Transition Handbook - From Oil Dependency To Local Resilience Book Review

The Transition Handbook - is written by Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement and published by Green Books in the UK and Chelsea Green in the US.

Now I can’t pretend to have read the entire book while I write this, but I plan to. It’s just that it’s 240 big pages long with two to three columns a page - it’s going to take me a while to get through it. And a lot of it is about starting your own Transition initiative which I don’t plan to do. Yet.

But back to the beginning, the whole transition thing of this ‘Transition Movement’ is to do with moving away from the dependency on oil and building resilience - i.e. building a way of coping with the change when oil runs out. And the book is a guide to the issues central this change and how to prepare for a different future.

Split up into three main chapters: The Head, The Heart and The Hands, the book starts off with a great introduction to what it’s all about. The amount of text initially looks fearsome, but Rob Hopkins writes with a relaxed style that draws you in and the more you read the less hard work the book seems. What makes it more interesting is that Rob relies on his own experiences to draw you in and explains things in a clear and relaxed style.

There are also box-outs, quotes from newspapers, authors and experts to help spice things up a bit. There is a reliance of some graphs and charts at the start, but these soon make way to photos or communities and people who are going through the changes outlines in the book.

Having someone writing the book who has been through the experience readers of this book are going through is invaluable. The Transition Tools and Transition Tips are there to ensure future projects go smoother and the insights seem very useful. But the book also makes a good read for those not immediately planning on starting a cultural change in their local town or village. It’s interesting to see what real people from across the world have done and read about something inspiring.

As I mentioned at the start, I haven’t read everything yet, but the story the book tells is very compelling. Flicking to Part Three: The Hands, is an inspiring moment. Seeing the Transition movement in Totnes, Devon (UK) is amazing. Seeing what they achieved and being given a blueprint to do it yourself as well is food for thought. As is how the Transition approach differs from conventional environmentalism in its group approach, proactivity and resilience idea.

If you’re interested in practical solutions to how you and your community can move away from a dependency on oil, or even if you fancy reading a story about how it can be done, I’d recommend this book. The Transition Handbook - From Oil Dependency To Local Resilience is available from Green Books, priced £12.95 and printed on 100% recycled paper. You can see a video of Rob talking about his book here.