Metaphors such as food chain, species richness and ecological integrity are so ingrained in our thinking that we use them without thinking. Larson wants to expose how the various meanings embedded in these metaphors influence how people relate to the natural world. His goal is to have us create new metaphors that motivate people to act sustainably.

The metaphors we use for the Earth, he proposes, influence the way we frame problems and, therefore, affect our actions. Whether Gaia can regulate itself, Mother Earth will take care of us, or Spaceship Earth needs a mechanic, depends on which metaphor is part of your worldview. Larson’s wish is that metaphors can help us recognize our place within nature and our interconnectedness with other species.

The metaphor of competition within the context of ecology is one that Larson says needs rethinking. People often speak of how one plant or animal “out competes” another. He suggests that this metaphor, when applied to nature, indicates that scientists are relying on their own human experience. Competition metaphors lead us to consider nature with a free market, capitalist mentality. We are comfortable with the idea of winners and losers. Exploitation is part of the game. If we were to look at nature as co-operative and harmonious, he argues, it might encourage a more sustainable approach.

Equating continuous growth with progress is another problematic metaphor often applied to the natural world. It’s difficult to put aside the idea of growth, because growth is linked to success. If we remain steady, we are stagnating; if we get smaller, we say we are losing. Larson wonders: Where are we trying to go anyway?

A newer problematic metaphor is to describe DNA as a barcode. In a way, this makes sense since DNA is different for every species, and no two products have the same barcode. Larson is uncomfortable with this metaphor, however, since it creates the impression that species are products that can be bought and sold or, presumably, “discontinued” when they are no longer useful.

Biologists’ use of the militaristic metaphor of an invasive-species “meltdown” is also of concern, given its comparison to a nuclear reactor. The broader problem with these menacing metaphors is that they give the impression that humans are pitted against nature, that humans are outside nature and have to control it.

At times dense with sociological language, the book may be more accessible to social scientists than his stated audience of environmental scientists, everyday citizens and policy makers. Nonetheless, it is worth wading through the jargon to gain Larson’s insights into how language intertwines with our values and profoundly shapes our relationship with nature.

Larson proposes that the public needs to be more involved in selecting metaphors. He goes so far as to suggest that researchers use focus groups to help them find the best metaphor to use in their publications. He imagines a world where everyone is involved in knowledge production, and scientific communication is a two-way endeavour that brings clarity and understanding. Opening the lines of communication, says Larson, will “foster the human interactions that are so essential to sustainability.”

He challenges scientists to think through the implications and multiple meanings of the metaphors they use, and to realize that scientific knowledge is only part of the story. The other is communication, and effective communication involves imagining how others may interpret metaphors within their context.

The power of metaphors is such that once they enter our collective culture, we use them almost unconsciously, which makes them very difficult to unseat. Therefore, says Larson, “we must place our metaphors with great care because they tend to reinforce pre-existent ways of thinking.”

What we need, Larson suggests, are metaphors that emphasize interconnectedness rather than separation between nature and culture. We need metaphors that are hopeful, optimistic and inclusive. Shifting our metaphors in favour of the environment “will shake the very foundations of how we usually think about science” and provide “a vista of possibility for creating a more sustainable future.”

Emily McMillan is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Human Studies program at Laurentian University. She has an interest- in how schooling shapes our attitude toward the environment.

The author’s specific focus is on co-operatives as they have emerged internationally. Restakis, the executive director of the BC Co-operative Association and a consultant on development projects around the world, takes readers on a tour of seven countries, and explores a wide range of economic sectors. Of particular relevance to this journal’s audience are the two chapters on the production, distribution and consumption of sustainable foods. 

In Japan, Restakis introduces us to the Seikatsu Club, a co-operative enterprise with 300,000 members that purchases food directly from farmers. Seikatsu has strict environmental practices to which growers willingly adhere. Seikatsu and their producer partners are also actively involved in the fight against the genetic modification of food. In Sri Lanka, the author tells us about the Small Organic Farmers’ Association, a co-operative whose members grow organic tea for the fair trade market. In addition to removing producers’ exposure to agrichemicals and providing higher prices for tea, the association invests in wider-reaching projects such as building a community centre and improving local drinking water. In both examples, co-operatives use market relations while advancing community well-being and sustainable development.

Co-operation is also used more broadly in the book. Restakis argues that the emergence of a more humane economic system requires the transformation of global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Co-operation, in this sense, means a move to democratic participation within these institutions by all countries, involving both government representatives and actors from civil society.

Restakis writes beautifully.  His seven examples of co-operatives in practice are particularly poignant, providing socio-historical information on the regions in which they are located. He also includes records of conversations with co-operative members regarding how these organizations have had an impact on their lives, and descriptions of local sights and sounds so vivid that you feel you are on location.

It is these real-world examples that may most inspire environmental activists, as they illustrate that market relations can serve environmental and social goals. This is a concrete form of economic activity that seems worth replicating, but because the author concentrates on co-operatives as they appear internationally, readers may feel that the model is better suited to regions outside of Canada and the United States. Restakis could have paired his material on the Seikatsu Club with the flourishing natural foods co-operatives in the US, or coupled the story of the tea farmers in Sri Lanka with the Ontario producers who formed the farmer-owned Organic Meadow. If that had been done, readers could have more clearly understood that co-operatives have the potential to humanize the economy and create a greener world.

Restakis also largely overlooks some of the tensions and contradictions within the co-operative movement. Not all co-operatives- follow sustainable practices, nor do they all treat workers equitably or adhere to truly democratic practices. The adoption of the co-operative form never guarantees that these things will take place. After all, some co-operatives operate oil refineries or are immersed in agribusiness. It is the co-operative form combined with the hard work and commitment of its members to a moral and sustainable economy that makes the difference.

Although the book was written for community developers, the volume is appropriate for undergraduate or graduate students in environmental studies, community studies or business.

Catherine Leviten-Reid is an assistant professor in the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, where she teaches in the MBA in Community Economic Development program.

The first section begins with a collection of poems that have little explicit connection with Gunterman, though it introduces themes of time, memory and naturalistic imagery that re-emerge later on. In many ways, this is the strongest and most poetically compelling part of the book, with its combination of intense description and politically charged references. For example, in “26 Eagles,” Owen writes:

Multiply and fill the Earth

that dark Old Testament stamp,

bequeaths Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez,

the desert of the Ural Sea and, numberless

as the stars in their spheres, frozen butterflies,

sterile salmon, sequestrums of trees.

Bequeaths killers of eagles, he

with his knife gnawing and the golden corpses

The second section combines imaginatively reconstructed journal entries created as if from Gunterman’s perspective with the frontierswoman’s photographs collected from archival sources. Owen, a BC poet, artist and musician whose books have spanned environmental themes, the work of expressionist painter Egon Schiele, and both poetic and photographic collaborations, pens a swift and glancing narrative of Gunterman’s life, each entry giving a snapshot of a particular moment. Taken together with the historical photographs, it forms a tapestry of a life rushing past, from the birth of her son to the death of her husband, and on to her own growing frailty. The last two sections return to a free and loose poetic style, but this time with more direct references to Gunterman, her family and photographs.

The text demanded second and third readings, and again I found the first section more fascinating than the rest. In turning my gaze from the environmental horrors of the last century in “26 Eagles” to “Moose: Deka Lake, BC” on the facing page, I saw a transition from the global scale of ecological catastrophe to personal revulsion at eating moose flesh as though it were no more than a resource: “…everything reduced to the gut / though here I was, complicit / swallowing / the transformation while shrinking / at a vision of blood.” This theme of personal ambivalence in response to environmental concerns returns pages later when Owen laments the loss of trees that her book requires: “hard / selves slipping into paper, soft / pith steeling into tables. / The day begins / and I [...] write on them, of slaughter.” However, amid the sadness of death and loss (the kind, perhaps, that is always implied in a photograph, a vision from the past), there is a kind of redemption, for in the passage of time, we might one day wake up “As if / this morning / we had never begun / to plunder.”

After reading the book, I was left trying to decipher the “seeing lessons” Owen had intended her readers to take away. As told in this collection, the story of Mattie Gunterman seems, on the whole, to be about personal attempts to hang on to memories through the dynamic and relentless passage of time (“clutching a camera to stave off grief”). I viewed the photos with a kind of distant melancholy, knowing that the people and landscapes depicted have long since passed away. Not even Gunterman’s commitment to the more advanced photographic technology available was able to ensure the images survived the ravages of time:  Most of her photos were destroyed when the family home burned down in 1927. The few hundred that remain belonged to her son: These form both the third part of the book and a cornerstone of the Vancouver Public Library’s historical photographic collection.

Owen was unable to find that other solid remembrance of Gunterman’s life: her grave. Ultimately she decides that this gives no reason for distress. “Neglect can be a kind of care,” she writes. Although many passages are touching, when considered from a distance, there is little nostalgia in these poems – just the sense of brute factuality that one finds in a photograph. The final section, a single poem entitled “Geologos,” demonstrates the inadequacy, or perhaps inconsequence, of photographic memory in the face of geologic time: “[...] inaccessible still, seeing / beyond carbonates, tonnage. Scree. All / these shots, and time over the Lardeau, falling.”

Ian Devenney is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at York University. His research focuses on the philosophical and artistic dimensions of digital media and technological change in photography.

The thesis of this book is that the Arctic is not a region to be studied at an objective remove, or subjected to policy decisions and industrial developments designed to protect southern notions of economic development and sovereignty, but a being who demands of us a relationship that is both ethical and spiritual. That being, in the language of those who have lived there the longest, goes by the name Sila, as the shaman Najagneq told anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in 1924:

Sila [is] a strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact all life on Earth – so mighty that his speech to man comes not   through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the sea, through all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas or small, innocent children.

This is, as you may have guessed by now, a deeply unorthodox book. Its many lessons are folded into a story Leduc recounts about the Western climate researcher George Wenzel and an incident that took place while on a three-day hunt with an Inuit companion from Baffin Island. The two men came across a polar bear that acted in a strange manner when it emerged from its den. Wenzel was intrigued by the fact that his Inuit companion spent three hours studying the bear’s behaviour, as if it was a piece of changing, and increasingly uncertain, polar bear activity across the North.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.6: 40th Anniversary Issue, published in October 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Because the world around us is beginning to act in non-ordinary ways, Leduc infers from this story that human beings of diverse backgrounds need to come together to talk through the ramifications of what is happening. And, before responding to Sila’s changes, our first move might actually consist of bearing witness and recalibrating our own worldviews.

Leduc sees climate change as an occasion for new thinking, and – in one of the book’s many mythic turns – the basis for an initiation back into the old-world idea of the Earth as full of agency and active powers. He implores us to take Inuit cultural authorities at their word: that Sila is not a metaphor, but an entity whose existence has been confirmed through a non-Western- epistemology as rigorous as our own. He proposes that even if we reject such ideas, our consumerist behaviour still contributes towards one half of a dialogue with the North – albeit a dysfunctional one.

Ultimately, this book has less to do with the Inuit with whom Leduc himself conversed than it has to do with how we need to change the ways in which we think. Leduc’s radical, to-the-root rethinking and reframing of the climate crisis is uncompromising and exhilarating.

This is also a difficult book, written in an academic language that in places may frustrate the intelligent beginner. Hopefully, he will address this in the future because his work aspires to an important place in the ecosystem of environmental ideas. A contract professor in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, Leduc is one of the only intellectual decendents of a whole generation of ecological philosophers – the likes of Vine Deloria Jr., George Sessions, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, and, in a Canadian context, John Livingston and Neil Evernden. Their critiques do away with light tinkering around the edges of the modern industrial paradigm in order to challenge its ground-floor assumptions about reality and the place of human beings in it. How come Leduc is one of the few left to hold the ground?

The take-home message of this book is this: Finding our way through the climate crisis will involve a lot more than negotiating where to plant wind turbines, or remembering to take the blue box out to the curb. We arrive at Sila’s historic challenge dragging a lot of baggage with us, much of it inherited from Enlightenment thought patterns. We’ve been conditioned on so many levels to see the Earth as a set of resources, subject to human management and manipulation. The idea of the North as a living being – Leduc’s main point – may simply not make sense within the assumptions we live by. In other words, even if there is a way out of the climate crisis, will we recognize it?

Mark Dickinson teaches courses in the ecological humanities at Trent University and the Ontario College of Art and Design University. He is co-editor of Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky.

For some, active citizenship might mean founding a non-profit organization. Others may find their calling in joining Teach for America, making a midlife career change and getting into the non-profit sector, or volunteering online with a collective intelligence project. In Citizen You: How Social Entrepreneurs are Changing the World (http://www.citizenyou.org/), co-authors Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber explore an option for every lifestyle. The book is filled with the stories of numerous active citizens, as well as practical tips, “food for thought,” and “seeds for action” to help individuals make a difference.

In an active citizens’ society, anyone can – and everyone should – be socially engaged. The varied examples offered in Citizen You do much to support this argument. Students may identify with the young woman whose volunteer work researching poverty in Guatemala inspired her to attend law school. Professionals might enjoy reading about a “citizen engineer” who takes a holistic approach to his work, transforming technical fields into opportunities for  social, economic and political reform. Business people will be interested by the corporate citizenship of Loews Hotels, which includes a Green Policy and a Minority Business Enterprise Program.

Tisch, the successful chief executive with Loews Corporation and Loews Hotels, is known for his corporate responsibility and philanthropic work (such as his creation of the Loews Hotels Good Neighbor Policy), and for his service on the Board of Trustees at Tufts University. Throughout his career, Tisch has demonstrated the possibilities of uniting for-profit business and social responsibility. In Citizen You, he and Weber describe unlikely means of merging the two.

Some say a business is only responsible for earning a profit by legal means. Yet social responsibility for businesses has its own benefits, such as good publicity and increased sales. Corporate social responsibility does not need to stop at donations to charity or “greening” the company; business acumen can also be combined with social goals. Non-profits can learn from and adapt business methods, such as when charities use metrics to measure their programs’ efficiency and impact. From the other side, divisions of for-profit organizations can contribute resources to social and civic causes.

Citizen You‘s greatest strength may also be its weakest point. As mentioned earlier, the book is packed – some might say padded – with examples. These examples easily take up as much space as their theoretical underpinnings, sometimes becoming tedious. Worse, the authors rarely reflect on them or adequately explain their significance.

Canadian and international readers may also find the book rather US-centric. The chapter dedicated to New York’s NYC Service initiative is interesting as an example of what a city can do on its own, but the chapter on government, which focuses exclusively on American government, could easily have been given a broader scope. There are occasional references to active citizenship overseas, but the vast majority of the book is about Americans’ work and would not apply to developing countries. Working within a capitalist framework is particularly taken for granted.

Citizen You illuminates and inspires with its detailed descriptions of how anyone can get involved in active citizenship. It makes a convincing argument that it is possible to both “do well” and “do good.” The face of activism is changing to reflect active citizenship; Tisch and Weber’s book provides a useful guide to what is happening and how you can get involved.

C.E. Pierre recently received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and English from the University of Waterloo. 

E is For Environment contains 26 short stories about a couple of kids named Elliott and Lucy who learn valuable lessons about re-usable shopping bags, using both sides of a piece of paper, litterless lunches, fixing leaky faucets, and much, much more. Each of the stories is accompanied by follow-up questions and discussion points to keep the conversation going. Illustrator R.A. Holt has created endearing renderings of Elliott and Lucy that add a touch of whimsy at the start of each chapter.

Ian James Corlett has gone down this road before. His previous book, E is For Ethics used the same formula to great effect. His writing is breezy and effective, delivering moral lessons without being overbearing. Corbett has really hit on something here, and the world of children’s literature will be made all the richer if he continues with more books in this style. If Corbett keeps the ‘E’ series going, we will certainly be buying them.

Sara Hart is homeschooling mom of four and owner of Hart Home Daycare (www.harthomedaycare.com), the first daycare in Ontario to be endorsed as Eco-Healthy by the Oregon Environmental Council.

The book’s main insight is that we have been barking up the wrong tree when it comes to stemming urban sprawl. We put our faith in planners and planning institutions to undo sprawl’s litany of predations. We create regional plans, draw growth boundaries around cities and zone for higher-density housing. Yet Canada continues to sprawl like there is (literally) no tomorrow.

The planning approach would make sense if poor planning policies were the main cause of sprawl. But, as Blais points out, this is only one source of the problem. The Toronto-based consultant argues that economic signals are a more fundamental driver.

Blais brings this assertion down to Earth with a plethora of examples. Development charges are the fees that municipalities slap on developers of new real estate projects so that they can provide the infrastructure (water, sewage, roads) needed to service the new community. However, the same per-unit fee is paid whether a project is infilling an empty space in the city centre where services are already nearby, or clinging onto the periphery of the city where new infrastructure has to travel a long way. Since these charges can reach $30,000 to $40,000 on a residential unit, they represent a hefty subsidy to sprawl.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.6: 40th Anniversary Issue, published in October 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

The same applies to a slew of other price signals: property taxes, network service rates (water, electricity, gas, telephone, cable, postal services, internet connectivity), municipal service charges (garbage collection, snow removal, recycling), mortgage rates and parking fees. Blais convincingly shows how a new approach to pricing, based on the true cost of supplying infrastructure and services to different locations and for different types of land use, would transform these price signals from sprawl-makers into sprawl-busters.

Short listed for the 2011 Donner Prize, awarded each year to the best book on Canadian public policy, Perverse Cities is generally well written (although a little rambling in the early parts, and repetitive in later sections) and makes interesting reading (especially for policy wonks). Nonetheless, it suffers from a few weaknesses.

First, urban planning is not quite the failure that Blais makes it out to be. Early results suggest that the ambitious urban planning effort in Southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe, where Blais lives, is helping rein in sprawl. And planning success in Vancouver and Portland, Oregon, receive short shrift.

Perverse Cities proposes that if we juggled the fiscal system so that property taxes, service fees and utility charges accurately reflected the cost of delivering infrastructure and services in different locations and at different densities, then we would not need urban planning at all – sprawl would solve itself. If this were the case, however, we would expect Canada to be more sprawling than the US, where planning systems are weaker and property rights are sacrosanct. But the opposite is true: Canadian cities (and suburbs) are generally denser, more compact and contiguous than their US counterparts.

Another of the book’s shortcomings is its political naiveté. Homeowners have invested in their location and transportation choices (suburban homes and multiple vehicles) based on the existing constellation of price signals. Wholesale changes to this system would require massive dislocations in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Large suburban homes would lose value and driving to work from a distant suburb would become prohibitively expensive. Politicians would be understandably hesitant to make the changes required to bring this about.

Finally, the author is sometimes a little cavalier with the evidence. For example, to support her contention that planning is part of the problem, Blais claims that the massive new greenbelt around Toronto and Hamilton is having the disastrous effect of causing development to leapfrog outside the greenbelt. As evidence, she refers the reader to a Neptis Foundation report that was published in 2004, a year before the greenbelt was created.

Blais’ focus on the idea that the drivers of sprawl are hidden in our utility and tax bills might gradually tame some of the economic forces that are grinding against the planning system. However, the author seems to have been carried away by the seductive logic of free-market thinking, a logic that ultimately impugns urban planning. And that, as they say, is a pity.

Ray Tomalty, an urban-sustainability consultant, is an adjunct professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University.

His new book, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, begins with the obligatory dissection of the full crisis before us, which Rifkin describes in a nutshell as peak globalization. “We have reached the outer limits of how far we can extend global economic growth within an economic system dependent on oil and other fossil fuels,” he writes. He also cites climate change as another major threat that could be “cataclysmic” if left unchecked.

These crises — peak oil and climate change — are the natural result of an economy predicated on endless growth, one which is blind both to the limits of finite resources and to the vast opportunities for harnessing boundless, free energy from the sun.

For Rifkin, we are on the verge of finally turning the corner on this carbon-based era, and about to begin a 40-year roll-out of the Third Industrial Revolution, defined by a “merging of Internet technology and renewable energies.” This vision is far from pie-in-the-sky. A key advisor for the European Union for the past decade, he helped craft the EU’s long-term plan for sustainability, which ultimately convinced diverse political leaders to commit to an aggressive reduction of fossil fuel use over the next 10 years.

Long-term sustainability, argues Rifkin, entails a “profound shift in the very way society is structured, away from hierarchical power and toward lateral power.” It’s a shift that would transform the energy economy (and the global economy along with it) from being centralized, inefficient and inherently wasteful, to a system that mimics the distributed and collaborative structure of the Internet.

The book lays out a five-pillar plan that would get us there. It is based on a strong commitment to local, distributed and renewable power, such as solar, wind and geothermal. Rifkin goes beyond traditional calls to ramp up renewable power capacity: He calls for turning buildings into “micro power plants,” producing power with rooftop solar panels and other technologies, and combining that with enough storage capacity to ensure a reliable energy source.

Such a system, writes Rifkin, could be linked together on a smart-power grid that would stretch across continents, just like the Internet. He also argues for a full, green overhaul of our transportation systems using electric and fuel-cell technologies that would be fully plugged into the new power grid.

Is it possible? Rifkin thinks so. But it all depends on integration, with all elements coming to the fore at the same time, and not in isolation. “If any of the five pillars fall behind the rest in development, the others will be stymied and the infrastructure itself will be compromised.”

Rifkin recognizes the enormity of the task at hand, which perhaps accounts for the book’s grandiose title. It also explains one of the book’s final chapters, and its call for a revolution in education. Rebuilding our society for sustainability will take more than grand plans and economic tinkering, suggests Rifkin. How we educate will also need to change, not just to train a new green workforce, but also to cultivate a “biosphere consciousness” based on empathy for the planet and for fellow creatures.

We’ve already experienced two Industrial Revolutions, both of which transformed society in fundamental ways. The third will be just as transformational, but green, insists Rifkin. Let’s hope he’s right.

(Book published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 304 pages.)

This review first appeared on TheGreenPages.ca.

Thurman swims upriver, where he will do… something. Along the way he encounters more garbage, finally winding up stuck in a discarded soda bottle. (Spoiler alert:) Rescued by a group of young students on a field trip, his story broadcast by a local TV station, Thurman becomes the inspiration for other schools to send students into the countryside to help clean it up. Meanwhile, Thurman returns to his family having learned the valuable lesson that one turtle can make a difference.

Artie Knapp’s Living Green is pleasant enough. Its characters and story are simple and relatable, and its message is positive and worthwhile. More cynical children and adults might be a little put off by the didacticism and heavy-handedness of the storytelling, but the book will be well-enjoyed by younger children. The illustrations and design look polished and professional, but oddly derivative of popular Children’s Lit icon, Franklin the Turtle. One wonders if this was intentional, or if there are simply not that many different ways to draw a turtle. Still, Living Green is a well-meaning and inoffensive introduction to environmental issues. for kids who are beginning to learn about the world around them.

Sara Hart is homeschooling mom of four and owner of Hart Home Daycare (www.harthomedaycare.com), the first daycare in Ontario to be endorsed as Eco-Healthy by the Oregon Environmental Council.

The book is based on the author’s four decades of direct experience in social issues and community organizing in Canada, Africa, Central America, Europe and Japan, as well as a comprehensive reading of the important literature on the subject. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of the history and the conceptual basis of community organizing before launching into the specifics of the practice. It this practical nature of the book as a “how to” tool for community organizers that is its greatest strength. The practitioner is provided with specific tools: how to recognize the motivations of the funding body, how to work with the community – set up a meeting, run a meeting, identify and address the issues – how to deal with conflicts within the community group, and how to disengage positively once the mission has been achieved and the group has built up internal strengths.

This is a practical book, but it is not short on guiding principles, most obviously: social justice, non-violence, environmental consciousness, respectfulness and humility.

Not coincidentally, Lee quotes the classic work The Great Transformation, by Karl Polyani on several occasions. Polyani was concerned with the pendulum swings from right to left and back again since the early days of the Industrial Revolution in England. He was also concerned about the potentially negative effects of capitalism on the environment. Lee is no less concerned with these swings and his overall thesis is that community organizing, if done effectively and with knowledge of the wider social, economic, political and environmental realities, can be an important force in redressing the current swing to the right.

The author ends the book with a section that asks the bigger questions about community organizing in what is primarily a capitalist society, one in which the rich seem to be getting richer and the marginalized are increasingly pushed to the margins; a world where responsibility to the community is seen as increasingly irrelevant to many economic decision-makers.

This book is primarily addressed to the student or practitioner of community organizing: They will find it an invaluable tool in honing the wide diversity of skills and understandings so essential to the effective practice of community organizing. A more general audience of readers will find this book enlightening and useful, particularly those interested in how change at the local level can be linked to wider systemic change, especially change that leads towards greater social justice for marginalized populations such as those living in poverty and racialized groups. This is also relevant for environmentalists. Bill McKibben, the American environmentalist and author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and many other books on environmental issues, has said that addressing the environmental crisis is no longer simply a problem of science but is also a political problem. Accordingly, the pragmatics of organizing at the community level will increase the effectiveness of every environmentalist by helping him or her directly address the political dimensions of environmental issues.

Pragmatics of Community Organizing should be in the hip pocket of every community organizer and every student who wishes to become one.

(Book published by CommonAct Press, Toronto, 2011. 304 pages.)

Jim Ward, PhD, has been developing community organizing strategies with numerous stakeholder groups since the early 1970s. An educator, consultant, public speaker and book author, he lives in Toronto with his wife Catherine.