Timing was important. The Vietnam War was over. Aside from a few terrorist incidents, it was an era of optimism and material growth in most of the industrialized world, with scientific discoveries pointing the way towards a better future. Ophul’s book was published a decade before the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future) appeared, and Alternatives was barely five years old. Some ecologically oriented modellers at MIT had produced Limits to Growth a few years earlier, but that book focused mainly on the physical aspects of scarcity. (One irreverent commentator described it as Malthus wit a computer.) But until Ophuls and those fellow scholars, no meaningful links had been made between physical and ecological scarcity on the one hand, and modern beliefs and politics on the other.

Plato’s Revenge takes these associations a big step further. Ophuls assumes the conclusions from his earlier book, which argues that scarcity encompasses the various limits to growth and that the economic challenge of diminishing returns is being overtaken by an ecological challenge of decreasing returns. Most proposed technical fixes, he found, require more energy and materials and create more pollution. Plato’s Revenge identifies the source of the pollution as our resilience on a belief system that grants value only to instrumental ideas, meaning that those can solve problems or produce products. This instrumental perspective is further condemned by its corresponding failure to recognize the fundamental basis of ecology in our lives and livelihoods.

We are indeed very far from the ideal state contemplated by Plato two-and-a-half millennia ago, and our failure to heed those insights gives this book its title. In one of Ophuls’ many quotable phrases, he says we need to develop. “an I-Thou relationship with creation.” He is also not afraid to say that we need more religion in our politics, not less.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.4: Eco Tourism, published in July 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Ophuls’ book is divided into two main sections, sandwiched between an introductory chapter and an epilogue. The first section presents his view of natural law in three chapters, one each for biological, physical, and human nature. Together with the introduction, these chapters define the problem. The second section deals with education, politics and our potential future, each presented in the broadest sense. Along with the epilogue, these define the opportunity. Between the problem and the opportunity is Ophuls’ challenge to those of us living in richer countries:

Real progress depends and has always depended on expanded consciousness,
not material improvement. …But never before has humanity been confronted
with the necessity fir such a profound consciousness revolution.

Ophuls is a superb writer. However, his book is not an easy read. His sentences can be long and complicated, his arguments range widely among authors and disciplines, and his selection of words is almost arcane. (The book also has 16 pages of sources in addition to 21 pages of notes.) Most substantively, just as with early concepts of soft energy paths, our instrumental present and Opuls’ ideal future are less dichotomies than points on a continuum, and therefore the paths towards them are more like variations on a theme than perpendicular directions.
Although Ophuls recognizes that cities will be part of the human future, he is vague about how they should be governed. At times he seems to think fondly of some rural community where decisions are made under an oak tree and everyone, presumably meaning every man and woman, has an equal voice.

Despite some oversimplifications, Plato’s Revenge is a rewarding book. It’s tough to disagree with Ophuls’ prescription, which asks a lot of us and our leaders. As much a biblical prophet as a modern philosopher, he is surely on the right track.

David B. Brooks is a natural-resource economist and a member of Alternatives’ editorial board.

This Soil, This Water presents a rare body of watercolour work by woodcut printmaker, painter and sculptor Ed Schleimer, interwoven mostly with excerpts from a presentation made by seasoned activist and writer Susan Hodges Bryant during a 2001 inquiry into the Walkerton, Ontario, E. coli water crisis. Their collaboration tackles an ecological controversy that has continued to percolate for more than two decades: a Uniroyal Chemical manufacturing plant’s contamination of the land, water and aquifers in Elmira, Ontario.

The book aims to reinvigorate debate – Bryant says most people don’t realize that the environmental damage and corporate reticence are unresolved – by recounting the original efforts of a local environmental group to repair the habitat and corral support from “a distant, preoccupied Ministry of the Environment.” Unconventionally, hard words are paired with softer images to address this knowledge gap.

“I wanted to offer readers an experience of the resonating contradictions between two different approaches,” says the book’s publisher, retired literature professor Judith Maclean Miller. “Readers can interpret whether or not we’re going to have respect for the natural world in the way Ed observes and records it, or if we’re going to have the denigration and disrespect that Susan’s text shows. How is one endangered or obliterated by the other? How might one be used to disguise or mask the other? I trust the reader to deal with those kinds of contradictions and go wherever that leads.”

Snippets of Bryant’s plainspoken arguments relay the disturbing facts: that Elmira’s water supply was revealed to contain rising levels of a cancer-causing nitrosamine beginning in 1989, and sediment erosion was found to be depositing high levels of dioxins, furans and DDT in 1995; that “no health study has ever been done in Elmira to determine the effects of drinking the contaminated water”; that no charges were ever laid against Uniroyal, even though their production practices were pinpointed as the source of contamination, which was also found in water supplies nearly 100 kilometres downstream; that “little has been done, other than countless studies,” to protect the affected waterways and floodplain, or to address the negligence and pollution.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Set against this harrowing recap, Schleimer’s watercolours explore the dynamic natural beauty that Uniroyal’s practices have threatened, and a range of emotional responses. Floral shapes are composed of blotches, smears, stains and leakages. Vibrant plants are tinged with decay or darkness; others evoke tributaries; a few enlarged pieces allude to a sense of suffocation. The somewhat abstract, seemingly evolving shapes also tap into the creative process of watercolour painting. Created sporadically between 1975 and 1995, each piece draws from the flora of Schleimer’s mother’s backyard garden, and each subject serves to honour and radiate the glory of simple outdoor pleasures.

The notion that sparsely written, image-anchored stories- can have as much impact as a densely researched tome is what motivated Miller to launch Stonegarden Studios and begin publishing chapbooks in late 2009. She was drawn to Bryants’s lack of ornament and bombast, and her indisputable facts that spoke volumes. Her attraction to Schleimer’s painting was similar. “Art is vital to our conversations about the world around us,” she says. “It can say the things we can’t quite articulate, and provide us with vocabularies beyond the usual.”

Eric Rumble is editor of Alternatives.

And so it is too early to truly judge Jeremy Rifkin’s The Third Industrial Revolution. I do not know if it accurately reflects how our world will unfold, but I can say for certain that I hope it eventually comes to be seen as a work of great foresight. The path forward that he presents, perhaps one of the few that could prove viable, is one in which humanity saves itself from its own excesses and comes closer to realizing its true potential. The reader wishes that Rifkin turns out to be a true seer, and not a cheap conjurer.

Rifkin paints a picture of a humanity hemmed in by hazards of our own making. A toxic soup of climate change, peak energy and market shocks is bringing our current economic system to its knees. As Rifkin sees it, the second industrial revolution (the age of oil that has lasted for most of the 20th century) is coming to a shattering, cataclysmic- close. As we exceed peak oil and prices are propelled upwards, and as the climate pushes back with increasingly unpredictable and damaging weather, we will be exposed to increasing economic shocks. This will force us to seek a new equilibrium in a new industrial model.

His vision is of a radically overhauled electricity regime that relies primarily on clean renewable energies, networked together in a decentralized electricity grid that is to the current grid as Wikipedia is to the Encyclopedia Britannica. This new system could continue to sustain standards of living, but in a way that would not exacerbate the key problems of climate change and peak oil.

Rifkin’s model for this kind of a transition is Europe, which has moved aggressively towards an economy powered by renewable energy, and which has enacted many reforms to decentralize energy production and distribution. Rifkin praises these developments. Unfortunately, he also praises his own efforts to move Europe in this direction. This need to make himself a prime protagonist in the story, as if all ideas can be traced back to him, undermines the importance of the reforms being proposed.

It does not help that the part of the world that has embraced his recommendations most boldly is also a region caught in the potentially devastating ramifications of public indebtedness. It’s clear that these don’t have much to do with one another, and yet the reader can’t help but wonder if countries struggling to free themselves from imminent insolvency will have the means and even the desire to continue with such bold transformations.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Yet, as a model of where we need to go, there is very little of Rifkin’s vision with which I disagree. In some ways there is a necessary logic to it; he may be sketching out one of the only ways that humanity can survive. What I find very creative, even brilliant, is how Rifkin answers some of the peripheral questions later in the book.

While his ideas on energy are fundamentally solid, they are not all that original or unique. People have been calling for small-scale, dispersed, renewable energy systems since the 1970s. Likewise, Rifkin’s notion of creating decentralized electricity networks is a logical extrapolation of the Internet business model.

But his views on education and the workforce struck me as quite thoughtful. Rifkin imagines a whole new educational curriculum and approach that would focus on teaching students about their role in the biosphere, with a heavy focus on earth sciences and ecology. Even more interestingly, Rifkin describes a future where more and more human jobs are replaced with automation. Rather than see this as a negative, Rifkin frames the possibility as a liberation from drudgery and an opportunity to strengthen civil society through a huge influx of people embracing charitable and non-profit businesses.

This is an uplifting vision of the future, and one that leaves me hoping that Rifkin is right. We should all hope that he is, for as he says, there is no Plan B.

Andrew Heintzman is the co-founder of Investeco, Canada’s first environmental investment company, and author of The New Entrepreneurs (Anansi 2010). 

Unlike most academic books, Rethinking the Great White North stirred enough irritation to be attacked by a Globe and Mail columnist. Repeating an old saw, Margaret Wente previously wrote that what makes someone Canadian is having sex in a canoe. Maybe new immigrants should be taught to canoe, Wente said, so they could be more patriotic.

The editors of this book took her to task in their introduction. They wrote that this perception, “Canada = Canoeing,” was just one of the ways a European colonial mentality permeates both our sense of nation and nature. Wente lashed back in the pages of the broadsheet. I hope environmentalists will listen better than she did.

When I came to Northern Saskatchewan as an immigrant, I quickly understood how much the North matters to the Canadian imagination. Nature and the boreal forest are huge parts of the country’s history and sense of identity. But I also learned that the “Canadian” way of thinking about the land was often split along ethnic lines. This book clearly shows how race and nature intermingle.

The view of the North as wilderness often neglects native peoples. The national narrative refers to, and then brushes over, the native present/presence. This is partially why the oil sands development proceeds as rapaciously as it does. They sort of say “there’s no one there,” so Canadians are willing to sacrifice the “empty” land.

For all our vaunted multiculturalism, Canada remains highly Euro-centric in modes of thinking and acting, how our institutions operate and even what counts as legitimate knowledge about the land. In the hands of the authors of these 14 sections, the Great “White” North becomes an analogy for the dominance of “whiteness” and the racial privilege that accumulates with it. The chapter on Temagami in Northern Ontario shows how Anglophone tourist literature labelled it a “wild” place. But what was a recreation site for southern Canadian tourists was a workplace for their Aboriginal guides. The “wilderness” was domestic. Contemporary ecotourism similarly celebrates exotic nature and cultures.

Two early chapters contrast the way “nature” was moralized around ethnicity. City planners in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century advocated the creation of parks to “civilize” and Canadianize new immigrants. Nature was “good.” The next chapter, an analysis of the rhetoric around Toronto’s SARS outbreak in 2005, demonstrates nature as “bad” or a threat. Media reports highlighted the virus’ origin in Asia, and as fear rose, nature – via SARS – became equated with the immigrants being a threat. Life-saving nurses were reframed as immigrant or ethnic nurses putting “us” at risk by possibly passing on the pathogen.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

There are two chapters about Samuel Hearne’s Arctic travelogues and the way this 18th century explorer represented intertribal conflicts and economic exchanges. Hearne racialized his “Chipewyan” guides and shaped the image of bloodthirsty, uncivilized aboriginals. Dominant social positions come with the power to narrate the land and shape its management, use, development and protection.

Rethinking the Great White North addresses injustices in other parts of Canada. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands illustrates the erasure of Acadian ethnicity from Cape Breton Highlands National Park and its subsequent replacement by the more respected Scottish ethnic heritage.

Elsewhere, conservation was a management tool for ethnic groups and ecosystems. Stephen Bocking, well known to readers of this magazine, describes how purportedly objective science minimizes traditional knowledge. The two differ  dra-mat-ically in their epistemologies and their way of understanding ecological processes, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to test against each other. Science has often been an implement of racializing domination, even to the present day.

Rethinking the Great White North contains some of the complicated academic language that makes people avoid reading such books. But that would be a mistake. Even more detrimental would be to ignore the entwining of race, nature, ethnicity and colonization that still permeates Canadian society. We need to disrupt the narratives of nature that are too often used in environmental action.

This book’s unravelling of race and nature in history and geography might help environmental protection by opening a broader vision of just sustainability and expanding the pool of people who might help formulate it. This is one of several recent scholarly books that challenges Canadian environmentalism to expand its social justice credibility. Will doing so help the environment? Yes, because it makes us more aware. Sustainability is an impossible goal if it does not include social equity. If others don’t see their issues and efforts in the movement, we unnecessarily narrow the audience for environmental messages.

Randolph Haluza-DeLay is a former wilderness guide. He is an associate professor of sociology at The King’s University College in Edmonton.

This Crazy Time by Canadian environmental activist Tzeporah Berman falls in the latter category. For the most part, it is a rip-roaring tale that gets behind the scenes of some of Canada’s best known environmental campaigns, ranging from the Clayoquot Sound protests on Vancouver Island in the 1990s to protecting the Great Bear Rainforest in BC and the Boreal forest in Ontario.

Berman writes about her first-hand experience on the front lines and in the back rooms of environmental organizations, concluding, “In the end it is about creativity, commitment, courage and a little bit of luck or magic.” I would add moxie to that list.

For instance, the campaign that succeeded in having lingerie behemoth Victoria’s Secret change its paper-buying policies was gobsmackingly good. To quote Berman, it was also “a critical piece of the puzzle that led to the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement,” which involves 21 forest companies, nine environmental organizations and 21 million hectares of public forest.

Coming up with a spoof ad that featured a corset-and-garter-belt-clad blonde slinging a chainsaw between her legs, and labelling it “Victoria’s Dirty Secret” was undoubtedly creative. But to spend $30,000, half of ForestEthics’ campaign budget, to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times, takes moxie. Berman explains that at first, the venerable newspaper refused to print the ad, claiming that it was too suggestive. They gave in when ForestEthics pointed out that the paper didn’t have trouble selling advertising space to Victoria’s Secret.

The chainsaw ad went viral. Papers including USA Today picked up the story. By some estimates, ForestEthics received the equivalent of $1.5-million in free media coverage for its $30,000 investment.

The beauty of the Victoria’s Secret campaign is that the spoof ad was only part of what ForestEthics did. “We followed the ad with serious grassroots organizing around the United States,” she writes. No kidding. They staged 852 protests outside Victoria’s Secret stores, and held a rally during the company’s annual fashion show in New York. They also sent the Victoria’s Secret CEO more than 10,000 letters and a postcard bearing his photo with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, with the cutline, “You can make all the difference. Protect our forests.”

Six months later, Berman was meeting with the company at its invitation. Eventually, Victoria’s Secret agreed that it would no longer buy paper from any company that logged endangered forests or endangered caribou habitat in the Boreal forest. If that doesn’t impress you, consider that Victoria’s Secret produces one million catalogues a day.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

It is hard not to review Berman’s actions rather than what she, with the help of accomplished writer Mark Leiren-Young, put in print. Most of the time, I was in awe of what this relatively young woman has done. (She’s 43.) Sometimes she comes across as being pretty full of herself – she actually describes how her colleagues took her down a notch when she got too big for her britches – but she manages to write about her numerous brushes with stars and stardom without making me bristle (not too much). At some length, Berman describes her meetings with Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, Van Jones, Tobey Maguire, Val Kilmer and more. One minute she’s sharing a dressing room with Desmond Tutu, the next she’s lunching with Irmelin DiCaprio (the actor’s mother) and then she’s being dressed by LA’s hottest designers. What surprised me most after reading about all of her exploits is that Tzeporah Berman is not more of a household name in Canada.

Berman wowed me with her descriptions of the sophistication behind the organizations that she worked with – mostly Greenpeace and ForestEthics. She was renting float planes here, commissioning someone to manufacture an enormous inflatable spirit bear there, hiring top consultants and chartering sailboats with never a mention of the funding problems that plague environmental groups. I’m certain making these high-priced decisions wasn’t as easy as Berman lets on, but not reading about chronic underfunding was refreshing and likely contributed to the book’s readability.

This Crazy Time, however, is not all flash and sizzle. Embedded within these highly entertaining stories are Berman’s observations, her lessons learned, and her constant search for meaning in her own environment-saving work. She writes, “I’ve spent my adult life working on environmental issues, and it took me six months of intensive research to even begin to figure out what I was for.” She repeats what seems to be the latest evolution in environmental messaging: “We need to talk about the dream,” adding, “travel agents don’t talk about the cost or the flight to Hawaii; they talk about the beach.”

My only complaint is Berman’s failure to follow her own lesson. In the chapter on her current climate change efforts, she adopts a Suzuki-esque tone of doom and gloom. She drags down the let’s-get-’em rhythm by describing the dire nature of our current situation. It borders on sounding preachy, but maybe that is just her age showing through. Maybe the passionate and invincible fire-in-her-belly 20-year-old has matured. She now runs the climate change program for Greenpeace in Amsterdam. Berman describes her new employer: “In Amsterdam the upraised marble reception area of the Greenpeace office had three receptionists seated at a high, high desk with their little headphones on, all saying, ‘Good afternoon, Greenpeace. Could you hold, please’ in at least three different languages.”

That image of Greenpeace bears little resemblance to the Vancouver organization of the 1970s. Then, Greenpeace’s office was likely in the rusty, damp cockpit of the Rainbow Warrior, and the radical organization’s founders were likely more familiar with handcuffs than strategic plans.

Similarly, in the last pages of the book, Berman’s rollicking tales of audacious tactics give way to descriptions of more sober and determined campaigns. They don’t make great copy, but perhaps they are what we need as the environmental movement shifts from simply trying to get coverage on the six o’clock news to actually bringing about the policy changes required to realize a more sustainable world. More likely,however, we need both.

Nicola Ross is a member of Alternatives’ editorial board.

These obvious yet perhaps revolutionary words come from Industrial Evolution, a wonderful new book by Lyle Estill, an entrepreneur, author, and, dare I say, environmental industrialist. The book’s premise reflects something that we all know but generally ignore: We can’t shop our way to real wealth. To help us move towards a better future, Industrial Evolution provides a manifesto of sorts for a new industrial ethic.

The book revolves around Estill’s company, Piedmont Biofuels, a biodiesel production facility in North Carolina. If Piedmont Biofuels sold only biodiesel, it likely would have failed – along with many of the other biodiesel producers – during the collapse of 2009. But Piedmont survived, in large part because it diversified.

As Estill notes, “When fuel production was down, design-build was booming. When design-build was soft, our research and analytics would sometimes carry the day.” Estill continues, “What we failed to understand at the time, as we were bringing our chemical plant to life, was that we were imitating nature, and accidentally diversifying.”

Diversification went much beyond the many facets and faucets of biodiesel production. In fact, much of Industrial Evolution describes how Piedmont became the anchor tenant in an eco-industrial park where the co-products of one business became the feedstock of another. To the extent possible, there was no waste. It was an industrial ecosystem made up of pipes, plants, people and more. Everyone had to survive and flourish together, so that’s what they did.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

At its heart, the ethic of Industrial Evolution is about people and how they matter. Much of the value in the Piedmont Biofuels model concerns building relationships and a shared vision of society.

“People just want to have a say in how they can govern their own lives,” Estill writes. Earlier on he notes, “It’s not about the gallons. It’s not about the fuel. It’s about people.” The people of Industrial Evolution are of course not all the same, and Estill devotes some time to candidly describing their differences. For example, a chapter on local food potlucks humorously describes a dispute between the vegans, who want everything to be properly labelled, and the meat eaters, who would be perfectly happy to hammer a sign on the front lawn that reads “Vegan option.”

Human welfare is just as important as an end-goal for a new industrial ethic, and Industrial Evolution shows how critical the human aspect is to the success or failure of a business or way of life. Estill is poignant when describing the impact of the death of his brother Mark, both on the people of Piedmont Biofuels and the success of the operation itself. In general, the plant would not have flourished without the collective sharing and sacrifice by all those involved.

To appreciate Industrial Evolution, it helps to know a little about Estill. As noted early in the book, he is an industrialist who believes in production. He wants to reclaim the word “industry,” which has literally been outsourced. Likewise, Estill notes that he is not an activist. Chaining himself to a barricade to stop a bulldozer would not be high on his priority list, he writes, especially if he may have been the one who ordered the bulldozer in the first place. And yet Estill believes firmly in sustainability, people and values, and he istrying to outline a new ethic both in prose and practice. While I don’t believe this means Estill embodies a contradiction, I do believe it lends him a unique perspective on issues of sustainability.

A key part of any business story is its success, and Estill is upfront about the financial difficulties Piedmont faced. “We were fuelling ourselves. We were feeding ourselves. But we were having trouble financing ourselves,” he writes. However, financial performance is “but one measure of a company. As a place, and as a culture, and by almost any other measure, Piedmont was doing wonderfully.” Estill’s preferred metric for success is the five-pointed star of genuine wealth described in Mark Anielski’s 2007 book, The Economics of Happiness.

Ideally, being virtuous also helps pay the bills. In Industrial Evolution, Estill describes how Piedmont developed the concept of open-source biodiesel, which is predicated upon a belief that freely sharing information is right and just. Being open-sourced ended up helping Piedmont financially, as it received several grants from the public and governments.

While Industrial Evolution is an uplifting story about a group of people who found a way to succeed living by the life they thought they should live, its message runs much deeper. The challenges that Piedmont faces are much more than the next financial statement. They cut to the heart of some critical issues facing America and the world, such as climate change, peak oil and local self-reliance. While Estill doesn’t provide a full solution for these challenges, I for one am grateful he is at the frontline, standing tall.

Kyrke Gaudreau is a doctoral student of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on developing and applying a sustainability assessment framework for energy systems.

In Creative Community Organizing, Si Kahn provides a bridge from the past to the present. At 68, Kahn is a living link between key North American social movements of the past half-century and the work activists are still doing today to address social injustice. For nearly 50 years he has been a community organizer and activist songwriter, working in the civil rights, labour, and anti-private-prison movements. Kahn attempts to distill the lessons of his ongoing involvement by telling vivid stories of his experiences and reciting his topical song lyrics.

Kahn encapsulates these lessons in what he calls “Creative Community Organizing’s Top 20.” Some of this advice is familiar: Park your stereotypes at the door (and create conditions for others to do the same); have a vision of what you are for, not just what you are against; find the common interest that can unite people; use culture and storytelling to build common bonds; and imagine where you want to be and work backwards from there.

However, he also offers ideas that are more specific to his experience: Make sure people are fully aware of the risks they face when they get involved in a campaign; find ways to play one opponent against another; and when you ask for people’s support, make sure it’s for something simple and straightforward. This is an insightful and entertaining book, but one has to wade through a lot of stories and side tangents to get to the meat of it.

Community organizer’s Linda Stout’s book, Collective Visioning, focuses almost exclusively on how to create a vision that can fire people up. Speaking from her rich experience working with people of all ages and cultural backgrounds, she talks about how to facilitate a visioning process and provides exercises for doing so. For Stout, such efforts bring together disparate groups to articulate mutual concerns and find common ground, creating preconditions for collaboration.

One particularly inspiring example involves high school students from a low income black community in post-Katrina New Orleans. The students had to put up with substandard food, malfunctioning air conditioners, almost unusable washrooms, and a lack of textbooks and seats in their classrooms. Stout brought them together as a group called the Rethinkers and encouraged them to imagine what their schools could be like in 2026. As the students took their vision to the media, the new school superintendent and non-profit organizations, major changes began to occur as adults became both inspired and shamed into taking action.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 38.3: Art & Media, published in May 2012.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Stout’s work is deeply rooted in heart and soul. As she says, “We must work from a place of vision, a place of hope, a place of joy, and a place that is grounded in our hearts.” By shifting the focus initially away from challenges and problems and onto visions and desires, Stout’s approach seems effective for inspiring people to imagine that a better world is possible, and to find common ground across the divisions of race and class.

Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber’s very relevant book, Citizen You, invites the reader to engage in the new civic activism and use personal creativity, initiative and commitment to solve seemingly intractable local and global problems. They argue that old models of involvement, such as volunteerism, charity and lobbying, are transforming into community-based action, leadership in global citizenship and social entrepreneurship. This provides incredible opportunities for determined, creative individuals to inspire and change the world.

The authors introduce a growing number of citizens who take passionate ownership of global issues, including urban farming, clean drinking water for everyone and combating massive drug distribution. Their work is committed to improving conditions for people and environments in developing countries.

Citizen You outlines how to revitalize democracy, how modern technology can create new forms of civic engagement, and how to change careers in search of a deeper meaning of life. The authors remind us of our own dreams and visions, and illustrate with compelling and fascinating real-life stories, as well as an abundance of tips, how to take effective action and be part of creating this new world.

Charles Dobson’s The Troublemaker’s Teaparty presents itself as a strategic, straightforward field guide to establishing citizen action groups and keeping them healthy and effective. Organized into 10 easily accessible and insightful chapters that build on each other, each chapter can also be a useful standalone resource when specific challenges occur.

The first chapter introduces different ways to organize the community, explaining how to lead a meeting and keep people involved, share information and raise funds. The book elaborates on grassroots relationships, mediation and conflict resolution, and explains how to prevent grassroots wilt. It educates well on how to design and run a project, and demonstrates how to use media as an effective tool to reach a broader community, rally troops, drive governments, help create distinctive messages, and build and support communication networks.

When the book was first published in 2003, Dobson was already well aware of the media’s potential to facilitate communication between massive numbers of people in order to influence public trends and government decisions. This is more true today than ever. The book also advises on how to directly contact government bodies and elected politicians, and outlines the best approaches to choose when meeting with decision makers. Dobson concludes with “Confrontation 101,” a list of Gandhi’s eight methods for converting an opponent in order to strengthen civil society. This book is an indispensable guide for every serious activist.

With a whole new generation of youthful activists coming on the scene, it is important to maintain the continuity of experience while opening the doors for fresh ideas. These four books are a good place to start.

Christine Krumrey has a PhD in natural sciences and works as a freelance writer and photographer. Don Alexander teacher geography at Vancouver Island University. He writes about place making, urban sustainability and smart growth.

Their overview is paired with the beautiful Batik artwork of Mary Edna Fraser, who captures many global landscapes affected by climate change in a stylish and unique way. Against this backdrop (which is worthy of even the most decorative coffee table), the authors clearly demonstrate that there is no debate about climate change. Their book presents this argument in a non-aggressive way, concentrating on scientific realities that are supported by irrefutable evidence.

Sometimes hard numbers are the key to understanding the role of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic factors that drive climate change. Such facts and figures can become mind-numbing and overwhelming; however, the authors isolate the data that are necessary to understanding the science in an easy-to-read format. Basic terminology is also woven into the book, from the misnomer of the greenhouse effect to glaciers to governmental panels.

The book also confidently frames the nature of our uncertainty about the future. One of the nicest features comes at the end of each chapter, where a recurring section called “Myths, Misinterpretations, and Misunderstandings of the Deniers” briefly describes the most common mistakes in the climate change discussion and then refutes them. These are also the most valuable insights of this book, presented in a factual and consistent manner which is equally useful to both proponents and cynics.

One key point the authors make is that scientific terms and statistical numbers aren’t required to convince the humans and wildlife that are already living with devastating drought and wildfire, catastrophic flooding and melting of the permafrost. For the rest of us, perhaps we either can’t imagine these experiences or we don’t know enough to point directly to the causes. Yet some of the greatest, most beautiful places on our planet display clear evidence of climate change’s negative effects, and we are only beginning to contend with sea level rise and acidification, melting glaciers and desertification. Unfortunately, by the time we are all affected in an undeniable way, it will likely be too late to make things right.

Sadly, as the authors point out, it is possible that we are approaching a point where our options for mitigating climate change will run out. If that is in fact the case, the final chapter fittingly addresses the concept of geo-engineering, or what some refer to as Plan B. If all else fails, the desperate and dramatic options they describe do offer some alternative methods of controlling greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. However, the consequences of their deployment could be devastating, and are uncertain at best.

Global Climate Change rationally and simply explains what scientists from around the world all agree on: We are past the time of arguing about whether or not climate change is real, and into a time when consequences and solutions must be addressed. With that goal in mind, the authors intend to provide a tool which can be used by savvy environmental activists and, as the title asserts, climate change novices.

Jenn Marshman is an environmentalist who has worked in the health care industry since 1998. She is currently studying geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo.

Paths to a Green World begins with an introduction that presents the four perspectives. This is followed by three chapters about modern environmental problems: the ecological consequences of globalization, the impact of globalization on environmentalism, and the gaps which separate economic growth in richer and poorer areas. In each chapter, the causes and consequences of the problems are then “explained” as they are seen by each of the four perspectives. These explanations are followed by another three chapters which indicate what positions each perspective takes with respect to global trade and the environment, global investment and the environment, and global financing and the environment. The book also offers the most easily understandable distinction between environmental and ecological economics that I have found (see especially page 107).

Each of the first seven chapters end with a section entitled “Conclusion,” and then a final chapter serves as a summary conclusion. The use of the singular rather than the plural must be taken as intentional, and it is my sole major complaint about the book. The authors are explicit that their goal is to present the four perspectives so that readers can find their own way among the positions and the resulting policy proposals. Good for them.

However, in my view, they carry neutrality too far. It is hard to find anyone – regardless of their worldview – who does not recognize population growth as contributing to, though not necessarily the source of today’s environmental problems. There is a near-consensus among analysts that subsidies which encourage higher rates of natural resources use are anti-environmental. (Admittedly, certain political parties in Canada seem to be oblivious to this analytical conclusion.) In short, I would have liked the last chapter to be less a conclusion than a source for multiple conclusions, and suggestions indicating why parts of each worldview are highly questionable (if not just plain wrong).

I have two other non-quibbles. First, the word “value” appears only rarely in the book. One can infer, but it is never stated, that each of the four perspectives is based on personal values, and those values are really the root for the different and indeed incompatible policy positions. All political choice ultimately comes back to values.

Second, the authors do an injustice to the concept of sustainable development by emphasizing its inconsistent use by the 1972 Brundtland Commission. Simply put, the Commission did not recognize the strength of the baby it had brought up. As a result, many institutions that should (and perhaps did) know better decided to treat sustainable development as little more than modified business-as-usual. Meanwhile, others have recognized its truly radical nature as a challenge to both the quality and the quantity of economic growth.

Despite these complaints, Clapp (who teaches at the University of Waterloo) and Dauvergne (UBC) deserve enormous thanks for clarifying the underlying perspectives that lead to such divergent advice for coping with what are now widely recognized are global environmental issues. Paths to a Green World may be used as a textbook, but it is also accessible to anyone who can read the editorial and op-ed pages of a daily paper.

David B. Brooks is a natural-resource economist who, when he is not in a canoe, identifies ways to conserve fresh water. He is also a member of Alternatives’ editorial board.

Carrot City’s overarching solution is to redefine what it means to live in a city by integrating food production into the built environment. Through fascinating case studies and vibrant images that showcase the appeal and diversity of urban gardens, the book aims to prove that, “There is no dichotomy between the beautiful yard and the edible landscape; they can be one and the same.”

The book divides urban agriculture projects into five main themes: “Imagining the Productive City”; “Building Community and Knowledge”; “Redesigning the Home”; “Producing on the Roof”; and “Components for Growing.” Each section profiles innovative communities, ongoing ventures or elaborate plans for a sustainable future. Many of the case studies are clustered around Toronto, Vancouver and New York, which allows Carrot City to challenge the demonization of urban development by demonstrating that even the environmentalist’s worst nightmare – the dreaded suburb – can foster biodiversity rather than destroy it. Likewise, industrial parks, often vilified as urban scars, are reimagined as “Agroparks,” or mechanisms of food production and distribution that completely overturn the idea of industrial ecology.

Using vivid graphical and literary imagery, the authors introduce incredible and attainable projects that not only promote edible landscapes, but also energy neutrality and sustainable lifestyles. Food miles become food metres when consumers pick produce grown right inside the supermarket. Rooftops can be repurposed as classroom gardens. Single-family homes can be reengineered to become closed-loop systems that mimic natural processes. Encouragingly, many of these projects are already a part of the fabric of our cities, and we all may have unknowingly walked past them without appreciating their splendor.

Carrot City also illustrates how urban agriculture transcends social class divides. The urban elite can redesign their homes to reduce their environmental footprint and add a rooftop garden, but people living in subsidized housing in Toronto’s low-income Regent Park area can do so too. The potential of urban agriculture in surprising landscapes is also covered. In the small community of Inuvik, for example, the local hockey arena was turned into a huge and vibrant community greenhouse, the closest one to the Arctic Circle in North America. In the slums of Nairobi in Kenya, people cope with land shortages by growing their food using a technique known as “a farm in a sack.”

We can all be part of this movement. There is room in urban agriculture for sophistication and also for simplicity, and all that is required is creativity and a willingness to get your hands dirty. Old tires, used containers and plastic bags are gardens waiting to grow. A child’s swimming pool can be filled with dirt, planted with herbs or flowers.

Carrot City will resonate with city planners and architects, but also with anyone willing to imagine the full growth potential of cities. It matters not who you are – artist, visionary, backyard farmer, guerilla gardener, engineer or parent. As the authors argue, one day soon, “It may be as unusual to find a city without productive urban landscapes as it would be today to find a house without plumbing.”

Megan Herod is an urban garden enthusiast and an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo.