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Book Review – The Economical Environmentalist
Filed under GeneralJan 8Prashant Vaze’s book the Economical Environmentalist is one of the best books of it’s kind. He leaves no stone unturned and scrutinizes every aspect of his life in order to lower his carbon footprint.
He comes at the subject from quite a different angle as many of the recent trend of ‘have a go’ journalist who begin knowing absolutely nothing about climate change or so called ‘green’ living in general. Having worked for (amongst other things) the UK’s office on climate change and on the board of the Energy Savings Trust he approaches the subject from a level of expertise not normally associated with books of this kind.
For example rather than insist we buy local he looks at the difference between tomatoes grown in artificially lit and heated UK greenhouses and Spanish grown one’s under natural sunlight. Even if we include the impact of shipping the result can be quite surprising! Perhaps the answer isn’t always UK, organic or local but we have to include seasonal also?
He also recognizes that we need to make profound changes in our lifestyles if we stand any hope of getting through the next few decades unscathed.
His book is a real eye opener and although he does go into quite detailed science at times he does so in a way that makes it accessible even to the most unscientifically minded.
The book is jam packed with tables and graphs the book can be dipped into or read from cover to cover.
An excellent read and one that comes highly recommended.
2 Responses to “Book Review – The Economical Environmentalist”
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Book sounds interesting. Does the writer reach a conclusion on the English versus Spanish tomatoes question? I read up a while ago about some of the tomato farms in Spain and how much pollution they cause with chemicals for example.
Also many are grown under polytunnels – most of which I saw were worn out by the sun, ripped up by the wind and blowing everywhere.I was talking to some farming relatives (distant) recently and told them that I’d noticed you can now buy British sugar. They were jolly happy I’d noticed and was buying it. Another farming relative then pointed out that there are arguments over how environmentally friendly British sugar really is because the production process that gets the crop we grow to the white stuff we like uses enormous resources.
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dave said on April 9th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Well it turns out the Spanish tomatoes have a lower carbon footprint. I think this clouds the issue a little and the book also agrees with this – it shouldn’t be Spanish or English but seasonal, we shouldn’t really be eating strawberries and tomatoes in the middle of March!
I think it sounds like this book might answer a lot of your questions, I’m sure it goes into also goes into sugar production.
