Eco Love Forest Film Not a Convincing Eco-Porn Messenger (Review)
James reviews a film about a very odd group of “environmentalists” in Berlin who use sex as a tool to save the planet.
Solar Mamas Shows Sustainable Engineering for Bedouin Women (Film Review)
They can’t read or write but a couple of brave Bedouin women from Jordan travelled far and wide to help their villages become solar powered.
Book Review: I’m With the Bears
Pauline Masurel reviews a collection of literary and science fiction stories by world renowned authors that imagine the affects of climate change. Bill McKibben was arrested in August this year while protesting against TransCanada’s proposed plans to build a pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta tar sands to Texas. McKibben has written: “This [...]
Book Review of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
Edgelands are the spaces outside of towns and cities that play host to a rough element. Largely considered no-man’s-land, they too deserve attention, Marion Shoard argues. Two poets respond to the call. The term edgelands was coined in 2003 by Marion Shoard. She wrote, “The expanses of no-man’s-land which have sprung up on the margins of [...]
Book Review: ‘The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change’ by Stephen Gardiner
Stephen Gardiner argues that climate change is a combination of the ‘prisoners dilemma’ and ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Stephen M. Gardiner regards climate change more or less as an ethical failure on the part of the human race, something that implicates our institutions’ moral and political theories alongside ourselves as supposedly moral beings. He employs [...]
Book Review: ‘My Journey With a Remarkable Tree’ in Cambodia
Ken Finn is a passionate man. Sitting with him in his Brighton kitchen (which he built himself), our conversation ranges from his book, ‘My Journey With a Remarkable Tree’, to the current state of the economy: “We’ve got to decouple the juggernaut [of economic meltdown] that is hurtling towards us” is a memorable quote from [...]
‘Human Well-Being & the Natural Environment’ by Economist Partha Dasgupta
How do you measure human well-being? How do you fully account for the impact of human interventions in poor regions like in Iraq? What costs are paid by the citizens of one country for the consumer demands of another? Renown economist Partha Dasgupta’s recent book, ‘Human Well-being and the Natural Environment’ is not for the [...]
Book Review: Loving Leo Hickman’s ‘The Good Life’
Want a reference book to living ethically? Want to know the truth about the costs of globalisation and profit-driven business practices on our health and society? Want to know what you can do to bring about change? This is the book for you. Unlike the other books by Leo Hickman that I have reviewed (The [...]
Louise “Goes Slow” ‘Round England
Interested in finding out about Slow Food, Slow Travel and some of the most beautiful places in England to slow down? Want to know about people who have chosen the Slow Life? This is the book for you – a journey and a resource. It is a gentle meander through England, a ramble across the [...]
Pauline Wafts Through “Uses & Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke”
Pauline discovers in her review of “Uses & Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke” that there is more to plant-based smoke than meets the eye. Read on for details. You’ve heard of tobacco and cannabis but what about jimsonweed or torchwood? This book demonstrates that there’s a lot more to smoke created from plant material than just [...]
Ellen Thrives On Pinkerton and Hopkins’ ‘Local Food’
Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins guide us away from domineering supermarkets and into our own backyards. Ellen has the details. Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins are authors of ‘Local Food, How to make it happen in your community’ – a big, hearty book. In a time when the supermarkets look set on taking over, they [...]
Clare Wanders The Woods With Ben Law In ‘The Woodland Year’
More green wisdom from the United Kingdom: this week Clare unravels the many reasons to celebrate and cherish woodlands. Anne Frank found solace in the giant Chestnut tree that stood outside her home, while a Moroccan activist risked arrest to protect a precious stand of Cedar trees. And in Israel, to the outrage of Omer’s [...]
Living A Simpler, Deeper Life With ‘The Moneyless Man’
One man goes on a mission to live a year without money; James tells us how it’s done. If we take green living seriously, we all must examine every aspect of life, from consumerism through to energy use and our personal economic and social attitude. This is what Mark Boyle has done, to an extreme [...]
Green Student Life Using “10 Ways to Change the World in Your Twenties”
I am a fanatical ‘thrifter,’ an unstoppable charity shop consumer; the best bit about shopping in this way is that all the guilt of buying too many clothes is eradicated because they are second hand. Instead of being a part of the disposable fashion industry, I am reusing loved clothes as well as donating my [...]
Mazzy reviews ‘The Story Of Stuff’
In order to change our unending addiction to Stuff, we need to redefine progress. We need to realize Stuff doesn’t make us happy. The Story of Stuff is subtitled “How our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health – and a vision for change.” Its author, Annie Leonard, is not [...]
Review of Leo Hickman’s ‘A Life Stripped Bare’
Interested in finding out about one man and his family taking on the challenge of living ethically for a year? Want to know more about the dilemmas of consuming without harming animals, people or the environment? This is the book for you. Like another of Leo Hickman’s books we’ve reviewed – ‘The Final Call’ - this book [...]
Clare Dissects Post-apocalypse Britain in 'Everyone Can Be a Hero'
I have quite a taste for post-apocalyptical fantasies myself (such as Cormac McCarthy’s chilling ‘The Road’, reviewed here earlier on GP), so I picked up ‘Everyone Can Be A Hero’ with some eagerness. It is a novel for teenagers set in a Britain devastated by a nuclear accident, where the remaining population is forced to [...]
James Feasts Slowly Upon Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'
Michael Pollan is a hero to many of us globally who take a strong interest in the link between food and the environment. Green Prophet’s James attends a lecture with Pollan and reports on his words, and Pollan’s newest book. This American journalist/author has written several prize-winning books, including ‘In Defense Of Food’ reviewed here [...]
Mazzy Luxuriates Within her Review of 'A Forest Garden' by Martin Crawford
‘Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops’ (Green Books,UK) by Martin Crawford This book is unusual. Firstly, by virtue of covering the topic of forest gardening at all, but also unusual in another respect. Many gardening books either concentrate on being packed with practical How-To information, or on offering glossy fantasies [...]
Louise Reviews Eco-Tourism Book 'The Final Call' With A Questioning Eye
Worried about the impact of the tourism industry on the world’s resources? Want to know whether tourism sustains or destroys local communities and ecology in the developing world? Then this is the book for you. ‘The Final Call’ is a thoroughly good read and I had to remember that I was actually meant to be [...]
Green Prophet Interviews Author and Journalist, Alanna Mitchell
Of the many non-fiction, environmentally-themed books I’ve read over the past few years, those that stand out are Alanna Mitchell’s ‘Dancing at the Dead Sea’ and ‘Seasick‘, both of which I have reviewed for Green Prophet. Mitchell is an acclaimed Canadian writer, skilled in her clear evocation of the destruction of the environment she witnesses [...]
'Red Alert!' Daniel Wildcat's Indigenous Knowledge Book Links Us to a Green Books Campaign
Green Prophet is delighted to be teaming up today worldwide with Eco Libris, an environmentally friendly green printing company, and their Green Books campaign. Eco Libris is run by Israeli Raz Godelnik, and has been featured on Green Prophet here where we interviewed Raz. The campaign plans 100 reviews of green themed books around the [...]
Alanna Mitchell Plunges Deeply In 'Seasick'
Alanna Mitchell’s new book, ‘Seasick‘ encompasses two and a half years of aquatic research over five continents. She has literally gone to the oceans depths to see and report upon the hidden ecological crisis of the global ocean. Reading it, a reader becomes profoundly aware of the oceans breadth, width and depth. Salient facts leap [...]
Julian gets to grips with green business in a double book review
A couple of years after former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach founded ActNow, a sustainable business consultancy, he signed up Walmart as a client. This brought Werbach considerable notoriety in eco-activist circles. Walmart’s record of environmental responsibility had previously been spotty, to put it mildly. Werbach retorted to his critics that Walmart, with almost two [...]
Louise Looks At Eco-Travel With "The Guardian Green Travel Guide"
Worried about your carbon footprint? Not sure where to turn for accurate information? This book certainly delivers what it says on the jacket. Drawing together a range of contributions from travel and green experts, it offers the reader opportunity to explore options for travelling worldwide which take least toll on the environment and which contribute [...]
Scientist, Environmentalist and Eco-Prophet James Lovelock Issues A Final Warning in 'The Vanishing Face of Gaia'
“We became the Earth’s infection a long and uncertain time ago”: James Lovelock is perhaps the world’s best-known independent scientist; he has published a new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. Lovelock has served humanity and the planet well by inventing a device (the ECD – Electron Capture Detector), which detected the [...]
The Political Ecology of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre Company in 'Rehearsing With Gods'
Whether or not you already know the Bread and Puppet Theater, “Rehearsing with Gods” is a wonderful way to learn more – to see, feel, and almost taste some of the magic of the seminal puppet theater founded in 1962 by German Peter Schumann. Simon and Estrin have both been a part of the B [...]
Rabbi Julian joins with other faiths to 'Love God, Heal Earth'
Twenty years, ago, Sally Bingham went to her local bishop and announced that she wanted to be ordained so that she could become the world’s first priest for the environment. She was received with some skepticism. Undeterred, she embarked on almost a decade of study and became an Episcopalian minister in 1998. She went on [...]
Leora gets to grips with Michael Crichton's 'State Of Fear'
Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” is a thriller, telling the story of eco-terrorists artificially creating extreme weather events in order to convince the world of the non-existent threat known to the rest of us as “anthropogenic (human caused) climate change”. The hero of the story, an MIT professor and special agent by the name of [...]
James Laps Up 'When the Rivers Run Dry' by Fred Pearce
A review on the cover of this book by Fred Pearce describes it as “a world tour of hydrological madness” (Sunday Times), and that, in a nutshell, is exactly what it is. For those who want to understand what happens to the world’s water supply and where it comes from, whether you live in or [...]
Gil Reviews 'Solar Homesteading Simply,' a DIY e-book by LaMar Alexander
Providing self-sufficient and affordable shelter remains a major challenge for humanity worldwide. Decent and healthy living conditions are still required in many parts of the world especially due to migration to over-populated urban areas, man-made and natural disasters. Many architects and non-government organizations have attempted to provide local communities in these areas with building skills [...]
Daniella Unpicks Israel's Relationship With Land and Housing In Amiran Gonen's "Between City and Suburb"
If you’ve heard about the demise of the kibbutz movement, then you may also know that financially strapped communal farms have recently climbed out of debt by building suburban-style detached housing developments and selling them to upwardly mobile Israelis. Suburbanizing kibbutzim and moshavim (village settlements), along with several new suburban-style towns like Shoham (near Ben [...]
Ronald Macintyre Excavates 'The Nature Of The State'
Reading has its own geography. I read this book The Nature of the State while I traveled back and forth from the West Highlands of Scotland to London for work . . . while Israeli-Palestinian relations erupted into open conflict in Gaza, while fire in Greece turned to fire Australia, while it snowed hard in [...]
James Laps Up Simon Barnes's Book 'How to Be Wild'
“The more we leave the non-human world behind, the less human we become: and the more fearful we become. It is not the thrilling fear of the kind I have experienced with horses, it is more a soul-deep, dislocated sense of anxiety. We lose our sense of trust in the wild world: we begin to [...]
Architect Gil Peled Strives for a 'Carbon-Free House' in Stephen and Rebekah Hren's Book
Carbon emissions from the building environment are globally one of the major contributors to climate change. On average up to 50% of all carbon emissions are related to domestic use of energy – our household consumption. How then will our personal conduct have any influence on the global climate? The answer to that is it [...]
Exploring Human Apathy In The Film 'The Age Of Stupid'
‘The Age of Stupid’ is an ambitious new Independent British green documentary. As a fellow filmmaker and activist, I salute director Franny Armstrong and her dynamic team for the passion and vision shown in creating this film, pulling together funding from diverse and various sources, creating the ‘Not Stupid’ brand and the big campaign that [...]
Rabbi Sinclair Reviews "Nature's Due" And Its Complicated Biology
I am really not the right person to be reviewing “Nature’s Due” by Professor Brian Goodwin from Shumacher College in the UK. It is based on some quite complicated biology, a subject that I haven’t studied formally since I was 14. James sent me the book in September, and I’ve only just finished it now, [...]
Harvey Treads Softly Along Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'
We’re pleased here on Green Prophet to be starting another run of reviews of green & environment-themed books and films, from a range of reviewers. Every Wednesday we’ll be posting reviews, ranging from academic to practical, from the obscure and epic, to the bang up to the minute, recently released, ‘in your face’ diatribe. So [...]
British Council Israel Initiates Energy Exchange With Turkish Experts
Those clever clever folk over at the British Council Israel are this week hosting a live video conference with British energy expert Francis McGowan and an audience in Turkey, all from the Council offices in Ramat Gan. Francis McGowan, senior lecturer in politics from the University of Sussex, is a member of the Sussex energy [...]
'Acme Climate Action' – The Trainspotting of Environmental Action Books
“The Old Testament tells the story of a seriously miffed God flooding the world, and Noah building a wooden monohull to save each species. This time around it won’t be an act of God but a pickle of our own making, and the planet is the only ark we have. It’s time to find that [...]