James Murray-White

Growing up in a green village outside Cambridge, UK gave me an eye into the natural world, and years later, after being an actor, dramatist, weary traveller and anthropologist, the environment fires me up the most – and the need to save and nurture it… while we live within it.I now live in the UK, with partner Tania and 2 pesky cats – writing and filming the world (slowly making a documentary about the Bedouin situation) take up my creative time. I do this while growing things organically and composting profusely take up the remainder.James can be reached at james (at) greenprophet (dot) com.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]