Eco Book Review: Time To Eat The Dog? – Vale: 2009
A Real Guide To Sustainable Living – they say, and they mean business.
This isn’t a book that you can take lightly – it is full of maths and equations to justify their suggestions; and some things really need explaining as they turn common eco conceptions on their head!
Basically this book explains how we should be approaching our lives if we truly want to live an eco friendly lifestyle – or to live ecologically within our ‘allotted’ means. By ‘allotted’ they mean if we are only to use our fair share of worldly resources rather than just putting a green angle onto everything we do.
And to prove it, they open up with a look at the widely held beliefs of the world without even considering the eco consequences to see what we are expecting the Earth to do for us as we are today. From there, they try to whittle us down to what the Earth can actually do for us.
The Book Itself:
The book is something you need to read with a notepad and calculator on one side and some strong coffee on the other!
I have a basic grasp of ‘footprints’, ‘embodied energy’ and the worlds finite resources – but the maths part was a bit too much to keep on top of piled thick, as it was, in the body of the text.
They did have a huge number of very easy to understand charts and tables of everything they were talking about (which helped make up for skipping all the equations) and I didn’t loose the thread of their arguments by not reading all the numbers and MJ’s etc.
The Authors help to explain why some of the things that we assume would be eco friendly turn out not to be based on a bigger picture – for example walking isn’t that ecologically sensible if you are getting all your energy (ie eating) processed cheeseburgers from a store. Basically, the energy chain of land use, transport, chemicals, packaging, heating, storing and selling the burgers in the first place is so huge that the ‘eco’ effort of walking fuelled by burgers wasn’t really ‘saving the planet’.
photo credit: Bob B. Brown
Similarly a 20 minute shower in an eco friendly low-water shower still uses nearly twice the amount of water than a 5 minute shower in an old-style water-intensive shower. Further more, sharing a bath between 2 people uses around the same water per person as that same eco-friendly – but long – shower.
They use compelling reasoning to hold this all together as well as extensive research data from around the globe. And even though a lot of their arguments offer very simple solutions to the World’s ecological problems – much is still recommending a somewhat ‘alternative’ lifestyle, where you use hemp for clothes, buy less things, stay ‘behind the times’, somewhat, live in smaller houses with the lights off and share things with other people rather than buying your own.
Now I know that this will all reduce our eco footprints and keep our emissions down and the world turning – but these aren’t the eco friendly living tips that people want to hear. The people that do want to hear this are probably already aware of most of their discussions already.
I totally agree that our actions are sometimes more important that the eco technology that is on offer (like flushing the toilet less times will save more water than flushing more times with a low-flush mechanism, and choosing a small basic home will be better in terms of resources than living in an enormous eco friendly house) but I think that it is preaching to the converted.
Result: 3/5:
Even if my not-so-eco-friendly friends could have forced themselves to have read this entire book in the first place, I don’t think they would be heeding much of it’s advice.
I think it is a great text-book style book and can really help to compare ecological differences between common activities and products, but I don’t think it will change peoples attitudes in the style in which it is written.
Although I really enjoyed several section of this book, I noticed a flaw. They spend so long working out the embodied energy (EE) of a product (or the products and activities that went into making the parts for that oringinal product) that they sometimes considered slightly different things as important in each case.
For example, in the only section of the book that I had a really good knowledge of (pets) they managed to completely write off the transport angle for the tinned food in their comparison of dog and cat food (even though they went into shoe leather replacement in the walking vrs driving section). They say that the eco effect of tinned packaging was negligible because we are encourage to recycle tins! Well, how on earth do they intend to get these tins to those 76.5 million hungry cats worldwide without making an ecological impact?
And secondly their argument included showing that a cat food with less meat content made less of an impact (obvious when you consider the land used for beef and the land used to grow the winter food for beef as well) – however, cats that are fed on low amounts of meat will be more likely to become ill, get dry skin, loose hair, get gum disease etc (as not enough meat or too much vegetable matter isn’t good for a cat). As a result – you will be using your vet more often or maybe adding shampoos and supplements to your cat to ‘cover up’ all these new problems.
Now I’m sure that these cosmetics and medicines (and trips to the vets) have just as much of an impact as adding the few extra percents of meat in their food in the first place. High quality dried pet food are fed in smaller quantities as other foods, and are known to reduce these health (and aesthetic) problems – as well as coming in bulk paper packaging instead of heavy, bulky tins filled with 80% water!
They also said that a well handled hamster will be happy to live on it’s own – where infact the most common type of hamster (the Syrian hamster) will ONLY ever live on it’s own. If you put 2 in the same cage, they will no doubt fight to the death within just a few days!
So now, can I really believe all the other comparisons they made in areas that I know little about?
ISBN: 978-0-500-28790-3
