Title: Building a Better World in Your Backyard – Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys
Author: Paul Wheaton and Shawn Klassen-Koop
Genre: Environment/Sustainability
Trigger Warnings: Strong language, discussion of excrement
Back Cover:
Make a huge, positive, global difference from your own home! Prioritize comfort over sacrifice while saving thousands of dollars. Explore dozens of solutions and their impacts on carbon footprint, petroleum footprint, toxic footprint, and other environmental issues.
If 20% of the population implemented half the solutions in this book, it would solve the biggest global problems. All without writing to politicians, joining protests, signing petitions, or being angry at the people that are causing the problems.
Good solutions are often different from conventional environmental wisdom. The average American adult has a carbon footprint of 30 tons per year. Replacing a petroleum car with an electric car will cut 2 tons. But if you live in a cold climate and you switch from electric heat to a rocket mass heater, you will cut 27 tons!
Join Paul and Shawn on a journey featuring simple alternatives that you may have never heard of — alternatives which are about building a more symbiotic relationship with nature so we can all be even lazier.
Nurture nature and nature nurtures us all.
Review:
As I read through the first half of this book, I had fully intended to start this review out with, “This guy is batshit nuts.” Then I finished it and understood a little bit better where he was coming from. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still batshit, but it seemed a little less ridiculous by the end.
The basic premise is pretty much what it says on the tin – Paul is going to explain to you how to live “a more luxuriant life” in a way that is better for the environment, with the idea being that your neighbors will see how well you’re living and want to imitate you. I absolutely love that concept, and as someone already fairly interested in permaculture and similar topics, I was excited for this.
I took notes while reading this. I hate taking notes on books. But I had to note all the ridiculous stuff in this book because I want to give you an idea of what this guy is like.
- He calls plants “growies.” (At first I thought he might be Australian and that might be an Aussie thing, but no, he lives in Montana.)
- He has a really strange love affair with incandescent lightbulbs and spends about two chapters hyping up why they’re so much better than any other option.
- INTENSE hate-boner for anything he labels “toxic glick,” which includes everything from plastic to trash to sugar to soap. (He also seems to think non-natural materials like polyester radiate some kind of evil that will hurt you somehow.)
- Soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, and any other cleaning product that you can’t eat are toxic to humans. His evidence: He gets nosebleeds if he’s near laundry detergent and someone told him their migraines stopped when they stopped using shampoo.
- People who claim that diatomaceous earth, his natural pesticide of choice, hurts their lungs are wrong because they haven’t examined their lungs with a microscope to prove it. (No such evidence requirement for his anecdotes, though.)
- The concept of native plants is only important to people full of white guilt.
- Composting is bad because the decomposition process makes the pile smaller and that must mean all the nutrients are going away.
- He insists that this way of living will be so luxurious that your neighbors will all want to imitate you, and then recommends outhouses as the best way to deal with human waste (which sounds like the opposite of luxurious to me).
- “There are so many toxins in a standard new home that if the air in the house is not exchanged with fresh outside air every few hours, you may die!” (Direct, unedited quote from chapter 6. The exclamation point was his, too.)
Not to mention that with all the building houses, digging holes, and cutting trees required for this lifestyle, it will be next to impossible if you’re anything less than 100% physically abled.
That said, there are some good ideas in here. The Rocket Mass Heater is something I haven’t heard of before but seems really cool to retrofit an existing house with. He has a lot of advice for making gardening easier and some neat plans for building your own house. His explanation of hugelkultur is one of the most accessible I’ve found. There are some real advice gems in here. But it’s surrounded by absolute batshit nuttiness.
Funnily enough, Paul puts in a scale of environmental responsibility at the beginning and advises that anyone more than a few steps more environmentally responsible than you will seem insane. So I guess that’s a good way to make readers think his craziness is only in their perception?
As I got towards the end and read about his design for building houses (which is only feasible on sloped land and cannot work anywhere flat), I realized what really happened with this book. Paul found a lifestyle he liked that went well with the permaculture ethos and had a low environmental footprint. Since it worked so well for him, he assumed it must work for everyone, regardless of their location or personal situation, and he wrote this book trying to convince the world that his way is the best way. I’m not saying all his ideas are bad – in fact, some are very good. But they’re not universal.
This is one of those books you’ll only 100% love if you already agree with everything Paul thinks. Read this book, laugh at the ridiculous parts, take what works for you, and leave the rest.
Bluejay Reads 