Review: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan (DNF)

Title: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan

Author: Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller

Genre: Sustainability

Trigger Warnings: General ecological disaster angst

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 6%

Back Cover:

In 2013, when friends Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller launched the first Facebook Buy Nothing Project group in their small town off the coast of Seattle, they never expected it to become a viral sensation. Today there are thousands of Buy Nothing groups all over the world, boasting more than a million members, and 5,000 highly active volunteers.

In their island community, Clark and Rockefeller discovered that the beaches of Puget Sound were spoiled by a daily influx of plastic items and trash washing on shore. From pens and toothbrushes to toys and straws, they wondered, where did it all come from? Of course, it comes from us–our homes, our backyards, our cars, and workplaces. And so, a rallying cry against excess stuff was born.

Inspired by the ancient practice of gift economies, where neighbors share and pool resources, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan introduces an environmentally conscious 7-step guide that teaches us how to buy less, give more, and live generously. At once an actionable plan and a thought-provoking exploration of our addiction to stuff, this powerful program will help you declutter your home without filling landfills, shop more thoughtfully and discerningly, and let go of the need to buy new things. Filled with helpful lists and practical suggestions including 50 items you never need to buy (Ziploc bags and paper towels) and 50 things to make instead (gift cards and salad dressing), The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan encourages you to rethink why you shop and embrace a space-saving, money-saving, and earth-saving mindset of buying less and sharing more.

Review:

I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical about this book. I really really like the idea, but it seemed like something that should have been an article and not a full book. But I didn’t even get into the content before calling it quits – although from the way the beginning is written, I don’t think it’s going to be that groundbreaking.

It started with the authors talking about how they realized the extent of plastic pollution, and then going into facts and figures on plastic pollution, microplastics, greenhouse gases, and all sorts of other things that are going to destroy our environment. That seemed kind of unnecessary to me – if you’re picking up a book like this, you probably already know the problem and want to consume less.

And then they fell into capitalism’s most common problem – blaming the individual for systemic problems. Sixty percent of greenhouse gases, they say, are caused by consumers indirectly though the manufacturing process. This is not the fault of the manufacturers not switching to more eco-friendly methods, this is the fault of consumers for buying the goods.

Which I guess might be a slightly better argument if everyone in the world was independently wealthy and could make a conscious choice to only support eco-friendly options and live the wealthy minimalist life and etc., but most people’s reality is a bit different from that. Putting the blame on consumers and not where it belongs – the capitalist owners of the production process choosing to use destructive methods – doesn’t do anything but give ordinary people guilt for needing to purchase things to survive.

I think I’m going to be able to figure out how to give to my neighbors and purchase less without Rebecca and Lisel’s 7-step program. I’m very active on my local Freecycle group, and I’m already in the process of cutting down the things I have to purchase (I currently make all my own hair and skin products and my own toothpaste). If I decide I need what’s in this book, I bet I can find a summary online. But what I really don’t need is more unhelpful, counterproductive, unhealthy guilt about what I have to purchase to survive.

Review: We Need To Eat!

Title: We Need to Eat!: A Guide to Conscious Cheap Eating

Author: Stacy

Genre: Sustainability/Cookbooks

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food

Back Cover:

An amazing guide to consciously cheap eating for yourself and others. This zine contains over 75 low-cost quick all-vegan recipes! You also get a bunch of vegan and freegan tips and advice, info on food and radical activism, gardening, finding free food, and giving food away.

Review:

This is a zine, I’ve never read a zine before, so I wasn’t completely sure what to expect. I got it because of the recipes – I’m not specifically vegan, but I’m interested in trying more vegan food, and recipes that are cheap are always worth looking at in my book.

I get the idea that this is pretty typical for zines, but there is a lot more than recipes in here. There are inteviews with people about things like cooperative economics and the group Food Not Bombs, there’s advice about getting food for cheap, a section on gardening to grow your own food, and also some politics in the beginning (the author says she is an anarchist right off the bat). I skimmed most of the interviews – I was reading the book for recipes, not information on economics.

The recipes, from what I could tell without actually making them, seemed good. Most of them were very simple (a very common theme was “rice/pasta/beans + a can of tomatoes + spices”), but I’m okay with that. Sometimes simple is good. And this was the first vegan cookbook to make nutritional yeast seem not intimidating to me. Some of these recipes I’m not going to bother with (I hate cooked cabbage so I won’t try any of the cabbage-based recipes), but some of them are definitely going in my to-try pile.

My only real problem with this book (zine? I don’t know if it qualifies as a book) is the moralizing about food. It only has one mention of the “meat is unhealthy and morally wrong” angle that a lot of vegan things do, which I’m glad of, but it does fall into the “anything in a package is inherently bad” argument. I am trying to eat more vegetables, but that is a personal decision about my own consumption, and I don’t believe in assigning moral value to any kind of food, regardless of how “nutritious” or not it is.

There’s definitely some worthwhile stuff in here, especially if you need to eat on a budget, and I’m absolutely going to try some of the recipes. I was a little thrown off by the zine format, but that’s more due to my inexperience with zines than any issue with We Need to Eat itself. A solid read if you want some easy vegan recipes or need to feed yourself on a really tight budget.

Review: Building a Better World in Your Backyard

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.

Review: Food Not Lawns

Title: Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community

Author: Heather Jo Flores

Genre: Environment/Sustainability

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food

Back Cover:

Gardening can be a political act. Creativity, fulfillment, connection, revolution–it all begins when we get our hands in the dirt.

Food Not Lawns combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own “paradise gardens.”

But Food Not Lawns doesn’t begin and end in the seed bed. This joyful permaculture lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden–simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community–to all aspects of life. Plant “guerilla gardens” in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces.

Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and the ills of our throwaway society. In Food Not Lawns, she shows us how to reclaim the earth one garden at a time.

Review:

Full disclaimer: I’m in a couple of Heather Jo Flores’s Facebook groups. I’ve never actually interacted with her, though, and she doesn’t know I’m reading/reviewing her book, so I like to think it’s still sort of unbiased.

This book has a lot of good information. There’s two main categories of information here: tips for gardening and turning your yard into a garden, and tips for activism within your community. This is more a reference guide than anything else – you definitely can sit down and just read it straight through (which is what I did), but the book clearly wants you to go out and put its ideas into practice.

I found the gardening part very interesting, as it explains permaculture methods (vastly different from the industrial agriculture I grew up with) and advice for turning your yard into a “food forest”-type garden. It talks about plants that complement each other when grown together, different “zones” of a garden, soil microbes, and a lot more. I’ve been interested in the concept of permaculture, and I found this a really good basic introduction to the principles.

The community activism part was also good information, although parts of it seemed more pie-in-the-sky than practical (especially in the bit about fundraising). I’m sure Heather Jo has used all of the methods she said in this book that she used, but I don’t think they’re all universally applicable. That said, a lot of the ideas did sound good, at least in theory, and I’d be willing to give them a try.

Overall, this was a solid book. Heather Jo and I have some different ideas on things (for example, I don’t think GMOs are inherently evil), but overall I appreciated how relentlessly practical this book is. It’s a book that wants you to go out and do the things it’s telling you about, and though I read it as an ebook, I fully intend to get my hands on a paperback copy so I can have it on hand to reference as I start trying to actually do some permaculture gardening.