Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Green Book review - Crunchy Chicken style

the green bookDo you have a friend or loved one who is a budding Crunchy Chicken, but doesn't know where to start? Are you afraid of scaring them off with your eco-tales of composting toilets, cloth TP and the DivaCup?

Well, don't squelch their burgeoning interests. There's a new book out (released 6/19), called The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time that will help the green-curious get started. It's chock full of easy to manage things they can do to live a greener life, broken down into chapters such as home, work, school, travel and more. Each chapter includes a section titled "The Simple Steps" that highlight those actions that have the biggest bang for the least amount of effort. Interspersed throughout the book are celebrity's writings revealing the things they are doing to live green.

Now, given all that, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to a serious treehugger as they will have heard most of the suggestions already and will be left wanting more. Many of the tips don't go far enough and I found myself wondering why they didn't include this or that. It does have a laundry list of Internet links for each section to pursue more information, but who's going to type in 50 reference pages worth of URLs? I would like the see these links available on the authors' website for easier navigation.

As for the celebrity's personal "going green" stories, some are well worth reading (like Will Ferrell's take on his EV and Owen Wilson's musings on how he's turning into Ed Begley, Jr.), but others prompt an eye roll or two. I'm still trying to figure out how Jennifer Aniston manages to take a shower in three minutes and brush her teeth at the same time. Something's not getting done there. I know celebrities have a lot of power, but I didn't know they had control over the physical universe and could compress time. Maybe a shower saver should be in her next swag bag.

But I digress... Each tip includes statistics relating to how doing the suggested action would affect consumption. For example, "if every traveler in the United States stopped using paper luggage tags for each of their trips, sixty million sheets of paper could be saved per year." While these stats help demonstrate why doing that action will help, I found them to be distracting after a while. And I wished they had spent the space instead with suggestions of how to do more.

All in all I think this is a great introduction to living a greener lifestyle. The celebrity writings will appeal to many and adds an element of hipness to the book.

Interview alert!
This book was featured on the April 20th episode of Oprah and was written by Elizabeth Rogers (co-producer of MTV's Trippin') and Thomas M. Kostigen with a foreward by Cameron Diaz.

I will be interviewing the authors of this book at the end of the month and will be incorporating some of the questions you submit. So, if you are interested in asking the authors a question, please post them here by June 24th!

If you want more information, check out their website.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey, isn't Jennifer Aniston also the new spokesperson for 'Smart Water'? Maybe she's brushing and showering with three minutes worth of bottled water.

QT said...

Jennifer Aniston has probably had her body hair lasered off, and has her hair done professionally. So she isn't DOING much in there other than lathering her body up, and apparently, brushing her teeth.

Anonymous said...

Ohh, that books looks intersting. Can't wait to read the interview. :)

Cave-Woman said...

Have you seen "It's Easy Being Green"? Many things covered in the book are obvious---but the book is very encouraging, practical, and a wonderful beginning place.