Nerve 14 - Round-up of Recommended Reads

Round-up of Recommended Reads

Suffisant! Basta! Enough! Oh sorry – I was just reading a book by John Naish in which he invites us to ditch our ancient habit of wanting more. It’s called ‘Enough: Breaking Free from the World of Excess’ (Hodder £7.99). Each chapter is entitled Enough…Information, Food, Stuff, Work, Options, Happiness, Growth, and details exactly why we don’t need more of it. Like any addiction our cultural addiction to more-more is proving extremely tough to break, but I am put in mind of Seasick Steve’s album title ‘I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left’.

So from that point of view, here are some resources that will be useful to us as we approach environmental tipping point and figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions by 90%. Watching ‘The Age of Stupid’ will help to focus your mind. Mark Lynas, author of ‘Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet’ (Harper Collins £8.99), features in the film. His book gives us a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. With a little foresight, some intelligent strategic planning, and a reasonable dose of good luck, we can halt this catastrophic trend - but the time to act is now.

Let’s focus on one aspect of environmental change – food.

Firstly what’s wrong with the food industry? Felicity Lawrence’s ‘Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business is Bad for the Planet & Your Health’ (Penguin £8.99) compellingly shows how in the last fifty years big business took control while we had our backs turned. But this is one area where it’s easy to make changes. There is a “growing” interest in permaculture as an ecologically sound approach to providing for our needs – two books to get you started – ‘Permaculture in a Nutshell’ by Patrick Whitefield, who seems to be the guru of the movement (Permanent Publications £5.95) outlines the principles and practice. Then ‘Getting Started in Permaculture’ by Ross & Jenny Mars (Permanent Publications £9.95) details 50 DIY projects for house and garden you could attempt.

But individual solutions are not enough; we also need to reconnect as communities. ‘Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden & Your Neighbourhood into a Community’ by H C Flores (Chelsea Green £17.95) is a bit American but is “a joyful manual” – my reader thoroughly recommends it!

The latest ‘transition towns’ title is ‘Transition Timelines: for a Local, Resilient Future’ by Shaun Chamberlin (Green Books £12.95) which describes four possible scenarios for the UK and world, ranging from Denial to the Transition Vision, in which we move into a more fulfilling, lower energy world. Choose your path, and then make that future real with your actions. Easy!

The publishing world recently seems to have gone crazy over all things wild. We’ve had ‘Wild Swimming’, ‘Wildwood’ and ‘The Wild Places’. But for a shocking, angry and passionate read I must recommend Jay Griffiths’ ‘Wild: an Elemental Journey’ (Penguin £8.99). Her words will haunt you with their rage against the exploitation of native peoples and dazzle you with her love for this blasted planet. Altogether lighter but no less profound is Simon Barnes’ ‘How to Be Wild’ (Short Books £8.99). If you learnt how to be a bad birdwatcher from him, you may now want to follow him into the wilderness. Not to be left out locally, John Dempsey gives us ‘Wild Merseyside’ (Trinity Mirror £4.99) a sweet guide to discovering nature in our own backyard.

Finally Bob Dylan fans will love ‘Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature’ (Still Pictures £17) in which Mark Edwards illustrates every line from Dylan’s masterpiece of a song with photos from 150 different countries. Beautiful, but I wonder what his carbon footprint is?

All available at News From Nowhere Bookshop 96 Bold St Liverpool L1 4HY 0151 708 7270 www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk (online ordering from the REAL Amazons – boycott union-busting Amazon!)

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