I’m all for spreading green tidings, but few of this year’s glut of books offering tips on how to save the world are up to the job. Much of it is stuff we already know — I suspect cut and pasted from green websites. Is the virtue of switching to energy-saving light bulbs in any doubt? An exception is the revised issue of Michael Norton’s 365 Ways to Change the World (HarperCollins, £6.99/offer £6.64), an imaginative collection of suggestions, one for each day of the year. It manages to avoid being preachy and is stashed with good ideas.
I particularly liked the references to subversive group action. From guerrilla gardening (the anonymous sowing of seeds in parks and urban spaces) to flash mobs gathering in train stations and parties reclaiming public space, some suggestions may strike readers as naive, but they are designed to rouse the resistant from apathetic slumbers.
For a more down-to-earth approach, Paul Waddington’s 21st-Century Smallholder (Eden Project Books, £12.99/£11.99) is a charmingly written, practical guide to setting up an urban smallholding, allowing readers to indulge Good Life fantasies, however small their balcony or window box.
It doesn’t assume that you know the basics, unlike so many gardening books, explaining how to sow a seed and the best way to pinch out seedlings. A chapter titled “What are fruit and vegetables?” may be pushing it, but it turns out to be a look at the difference between annuals and perennials. I recommend it for anyone contemplating their first crop of salad leaves.
For those who need reminding why they are balanced on their balcony, elbows deep in compost, there is Joanna Blythman’s punchy polemic Bad Food Britain (Fourth Estate, £7.99/
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£7.59). Not explicitly green, but a look at subjects close to the hearts of ethical consumers, it serves up generous portions of despair, discussing our “gastronomic illiteracy”. But Blythman acknowledges positive green developments, for example the rise of farmers’ markets and organic box schemes.
That leaves us with this years’ eco-heavyweight, George Monbiot’s Heat (Allen Lane, £17.99/£16.19), the most powerful treatise yet on the gravity of global warming. He demolishes any ground left to climate change deniers, whom he deems “as stupid as Holocaust deniers”. While it is no surprise that the environmental campaigner and radical thinker lays into half measures such as carbon balancing schemes, I defy you to read this book and not feel motivated to change.
Read Anna Shepard’s blog at timesonline.co.uk/ecoworrier Environment Anna Shepard