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These guys are the ones who should be listed on a website. Another evangelical trying to make a dime on the idea of God.
What if a government actually decided to do things right. As gripping as any stories can be.
We need to hear that in some places, people made the right decisions and their lives are better for it. We need these stories because most people aren't heartened by policy analysis or political talking points.
I work with college students, and occasionally direct them to read the chapter on Curitaba. This is a book of stories.
Great book. That alone will lift your spirits.
Here's what could happen.
Once more, Bill McKibben has laid claim to his spot on my short list of favorite, most readable writers. Another example from the other side of the world comes from tropical India. Elsewhere there are equally significant changes afoot. The poor can trade bags of collected garbage for bags of food, solving three problems at once: street cleanup, feeding the hungry, and employing local farmers. While the reforestation of the east has been largely inadvertent -- created by shifts of agriculture and technology -- and is today threatened by industrial chip mills eager to turn woodland into paper towels, the clearcuts of the 18th and 19th century have regrown from New Hampshire to the Deep South. Curitiba is a decidedly un-third world oasis amidst the gloom. "Kerala is the one large human population on earth which currently meets the sustainability criteria of simultaneous small families and low consumption," reports Will Alexander of San Francisco's Food First Institute (as quoted by McKibben). This exploration followed McKibben's THE END OF NATURE (Random House, 1989) by five years, and represents an effort by the author to find reasons for optimism after having so thoroughly examined our termination of the wilderness.
It has remade itself in its own image and has become a walkable, clean, prosperous and civil community. And on, and on. It does this with a population the size of Canada's squeezed into a land area the size of Vancouver Island. Like Curitiba its quality of life stands head and shoulders above its region, nation and third-world expectations. It has a higher percentage of car owners than Rio, but a vastly higher proportional use of public transportation. He found some certifiable success stories, and the good cheer he offers here fits well with my own growing sense that we can and will restore the earth. Starting from the eastern U.S. He searched for and found hope that we can go and do likewise.
Kerala, with a per capita income one-seventieth that of the U.S., has a higher literacy rate (100%) and a similar life-expectancy. proving that urban planning doesn't have to be stupid, inhuman, short sighted and costly. The poor are helped to buy land and build their own homes instead of squatting in shanty towns. This book is a balm and a challenge and a wonderful read.
Again and again McKibben serves up rich lessons about the shift necessary in both our technology and our psychology if we are to turn away from the consumerist passion which is destroying our life support. Attaboy. With the author, our eyes are opened to new possibilities emerging from ancient ways. where the recovery of the hardwood forests over the past century offers a remarkable example of the melding of urbanization and greening, he circles the globe to find other signs of change.
The birth rate is close to our own and falling faster. Street children are employed and fed. In Brazil, a country prey to the developing world's four horsemen of poverty, population growth, exploitation and corruption, one city has designed itself out of the mire. It has rejected the Interstate syndrome and performs its people-moving on tree shaded, human-scale streets.
I was also pleased to read about reforestation in New England. This town in Brazil and state in India show that we humans can live full happy lives on our planet while using less resources. This short hopeful book is definitely worth reading. Bill McKibben takes an original view of some environmental issues and some solutions. I was especially pleased to read about Curitiba in Brazil and the Kerala in India.
This book will have you contemplating how you can affect change in your own community, and will give you the courage to enact it. In it, there are stories about how entire communities have been positively transformed by the action of a few determined individuals.
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