The Mom’s Guide to Growing Your Family Green ~ review

Title:  The Mom’s Guide to Growing Your Family Green

Author:  Terra Wellington

Paperback:  322 pages

Published: 2009

ISBN:  9780312384739

Acquired:  won in the March 2009 LibraryThing ER batch

Challenges:  ARC Reading Challenge 2010, New Author Challenge 2010

Because most parents have limited time and budgets, an understandable reaction is, “I have too much on my plate already.  How can I possibly add more to my to-do list?”  Have no fear.  All the how-to’s in this book are about raising your family green in a practical way– so that it becomes part of your lifestyle.  Trust me:  It is doable.

…This book is all about creating lifestyle changes.  Some of these changes don’t add more to your plate, they just change how you do things.  Other changes ask you to care more, and donate what time and resources you have available.  This is how you create meaningful change in your home, your community, and beyond – one person making a difference in a real way.

–The Mom’s Guide to Growing Your Family Green by Terra Wellington, pages xi-xii

Terra Wellington has been around the green circuit for a few years now, guesting on The Montel Williams Show and other TV shows, as well as being a syndicated collumnist, ClubMom contributor, and has her own blog, MomsandthePlanet.com.  And I grant you she knows quite a lot about green living.  However, I found this particular book not my thing.

To be honest, I can’t fathom why the LibraryThing algorithm picked it for me, other than I am a mother who read and loved The World Without Us.  Quite frankly, I’m a very naughty polluter.  I’m bad at recycling, often throwing my cereal boxes, newspapers and aluminum cans in the garbage with everything else.  I do try to keep the plastic bags, though, because they make excellent trash bags for the smaller cans in the bedrooms and bathroom.  I have the CFL squiggly-looking light bulbs because some dude on the morning show I watch said they lasted 5 years, and I’m lazy and hate climbing ladders to change light bulbs, so I ran out and got a bunch.  After changing almost every bulb over now, I can tell you this:  The whole 5 years thing is a lie.  More like one year, maybe a year and a half.  BUT they do save on the electric bill, and they last 3 times as long as the cheap bulbs I was buying, so the cost is offset, I think.

Honestly, I do think about what I buy before I buy it and what impact it might have on the environment.  I’ve taught my kids that styrofoam is evil, and never breaks down.  I never buy the six packs because I’d hate to kill some bird or fish or dolphin because I forgot to tear the plastic rings.  I don’t leave the fridge door open, oven on, water running, and I keep my thermostat at around 70 degrees.  Frankly, I’m pretty much doing as much as I am willing to do.

Most of what Wellington offers in the book is either impractical (for me), expensive (I’m not running out and buying new appliances, hiring an energy guy to go over my house for leaks!), or not possible since I’m a rentor.  A lot of what she suggests I already do.  There were a couple things though that actually irritated me:

If it’s possible, have your pet stay outdoors to reduce pet dander.

Or better yet, give your pet to someone who will love it, dander and all.  HONESTLY!  It infuriates me when I see some dog tied up outside, year round, never see a person talk to it, pet it, and often see it’s bowls empty, and I wonder WHY on God’s green earth do these people even think they need an animal?  How ’bout we reverse that.  Let the pet stay inside, and have the owner stay outside to reduce his dandruff.  BTW, it’s about 16 degrees here right now, and I don’t let my cats out on the front porch right now, even.

Another one that made my eyes roll was the “reduce your showers (if you must take them) to 10-minutes”.  Maybe I could just shower ever three days, then I can have a nice long shower.  How ’bout if I just skip them altogether?  That’ll save even MORE water!  Also in this book is things for pool heaters and stuff, but how many 10-minute showers worth of water are in all these private pools?  Why not get rid of those, everyone swim at a community pool and enjoy more community? 

Do you know that if everyone parked their cars, took public transportation instead or EVEN BETTER, walked everywhere (OMG, I know… scary!) the carbon gases would be greatly reduced, and maybe so would the rising obesity rates.  AND, you would have much more time to stop and smell the roses, so maybe the heart disease rates would drop, too?

Okay, so what did I like about this book?  Wellington is trying.  She’s offering solutions.  She believes in what she’s doing and writing, and it shows.  There’s great cheat sheets and worksheets for readers to fill out.  Most of the sections are short and readable.  I think the book would work best as a reference book on someone’s shelf who actually is into that stuff.

I give The Mom’s Guide to Growing Your Family Green by Terra Wellington 3 out of 5 stars.

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Here’s a quick and funny video (Mom and Maggie approved) about recycling.  I enjoyed this vid a lot more than the book, and actually feel inspired to get a recycling tub after watching it.

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The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Paperback: 369 pages
Publisher: Picador (division of St. Martin’s Press)
Publish Date: August 2008
ISBN: 9780312427900

… picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.

Unlikely perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible. Say a Homo sapiens-specific virus – natural or diabolically nano-engineered – picks us off but leaves everything else intact. Or some misanthropic evil wizard somehow targets that unique 3.9 percent of DNA that makes us human beings and not chimpanzees, or perfects a way to sterilize our sperm. Or say that Jesus… or space aliens rapture us away, either to our heavenly glory or to a zoo somewhere across the galaxy.

Look around you, at today’s world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?

How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or Homo habilis, appeared? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? Or are some so unnatural that they’re indestructible?

…Since we’re imagining, why not also dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise? We are, after all, mammals ourselves. Every life-form adds to this vast pageant. With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet a bit more impoverished?Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?

 

–The World Without Usby Alan Weisman, pages 5-6

 

This is the premise for The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.  Weisman puts the question “What if ?” to the reader, then thoroughly, intelligently and scientifically systematically answers the question:  How long and by what process would it take for nature to reclaim the world if humans were to suddenly disappear?

In many ways, animals and plants would thrive and take off.  Several places in the world have been negatively impacted greatly because of what man has done, Chernobyl, Johnson Island, and a large number of coral reefs to name a few.  However, to say that the world would go back to pre-human conditions without us is naive and a romantic fantasy.

Without human mechanics and equipment operators, our 141 nuclear reactors would meltdown, spreading radioactive waste on clouds that would spread globally, as well as leech into the soil and ground water, eventually finding their way to lakes, rivers and oceans.  Also in need of these human beings care and service are the vast number of petroleum refineries, which would also suffer catastrophic failure in our absence and spread heavy metal and carcinogenic particle laden smoke along trade winds, reaching ground in other parts of the world in the rainfall.  No, the world without us would NOT be a better, cleaner Edenic place.

It is unmistakeable that mankind has forever irrevocably altered the Earth.  We have introduced gender-bending chemicals, which show no signs of EVER degrading,  into water sources.  The plastics that we produce for our disposable convenience only break down into smaller and smaller particles that are then eaten by birds and fish, many of which later suffer agonizing deaths from constipation as the pieces do not digest.  And in case there was a slight chance nothing of us would last, we’ll throw in the uranium and plutonium, both “depleted” and “weapons grade,” some of which have a half-life longer than the estimated time of the demise of our solar system!

The World Without Usby Alan Weisman is a sobering book.  I had to take a step or two back and look at what I, myself, do that contributes to the destruction of our ecosystem.  When Weisman talks about how some of those tiny pieces of plastic ending up in the oceans come from some of the body washes and other beauty care products, I ran to my shower to check the label of my shower gel (I was happy to find no plastic beads, only natural exfolients).   Second, I’ve always looked at “recycling” as some hippy-dippy commune-escaped concept and haven’t ever really done it (I looked at that toter as just an extra trash can).  After reading what the effects of my plastic water bottle and plastic bag usages does to the world, I know I have to change at least MY little contribution.

One poignant thought from this book is:  The Earth is like a super-organism, the soil, atmosphere and oceans its circulatory system regulated by its resident flora and fauna.  As such, this living planet may be suffering a high fever with humans the virus.  A sobering thought.

As a scientifically and intelligible answer to a simple question with an extremely complex answer, I give The World Without Us by Alan Weisman 5 out of 5 stars.  I recommend everyone with a stake in the Earth’s future to read it.