| Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (World As Home, The) | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 139461
Category: Book
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Studio: Milkweed Editions
Manufacturer: Milkweed Editions
Label: Milkweed Editions
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 1571313001
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.28
EAN: 9781571313003
ASIN: 1571313001
Publication Date: January 12, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Divided into three sections, Hope, Human and Wild profiles the efforts of three caring communities to preserve wilderness and reverse environmental devastation. They include the reforestation of McKibben?s home territory, New York?s Adirondack Mountains; solving traffic and pollution problems in the densely populated Curitiba, Brazil; and how the citizens of Kerala, India have demonstrated that quality of life doesn?t depend on overconsumption of resources. This edition features a new introduction that revisits these places and explores how they?ve changed over the years.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Yes, Hope October 13, 2008
I work with college students, and occasionally direct them to read the chapter on Curitaba. That alone will lift your spirits. What if a government actually decided to do things right? Here's what could happen.
This is a book of stories. As gripping as any stories can be. We need these stories because most people aren't heartened by policy analysis or political talking points. We need to hear that in some places, people made the right decisions and their lives are better for it.
Great book.
 The end of hopelessness? November 20, 2007
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. 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. 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. 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. Elsewhere there are equally significant changes afoot. 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. Curitiba is a decidedly un-third world oasis amidst the gloom. It has remade itself in its own image and has become a walkable, clean, prosperous and civil community. It has a higher percentage of car owners than Rio, but a vastly higher proportional use of public transportation. It has rejected the Interstate syndrome and performs its people-moving on tree shaded, human-scale streets. The poor are helped to buy land and build their own homes instead of squatting in shanty towns. Street children are employed and fed. 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. And on, and on ... proving that urban planning doesn't have to be stupid, inhuman, short sighted and costly. Another example from the other side of the world comes from tropical India. Kerala, with a per capita income one-seventieth that of the U.S., has a higher literacy rate (100%) and a similar life-expectancy. The birth rate is close to our own and falling faster. Like Curitiba its quality of life stands head and shoulders above its region, nation and third-world expectations. It does this with a population the size of Canada's squeezed into a land area the size of Vancouver Island. "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). With the author, our eyes are opened to new possibilities emerging from ancient ways. 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. He searched for and found hope that we can go and do likewise. This book is a balm and a challenge and a wonderful read. Once more, Bill McKibben has laid claim to his spot on my short list of favorite, most readable writers. Attaboy!
A hopeful look at living well October 28, 2007
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 town in Brazil and state in India show that we humans can live full happy lives on our planet while using less resources. I was also pleased to read about reforestation in New England. This short hopeful book is definitely worth reading.
This book changed my life September 29, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In it, there are stories about how entire communities have been positively transformed by the action of a few determined individuals. This book will have you contemplating how you can affect change in your own community, and will give you the courage to enact it.
At Last I Get It January 31, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is an exploration into what's right and what's wrong with the planet and our relationship with it. It was written as a sequel to an earlier book by McKibben, "The End of Nature." In this book, McKibben starts by identifying some areas where there is hope for improvement in the environment in the future. The book is arranged in four parts. In the first part, McKibben considers examples of environmental recovery in his own region. He then turns to two parts of the world with very different local solutions to global problems. The first of these is Curataiba, Brazil, a city made famously livable by some very forward-thinking city planners. He then turns to Kerala, India, noting that a relatively high quality of life can be achieved with extremely limited resources, provided one addresses the key structural problems of society first. In the last section of the book, he reflects on his observations from the three regions.
McKibben hardly needed to look any further than his own backyard for proof that the environment can indeed bounce back to some extent from extreme abuse. His backyard in the Adirondacks is now full of trees, a condition that is now common throughout the Eastern United States. Much more common, in fact, than it was just fifty years ago. A little over a hundred years ago, most landscapes in the Northeast were treeless. The trees had been cut down to clear fields, to use for ship building and house construction, and most notably, to use for fuel. With the invention of a plow that could at last turn the thick prairie soil, many of the New England farmers pushed westward, glad to leave their cold, stony fields to grow up into forest again. But changes in fuel usage played an even larger role in the recovery of the trees. A hundred years ago, we got 90% of our energy from wood, necessitating the cutting down of millions of acres of forest per year just to keep the economy going. With the switch to petroleum-based fuels, we now rely on wood for just 10% of our energy, and as a result, the forests in the East are now thicker than they have been for over four hundred years. In tandem with the return of the trees, the wildlife are also coming back, and wild turkeys and bear sightings are now more common in this region than they have ever been since the arrival of Europeans on the continent. As petroleum fuels become more difficult and expensive to come by, we can only hope that we will stumble on a new fuel to replace oil, just as oil replaced wood.
McKibben's discussion of Curataiba is quite stimulating. He describes how ingenious local leaders made the city into a model of a livable, workable metropolis. They did this not by copying technology of developed countries, but by creating original solutions based on locally available materials and culture. Kerala also was faced with seemingly insurmountable problems of poverty, race, and class. Individual leaders in Kerala were successful in getting the community to rally around local solutions to these problems. Thus, McKibben's theme seems to be, in a world of ever-increasing globalization, where all problems are global, the solutions need to be local.
I've been wrestling with trying to understand globalization ever since the protests in Seattle. Despite reading heavily on the topic and talking to others, I just couldn't understand why the protesters made such a fuss. I even completed a discussion course on globalization offered by the Northwest Institute, and I still didn't get it. But as I read this book, the problems of an economy controlled by transnational corporations finally began to sink in. McKibben describes the shocking extent of deforestation in Maine. It just so happens that a South African company is now one of the largest owners of timber rights in the state. With a home office some 10,000 miles distant, they don't have a personal stake in what happens to the Maine environment. So millions of acres of forest in the state are being clear cut, but visitors and locals don't notice the missing trees because the companies leave 50 yard wide swathes of undisturbed forest along the roads, trails, and waterways. Along with the clear cuts comes erosion, silting of streams, and massive loss of habitat for the wildlife. After reading about Maine, I thought about a plot of land up the road that is currently being logged. Fortunately, the land up the road is owned not by a transnational corporation, but by a neighbor, who has a vital interest in seeing that the forest remains healthy throughout his logging operations; indeed, he is truly managing the forest, rather than simply cutting down trees. I now see calls for supporting the local economy rather than going with the flow of globalization in a new light-in purchasing items made in a global economy, we may unwittingly be contributing to environmental destruction on a massive scale, destruction that is magnified by the fact that the decision makers in the production process have no personal interest in the environment that they are damaging. And the ones who do have a personal interest in that environment are powerless to fight the big companies. If, on the other hand, we support local producers and local economies, we can directly influence how the producers treat the land. At the same time, the local producers have a very personal interest in not causing damage to their own homes and livelihood. Indeed, there is plenty of food for thought in this book.
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