Bill McKibben’s "economics of environmentalism" book fully covered the community crisis surrounding our world today. From the economics of happiness to environmental stability, his text flowed smoothly from eating local to lack of community aid in our country to our durable future. He gets straight to the heart of many of these issues, down to the fundamental attitudes that effect our decision making. While McKibben addresses so many of the problems we have in our society quite well, there are holes in his logic.
When it comes to eating locally, he spent a year eating only foods that grew within an hour or two of his home. While that was a great decision, McKibben lives in Vermont – probably one of the densest farm states in the nation. In fact, I think they do have the most farms per square mile of any state in the country. Most of America doesn’t have a fully sustainable (meat, cheese, dairy, egg, fruit and vegetable) CSA farm within an hour of their home, like McKibben does. This doesn’t give us an excuse to eat pineapples in January, but one should realize that eating completely local might not be a realistic goal for most of the country. While I have a fabulous farmer’s market minutes from my home, they do not sell meat, cheese or dairy, so if I ate those and wanted them locally, I’d have to go all the way to Foster to get them, if I could even get them there. McKibben also completely ignores the plight of inner-city communities where fresh food is totally unavailable in any form – he doesn’t even acknowledge that living completely locally simply isn’t realistic for a lot of people. That being said, McKibben has a lot of great ideas that, in my opinion, are fairly realistic solutions to our problems.
McKibben also has a distinct bias. I got some pretty Socialist leanings based on his political commentary. He seems to support forcibly driving out “bad” industries or technologies using laws and regulations. It’s still a good book, but take his opinions with a grain of salt. A lot of issues (taxes, national health care, Social Security) are a lot more complex than simply giving all for the good of the community. (Although, to his credit, when covering politicians’ roles in these issues, he seemed to give fair play to both George Bush and Bill Clinton).
He strikes a good balance when it comes to statistics. He isn’t heavy on them but he provides data along with the anecdotes. However, I don’t trust some of them outright. For example, McKibben stated that as more Wal-Marts arrived in a specific community, those communities grew poorer. That may not be totally accurate – the appearance of the Wal-Marts (to me) signifies a demand for cheap goods, implying an inherent community poverty that would motivate Wal-Mart to open multiple stores within a fairly small area. He also cites a statistic in which “security” outranked any form of “being able to help your children” as a benefit of money – where in my mind, money provides security, partially in the ability to help your children.
While McKibben’s points are good, he has a difficult time pulling what we call in literature a “red thread” – a topic or overarching theme that ties all your evidence or reasoning together. While the book was an enjoyable read, I found myself forgetting his overall message – that we, as a society, need to ease back on economic efficiency so intense that it sacrifices community, family time and our happiness. That we must make our economy less traditionally efficient in order to increase the wealth of our communities, happiness of our citizens and increase both our independence and codependence. And that above all, we need to focus more on improving the quality of life for all human beings, including ourselves, rather than the quantity in our bank accounts.
Overall: 7 out of 10.
Details:
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; Later printing edition (March 4, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805087222
ISBN-13: 978-0805087222
