Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth?

I may well have mentioned this here before, but living in the US I was frequently surprised by the number of people who, when hearing I was from europe confided in me their desire for the US to have good public transport. I wasn’t just surprised because as a Brit I’d been trained to think of our public transport system as very poor (it looks a lot better to me now than it used to), but also because I kept wondering how something so many people wanted could still seem so far off.

There’s a lot of ways to approach that question that I’m not going to go into here; deep discussions to be had about the nature of contemporary political discourse. But that recurring conversation kept coming back to me as I read Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?.

Though the book’s various authors touch on dark themes, and the potential for environmental and/or economic collapse is very real, it maintained the sense that those steps we can take to be more conscientious might also take us closer to the planet we would like to live in. In that, it reminds me quite a bit of Generous (on which more, later).

The book has its weaknesses. For the most part it’s a volume for people who have access to the resources to make significant changes (whether simple or radical) in their lives, and a safety net to fall back on. But for those of us who are in that boat, it’s a good and helpful read.