REVIEW | The Climate Diet by by Paul Greenberg
AUTHOR: Paul Greenberg
ISBN: 0593296761
FIRST PUBLISHED APR 13th, 2021
EDITION RELEASE DATE: APR 13th, 2021
PAGES: 176 PAGES
EDITION LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
★★
I practiced eco-friendly actions for quite some years now, and I picked up this book from the library, hoping to find more actions I can take. Only to find this is a great example of how easy we can fall into the traps of consumerism. And I’m glad I didn’t purchase this book myself.
I don’t recommend this book at all. And I have two major issues with this book.
Firstly, although the book has 50 actions, they are either too obvious or too ridiculous. And it’s not even 50 suggestions. In order to make the number to 50, the author separated one sentence into different ones to pump up the number. For example, the first 3 suggestions about food, are actually just one sentence. “Eat less this, and consider that, or the third option.” Not to mention some of the devices are very redundant.
But that’s okay if the book tries to emphasize those ideas. Where the book totally lost me, is when it talks about pets.
The author argued that sometimes, our pets can have big carbon pawprints, which I agree with. However, he then made the suggestion that because of the carbon pawprint, we should therefore get hamsters instead of cats and dogs. I highly doubt that he even thought this through. Therefore I started to question the sincerity of this book entirely.
I have nothing against hamsters. But they are not the solutions to carbon pawprints. There is so many aspects of eco-friendly things for pet owners to think about, to reduce waste, and to be more responsible while having the pets they prefer. This is like saying “you should just wear pants” when people wanted to wear a skirt.
Another issue I have with this book is its typesetting. This book is rather short, 176 pages. But in fact, with an efficient layout, this book can easily be just two couple of dozen pages. Or a longer blog post.
When the issue I mentioned in issue number one happens, when the book separated the same sentence, it separated the pages too. One suggestion takes at least an entire page, as well as the tables. No matter how short they are. So sometimes the print on one page is only 20% of the page. And the rest of the page stayed blank. Pages and pages of wasted paper came with this book which is talking about reducing our waste. This is so ironic, such a counterintuitive presentation, and makes me low-key mad.
So, it’s unnecessary to mention that I don’t recommend this book to anyone. I think this is one of the traps for consumerism that uses people’s good intentions. If you want to learn more about reducing carbon footprint, there are so many better ways than this book. Even YouTube videos on this topic dive deeper sometimes.
