Buy these books

Robin Walsh
posted 6 March 2007

The Rough Guide series is more associated (for me anyway) with the best places to go for a cheap pint in Prague, than with the complexities of environmental science and green living. But the guides appear to be expanding their remit, doing a line in books covering everything from the Da Vinci Code and Heavy Metal to Shakespeare. Their latest contributions are the Rough Guides to Climate Change and Ethical Living. Both books wear their principles on their sleeves - literally - with stickers declaring their climate neutrality.

The Rough Guide to Climate Change starts in predictably shock'n'awe style. A fold-out graph inside the cover shows temperature against CO2 production for the 20th century, with accompanying natural disasters annotated. This includes the American dustbowl and Chinese flooding of the 1930s, and the 1972 Sahel drought - quite how these are down to global warming is not explained, but rather taken for granted. James Lovelock's foreword is equally dubious - apparently 'now our planet has to work hard […] to keep itself habitable'.

But when you push through to the actual science, the book is actually not too bad. The first part of the book, 'The Symptoms', can occasionally cross into scare-mongering territory - repeats of the 2003 French heatwave, and a big chill for Europe with the end of the Atlantic drift are both presented as real possibilities - giving the impression that the author is producing a list of every possible disaster. However the majority of the material is informative and scientifically literate, ranging over a vast variety of topics from ancient climatic changes to patterns of ice melt.

The section focusing on the debate around climate change is a little cursory - only half a page for Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist), and a slightly caricatured treatment of some anti-environmentalist arguments. Some of the section focusing on the possible technical solutions to global warming is interesting, but the final section regresses to the standard environmentalist fallback - 'What Can You Do?' - ie, as an individual making changes to your lifestyle.

The Rough Guide to Ethical Living, however, is an entire book dedicated this sort of small scale self-flagellation - without the benefit of interesting titbits of climate science. It is more along the lines of the traditional Rough Guides - a handbook to dip into, rather than a textbook - if, God help you, you felt compelled to live by it.

Every aspect of life from insulation to jewellery to mortgages has its list of sins and pieties; the book reads somewhat like a Bible for the green-inclined. Unfortunately for the novices of the new religion, there aren't the concrete certainties of the universal church - does one buy local, organic or fair-trade? The guide gives no hard and fast answers.

One area where this lack of definite judgement grates is its section on genetic modification (GM). We are told that Arpad Pusztai's experiments purporting to show the dangers of GM potatoes were 'irrevocably flawed', and then promptly warned that 'some greens' believe he was the target of a 'shameless smear campaign'; similarly, on the next page the author admits there is still no evidence that GM is harmful to human health, but then goes on to tell us at great length of Michael Meacher's concerns on that score. Given the title of this book, and its intended audience, however, it shouldn't really come as a surprise that old prejudices against mass produced food, animal testing and the rest are rehashed.

Overall, this book's existence is a depressing testament to the fact that many people actually aspire to lead the kind of monastic, anally-retentive lifestyle laid out on its pages. Let's just hope they don't make the rest of us follow suit.