Thank you, Treehugger.com

Well, news of 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' seems to be spreading. It's a curious fact of modern life that a book should be impossible to find in our biggest local bookstore (but try finding anything at Borders without a pirate's treasure map), yet instantly available online.

Treehugger.com posted a fantastic review yesterday, which is now doing the rounds. Here in Bristol, England, I'm beginning to find that parents aren't quite so friendly... Apparently some of the pushier kids are holding them to ransom for low energy light bulbs. I guess it's quite unusual for an adult to arm children against other adults, but these are desperate days. While the news is full of stuff about international summits and all that Al Gore-type blather, our everyday lives are becoming less and less Green.

Everything that comes in the mail is now wrapped in plastic. Weekend newspapers have their insides similarly packaged. As supermarkets compete with each other for the badge of Most Organic, the amount of packaging on their products keeps increasing. People keep driving more, flying more, wasting more.

This isn't just about global warming, this is about environmental destruction on a casual, everyday scale. Everyone's talking about global warming as this single issue that technology can fix, but what use is a cool desert? 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' is about life choices. Here's a bit of the last chapter:

Live Green
The future of the world is in your hands. OK, so there are a few billion other people with a say in it too, but your choices and actions will affect the course of history as much as anyone else’s.
However your parents live their lives, you are free to choose your own course. Which is it to be: Groan or Green?
1. Do you want to use up the planet’s resources, or conserve them?
2. Do you want people to suffer in the cause of your cheap stuff, or to live comfortably like you?
3. Do you want to watch life on TV, or take part in it?
4. Do you always want to listen to music on an MP3 player, or learn an instrument and play it yourself?
5. Do you want to experience the world through a car window, or at your own pace, under your own power?
6. Do you want hedgehogs and bumblebees to disappear, or to flourish?
Of course it isn’t easy being Green. We’re only human, after all. But if you follow Groan philosophy you’ll be unhappy, stressed, overweight and, quite probably, under water.

So instead of More, Cheaper! try

LESS, BETTER!

Instead of Make Life Easy!

MAKE LIFE FUN!