This book is a survival guide with fun, simple recipes in the margins. It has chapters on saving water, growing your food, storing food, managing your waste, creating your own energy, alternative transportation, being prepared for emergencies, imagining sustainability. All with a breezy, conversational style.
The parts I liked about the book, were its emphasis on communitarianism, after all in an emergency situation or in a world of less food and work, you are going to need good neighbors. That's your most important asset, not your gun stash or your EMRs.
I did have a slight problem with the change your ride chapter, in which he spends the entire chapter writing about potentially better gas mileage and bio-fuels. Biofuels are not sustainable, even if you look past the idea of burning food in a car in a starving world, there's the fact that you are taking nutrients out of the soil to grow the corn and then never returning the nutrient via compost as you can when the corn is used as food. Oh, yeah and one more annoyance was all of the powdered milk in the recipes.
But the chapter on Utopia which deals with eco-villages, developing consensus and talking to the gun-nut-wannabe-warlords with a reference to the Seven Samurai more than make up for the ethanol name dropping.
But overall, I heartily enjoyed the book and will try some of the recipes (without the powdered milk).
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