Green Gone Wrong
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Faced with climate change, many counsel “going green” by buying organic food or a “clean” car. But can we rely on consumerism as a solution to the very problems it has helped cause? Heather Rogers travels from Paraguay to Indonesia, via the Hudson Valley, Detroit and London, to investigate green capitalism, and argues for solutions that are not mere palliatives or distractions, but ways of engaging with how we live and the kind of world we want to live in.
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Rogers (Gone Tomorrow) leads readers into forests, fields, factories, and showrooms around the world to draw out the unintended consequences, inherent obstacles, as well as successful methods that lie beneath the surface of environmentally friendly products ; her discoveries are disturbing. She finds organic farmers from the Hudson Valley to Paraguay frustrated by their difficulty in making a living; the dilution of USDA organic standards; and laxity, cheating, and conflict of interest among organic certification companies. American car manufacturers that insist they need more time to get high-mpg cars on U.S. roads already sell them profitably in Europe, and palm oil plantations grown for supposedly low-carbon biodiesel in Indonesia are destroying both carbon-sequestering rainforests and indigenous societies. Readers will be troubled by the laundry list of fallacies at the heart of green business, but the book s final chapter, which discusses developing and very positive alternatives, will keep them from despairing. By going beyond expos to analysis, Rogers gives a deeper assessment of environmental problems and solutions than the usual global-warming investigative book.
