The next Book Group will be on Thursday June 17th at 7.30pm. The book is “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilson and Kate Pickett For more information please contact bookworm@TransitionNewtonAbbot.org.uk
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 Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show: – How almost everything – from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy – is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is – That societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them – including the well-off – How we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world. |
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| Previously at the Book Club: |
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 Climate change will dramatically alter how we live and is already affecting the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people. In Soil Not Oil, bestselling author Vandana Shiva connects the food crisis, peak oil, and climate change to show that a world beyond a dependence on fossil fuel and globalization is both possible and necessary. Bold and visionary, Shiva reveals how three crises are inherently linked and that any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial agriculture and industrial biofuels as recipes for ecological and economic disaster, Shivas champion is the small, independent farm. What we need most in a time of changing climates and millions hungry, she argues, are sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood. Calling for a return to local economies and small-scale food production Shiva outlines our remaining options: a market-centred short-term escape for the privileged, which will deepen the crisis for the poor and marginalized, or a people-centred fossil-fuel-free future, which will offer a decent living for all. |
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| Local food, how to make it happen in your community by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins |
 Many people already buy their vegetables as locally as possible, eat organic and seasonal food when they can, and are perhaps even getting to grips with managing an allotment. However, with current economic pressures and mounting concerns about climate change and peak oil, there is a growing feeling that we need to do more to reduce dependence on the global market.
Local Food offers an inspiring and practical guide to what can be achieved if you get together with the people on your street or in your village, town or city. It explores a huge range of local food initiatives for rebuilding a diverse, resilient local food network – including community gardens, farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture schemes and projects in schools – and includes all the information you will need to get ideas off the ground. Drawing on the practical experience of Transition initiatives and other community projects around the world, Local Food demonstrates the power of working collaboratively. In today’s culture of supermarkets and food miles, an explosion of activity at community level is urgently needed. This book is the ideal place to start. |
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| Small is Beautiful, Economics as if people mattered by E.F.Schumacher.
He challenges the doctrine of economic, technological and scientific specialization, and proposes a system of intermediate technology, based on smaller working units, communal ownership and regional workplaces, utilizing local labour and resources. |
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| The Carbon Fields by Graham Harvey
Award-winning author Graham Harvey investigates the murky world of food and farming and reveals how global corporations have hijacked Britain’s most basic source of life and health. This book explains how globally-traded grains have been used to promote global warming, obesity and ill-health. It shows how – by reclaiming our greatest natural asset – we can put ourselves and the nation back on the road to health and prosperity. This book will surprise you. You’ll wonder how something so vital to your health and well-being can have been kept hidden. But once you know you’ll be in a position to act. You can use your power as a citizen and consumer to reclaim this stolen treasure. At this time of threat and uncertainty our country needs it as never before. |
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| Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful and highly effective. Waste equals food. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new – continually circulating as pure and viable materials within a ‘cradle to cradle’ model. Drawing on their experience in redesigning everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved in making anything can begin to do so as well. |
First published in 1973, this controversial study looks at the economic structure of the western world in a revolutionary way. Schumacher maintains that man’s current pursuit of profit and progress, which promotes giant organizations and increased specialization, has in fact resulted in gross economic inefficiency, environmental pollution and inhumane working conditions.
It ranks as one of the great secrets of our time. A simple and elegant solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems – rising food prices, increased carbon emissions and the health crisis. The answer is here for us now if we’re bold enough to take it. No breakthroughs are required, no “fad” diets. There’s no need to throw away the car keys or give up real butter and juicy steaks. So why haven’t we been told about this great natural gift?
‘Reduce, reuse, and recycle’ urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, this approach only perpetuates the one-way, ‘cradle to grave’ manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place.
Themocracy