Click to buy There is too much information around about how to go green. Many are left wondering who to trust and just how they can individually make a difference.
Every day we make hundreds of small choices that can influence our future and the planet’s. “Whole Green Catalog: 1000 Best Things for You and The Earth,” out this month from Rodale Books ($29.99), provides these simple tips to get you well on your way to being green.
Modeled on the “Whole Earth Catalog,” this compendium of products, easy on the Earth, ranges from kitchenware to cars to pet food.
Lush and stylish, the book lists everything you need to make you want to go off-grid: sustainable skateboards, products to help you recycle, appliances, biofuel and cashmere.
What’s missing is the sense of an alternative lifestyle that drifted in waves from the pages of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” which was more of a manual for sustainable change — something you read on long winter nights in the city, while dreaming of building an A-frame house in the forest.
True to the times, the “Whole Green Catalog” is more consumer catalog than manual. Nonetheless, it fills an increasingly important niche — functioning as a clearinghouse of sorts for products that will only get less expensive as technology improves and quality increases. “What pleasure to imagine the future,” Bill McKibben writes in his foreword, “for ourselves and our society — that’s what this catalog allows. But what pleasure, too, to shape that future, in time to actually matter.”