Overview

James Glave, a self-professed child of suburbia and SUV driver, has an ecological awakening and decides he wants to live a carbon-reduced lifestyle without dropping out of society, alienating his friends and family, or breaking the bank. Lacking the budget to build an environmentally friendly house, he does the next best thing by constructing a new model home in miniature: a green writing studio. Along the way, he employs local gurus and energy-savvy builders, tries--and sometimes fails--to navigate the emerging social landscape of the nouveau-green world, and finds himself ensnared in the emotional entanglements of the high-octane era. With two small kids, escalating debt, and mounting material pressures, Glave begins to wonder whether he can really endure the strain of being a culdesactivist. As he probes the crazy zone between the relentlessly upbeat eco-evangelists and the Hummer pilots that roam his small suburban community, Glave explores one of the biggest questions of our age: Can a man with a modest salary afford to live a green lifestyle, and at what cost to his family? How does one embrace a greener life and keep everybody in it happy along the way? Almost Green is a hilarious, informative, and refreshingly irreverent account of one man's fumbling quest to reinvent suburbia--starting with his own front yard.

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9781632202970

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You know how they say you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew? Well, when the author, an SUV-driving magazine writer, decided it was about time to be a bit more friendly toward the environment, he started small: he planned to make himself a writing studio with a minimal environmental footprint. But building a 'green' house, even a tiny one, proved to be a bigger job than Glave had realized, even with the seemingly (but deceptively) large budget of $50,000. This is a lighthearted chronicle of the construction project, but it's more than quirky enviro-characters and Blandings-style misadventures. The book also tackles some pretty serious issues, such as extremism in the environmental movement, the self-contradictions, and (perhaps most important) how to balance the needs of the planet with the needs of one's own family--how to choose what sacrifices to make (and then how to explain them to your kids). A delightful book that takes a big theme, environmentalism, and puts it into the context of daily life. --David Pitt, Booklist

You know how they say you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew? Well, when the author, an SUV-driving magazine writer, decided it was about time to be a bit more friendly toward the environment, he started small: he planned to make himself a writing studio with a minimal environmental footprint. But building a 'green' house, even a tiny one, proved to be a bigger job than Glave had realized, even with the seemingly (but deceptively) large budget of $50,000. This is a lighthearted chronicle of the construction project, but it's more than quirky enviro-characters and Blandings-style misadventures. The book also tackles some pretty serious issues, such as extremism in the environmental movement, the self-contradictions, and (perhaps most important) how to balance the needs of the planet with the needs of one's own family--how to choose what sacrifices to make (and then how to explain them to your kids). A delightful book that takes a big theme, environmentalism, and puts it into the context of daily life. --David Pitt, Booklist

Author Information

James Glave is a former magazine editor and a onetime editor for Conde Nast's Wired. He has contributed to numerous other publications including Details, the New York Times Magazine, and This Old House magazine.He lives with this wife and two children on Bowen Island, British Columbia, Canada.

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