Time To Eat The Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living by Robert and Brenda Vale

Many of us are trying to move towards more sustainable lifestyles. In doing so we often have to look at things we currently do and then attempt to decide whether what we're doing should be changed or if we're already on the right track. These decisions can be difficult as there are so many inter-relationships and knock-on effects to consider. Different tasks have impacts measured in different ways, often using different and seemingly imcompatible units of measurement. We also have to be wary of expending lots of effort to make what we think of as valuable changes, whilst we overlook some other aspects of our lives that make greater impacts on the resources the planet has to offer. Finally, there are vested interests trying to drag us in different directions - governments, companies and green campaign groups all have agendas of their own that they try to push on to a concerned populace.

Personally I find it worthwhile to try to get some hard numbers together to help make my own decisions. I can happily while away hours working out whether I use more resources drying my hands in public toilets using paper towels or electric hand driers, or whether a work trip would be better made by train or car (and the answers aren't always what you'd expect!). If you find yourself doing similar calculations, then this book might well be for you.

Robert and Brenda Vale start from the principle that the earth's resources are for the most part finite, and sustainable living means that we need to live within our fair share of these, whilst ensuring that we leave enough for generations to come. They express this share as an area of land - the ecological footprint of each individual. Whilst they have to consider energy usage, either directly by the individual, or by society on their behalf for manufacturing, transport or providing infrastructure, they convert this energy into the area of land that would be required to grow or harvest the energy sustainably (using wood or renewable energy). The current ‘fair share' based on the world's population and available land is 1.89 hectares for every individual on the planet. In the West we use far more than this, and it is sometimes difficult for individuals to do a lot about much of it as it is expended ‘on our behalf' by governments and other organisations.

Using land share as a metric is an interesting approach, although it took a while to get my head around. The big advantage of this technique is that it makes it very simple to see and compare the competing demands we put on the planet. For example, if we want to use biofuels to power our cars, we need somewhere to grow the plants that we make the biofuels from. We also need some space to process them, and to account for the extra energy required to do the processing. When this is all totted up, it can be compared to the area of land that we need for other tasks, such as growing food or having space to build houses to live in.

The book covers a wide variety of topic area, each one having a chapter devoted to it. After introducing the basic concepts and techniques, there are chapters on food production, transport, buildings, things we have in our homes (including clothing), leisure pursuits, working, and family events such as weddings and funerals. Each chapter looks at several aspects of the topic and compares the footprints of different lifestyle options. For example, in food they look at how much energy food can provide, and then how much land is required to grow different crops using different techniques.

The chapters tend to build on one another, so figures generated in earlier chapters are often referred to later on in comparisons of what would, at first glance, appear to be completely unrelated topics. This tends to emphasise how decisions we make to ‘improve' our lifestyles in one area can have knock-on effects in other areas that can actually reduce the overall sustainability of our lives. In fact the title of the book hints at this: at one point the authors look at the footprints associated with pets of different types. It demonstrates that a large dog fed a Western pet's diet actually has a rather large footprint. The pet's land share can then be weighed against the land required for food, housing, clothes, hobbies, sports, etc. This can be a rather eye opening comparison.

The book also broaches the topic that is often the ‘elephant in the room' in discussions on sustainability - population growth. It's not just large pets that can increase a person's land usage - having lots of children can do the same (or rather worse in the West, as dogs don't often ask for games consoles or schooling). The authors make no apologies that their models and comparisons only really work in the long term in a world with zero population growth. We are woefully far from that state of affairs, so in reality our fair share of available resources is decreasing second by second. As the share that different people get in reality isn't remotely fair (we get far more than our fair share in the developed world than folk in the developing nations do), this rapidly means that some people's shares will fall below a point where the available land can provide enough resources for even a basic existence. It is at this point we get famines, mass migrations and wars. This is an uncomfortable truth for many, including many economists and politicians who constantly look for growth.

Having said that, the book does a remarkable job of trying to steer out of the way of politics for the most part. Much of the text concentrates on looking at the literature for information on how much energy, material or land processes and consumables require. Only occasionally do the authors point out that a capitalist society might not be the best way of distributing resources, or that current market forces are based on the economics of consumption, rather than the economics of replacement. Even if you are dyed in the wool true blue Tory this is unlikely to distract much from the main thrust of the book. After all they also point out that smaller governments may well be required to reduce the ‘hidden' footprint attached to each of us, so the ‘nanny state' isn't an answer either.

On the whole then, this is an excellent book for people who want to quantify the effects that their lifestyle choices are having on the planet. Whilst it can be read from cover to cover, it also makes an excellent reference work, and contains a large quantity of references and pointers to further reading. Even if it doesn't contain the exact information you require, the process they use to make their estimates and conversions is well explained, so you can do your own investigations in a similar manner. Well worth a read - especially if you can take the low impact option of walking to the library and borrowing a copy!

Jim'll

Time To Eat The Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living is published by Thames and Hudson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-28790-3.

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