How We Can Save the Planet by Mayer Hillman, Penguin, £7.99, ISBN 0141016922 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
BEING a town planner, social radical and iconoclast, Mayer Hillman has a way of getting to the heart of things. Twenty years ago, he pointed out that most journeys are made on foot – something transport planners had never considered. A decade ago, he turned our ideas about the freedom of the road on their heads by pointing out that our cars had driven our children off the streets of our cities. Now he wants to save the world.
How We Can Save the Planet is not a well-meaning environmental plea. It is a hard-headed blueprint for how to counter global warming, “the most important issue of our age – perhaps of any age”. It is practical but visionary; personal but political; lucid but rigorous.
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No other book tells you more clearly how to calculate your own contribution to greenhouse emissions. No other book sets out more clearly how the rich world is plundering the planet’s last and greatest free resource – the space left for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And no other book illuminates so well why a rationing system, giving each nation a pollution entitlement based on its population, is the only solution. A small classic on a big topic.