A whirlwind anthology of eco-conscious, climate focused projects in the US formed from interviews.
Bright Green Future is a collaboration between a professor of environmental science and a journalist. Over the course of 5 years, Gregory Schwartz, PhD and Trevor Decker Cohen travelled the country bringing together the stories of innovators and activists. They combined insights from over 200 interviews to share a collective vision for a sustainable society.
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Started March 2022
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Finished January 2024 (yeah, it took a while)
Thoughts
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Some of the projects in this book are really interesting and seem worthwhile. Some of them are blatant greenwashing, and the authors don't seem to be equipped to tell the difference.
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There's a breathlessness to how they approach talking about every project in this book that I found somewhat exhausting. There are fundamentals that need to be in place for a project to be actually helping with our current composite crises, and I would have liked to see a lot more analysis of those fundamentals.
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That said, the authors are clearly earnest and doing their best to try to draw attention to good projects. It's simultaneously important to highlight the fact that we do have the ability to change things for the better as it is to point out when our actions are at odds with that.