Growing Green: a young person's guide to taking care of the planet

Here’s an old-fashioned ‘improving’ tract that advocates a low-impact lifestyle in simple and simplistic terms. It advises us Westerners to be less greedy, to recycle and compost, to respect and nurture nature, eat fairly-traded organic home grown stuff and travel cleanly in order to arrive at an eventually peaceable kingdom. All very laudable, but so limply put across as to be virtually ineffective without an energetic interpreter. And the pictures are an utter let-down. Unreally clean apple-cheeked pudding-faced and pudding-footed Euro-kids have jolly aseptic fun on every spread, with structurally unsound bicycles, wheel-barrows, hens and cows. Honestly, Mabel Lucie Attwell did better than this (‘Please remember, don’t forget, Never leave the bathroom wet’ etc. etc). So it’s another one for the shredder, whereafter it can be processed into the free-range egg boxes and recycled bog-roll that, were it down enough to earth, it would doubtless advocate.