About the Book

Like many people, I have long been aware of the environmental problems of our age.

As a school-boy I was interested enough in the activities of the, then newly formed, Greenpeace and I even contributed a piece to my school magazine on the problems of CFC’s in aerosols. That was 15 years before the Montreal Protocol to ban their use. My career officer even suggested that I consider becoming an environmental health officer as a career but when I found what it entailed at that time it rather lost its glamour.

Fast forward to the early part of this century.  I had been aware of the growing level of coverage of global warming and climate change and couldn’t see much evidence of change taking place. At the time I was ‘between opportunities’ so I looked hard at the possibility of either setting up or joining a renewable energy company or one involved in fitting solar panels and similar. ‘There is no money in it’ was the most common advice from incumbent practitioners and I couldn’t find a position to match with. Once again, I found something else.

Then came 2009 and  a visit to Ecobuild in London, a trade show dedicated to those who are working in the built environment and are trying to reduce the carbon impact of it. There I attended one of their conference sessions and heard from Lords Heseltine and Lawson, MPs Tim Yeo, Michael Meacher and Joan Ruddock and some writers and consultants including Leo Johnson and Mark Lynas. The theme of the day was ‘Future proofing business in a carbon-constrained universe’. A mix of presentation and debate, I came away pretty confused but with a deep sense of  ‘****** me, this is really serious, why are we not talking about carbon in every single decision we are making? Why are some people panicking and others don’t seem to care?’ Mulling this over the next couple of months was pretty inconclusive but then in May came the newspaper report on the anti-plastic bag campaign. It had been a great success. Marks & Spencer had reported an 85% reduction in their use of plastic bags and DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, stated that retailers were on track to bring about a 5 billion reduction in plastic bag usage, which would be ‘equivalent to taking 41,000 cars off the road. That struck me as a big number but something niggled inside; was it? I decided to have a look and was pretty disappointed to find that 41,000 cars was 0.1% of the transport fleet and that transport was only around 20% of the UK’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That meant that a mass mobilisation and behaviour change on the part of individuals and businesses had managed a cut of 0.02% in GHG.

Next question, of course, was ‘Well if that’s not the answer, what is?’ and, finding that hard to answer from available materials, the idea for the book was born.

Once I started to research the area it quickly became apparent that while there is 'an answer' it is so huge and radical it will take an enormous shift to achieve. To get there will require a shift in our shared imagination. This book is my contribution to bringing that about. It uses the Labours of Hercules as the narrative framework and that is why the chapter summaries refer to them. If you would like to know how they relate, buy the book!

For the first edition, I have used author funded publishing. This has the advantage of speed at the expense of scale. This website is to address that imbalance.