I picked up ‘Crap at the environment’ by comedian Mark Watson—as featured on TV’s ‘Mock The Week’—with low expectations, anticipating the result to be a strong sense of guilt regarding my carbon-footprint, and an even bleaker opinion on Global Warming than the one I’d started with. What can I learn that I already didn’t when I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth? I asked myself. What can I personally do to make the world a better place when everyone else is sooooo rubbish?
I, like many, was pleasantly surprised and learnt a great deal; while the result most certainly was a strong sense of guilt regarding my personal carbon emissions—as was quite rightly the main intention of the book—my outlook on Global warming was much improved.
Anyone who has seen Watson’s enlightening and often hilarious stand-up routines will appreciate the easy-going style of writing in this book, which finds a happy medium between being both educational—with enough facts and figures to satisfy anyone looking to lower their own emissions and increase their recycling know-how—and consistently entertaining. There are laughs on every page, as Watson passes judgment on everything from Government to health and composting and the minutiae in between.
Over the course of one huge learning curve of a year, Watson goes on a valiant mission to reduce his carbon-footprint in any way he knows how. Not content with the already mammoth job of cutting down his own emissions to the bare minimum—which involves taking enormous train journeys as opposed to the easy option of a simple flight—he sets a full-throttle initiative under-way, and before long has people following by the hundred strong.
The book is a winner and deserves its place in the beat-global-warming hall-of-fame. With his refreshingly honest take on his own failures, the book manages to be both believable and very often shocking, too.
Just before I go, I was talking to my brother who works in the business world and he reckons that there is massive return in buying stocks for boiler juice. He is one of those individuals who is of the stance that America is trying to take over the world by taking over the Middle East. I must say I am getting pretty tired of the fact that everyone seems to have the same argument on this, we should all just shut up and be nicer to the planet…
