BOOK REVIEW: Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide

By Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew
Illustrations by Juan Martinez
South End Press, 2008, $16.00


Creating a world that is both sustainable and equitable is no easy task, especially when hampered by the lumbering slowness of government bureaucracies and our economy's perceived need for continual, ever-growing, mindless consumption.

The good news is that we don't need to wait for government, nor act upon the urgent calls of advertisers to go out and "shop 'til we drop." Radical sustainability, as proposed by authors Kellogg and Pettigrew, recognizes that ecological and social issues are tightly interwoven, and it addresses both at their root causes - the social and cultural attitudes and inequities that are tearing apart the fabric of our culture.

Bypassing expensive tools and technologies that are beyond the reach of average people in favor of solutions that can be built and used by those "without capital or monetary wealth," the authors empower city-dwellers to take action to minimize their vulnerability to rising costs and the failures of infrastructure and services. Kellogg and Pettigrew present city-compatible, illustrated solutions for wastewater recycling, aqua-culture, personal and community gardens, waste management, and energy generation - all designed to give "control over basic resources to the people using them, increasing self-reliance and aiding resistance to resource monopolies."

Urban dwellers are now more than half the world's population and are likely to be the hardest hit by the consequences of climate change, increased fuel costs, and the insufficiency or failure of supply systems and energy grids. This book gives the encouragement, tools, resources, and contacts to make urban self-reliance a possibility.

It comes with a warning, however, that we need to begin right now to gather together and discover ways of protecting ourselves, our families, and our communities; waiting in the hope that our communities will be saved by "someone else" may put us all at risk.

Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew are co-founders of the Rhizome Collective, an educational and activist organization based in Austin, Texas, that presents seminars on urban ecological survival skills at universities and organizations throughout the United States. They are the developers of bioremediation techniques now being used to clean up toxins in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.