mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement

Elizabeth May, now the executive director of Sierra Club of Canada, has written a short and highly entertaining book called How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. It’s hard to find the happy medium between dippy, counterproductive overoptimism and defeatist cynicism, but May does it. The book is somewhat slanted towards environmentalism, because that’s what May does; but the principles apply to any grassroots movement. (Even the bad ones, I would assume.) It’s also full of entertaining anecdotes and cautionary tales, beginning with the story of how May’s mother saved the planet.