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Newsletter & Community

This subject is so important that I’ve created a separate newsletter to share what I’ve learned in the 30 years since I published my first book, Home Ecology: Making your world a better place with a small London publisher. My focus at Home Ecology now is preparing for climate change without losing our minds, but climate change is not the only thing that matters. And as I did from the beginning, I’m keeping it practical, rational, and reasonable.

“Not only is this book extremely well researched, it is informed with rare common sense and has the ring of actual experience about it.  If we all do what Karen Christensen advises, the world will become a better place.”  --John Seymour, author of the bestselling Self-Sufficiency and many other books.

Jonathon Porritt, a leading green figure in the UK for many years, wrote this:

One of the things that I like best about Eco Living is that (unlike many books) it won’t make concerned and committed people feel inadequate or paralysed by guilt!  Though it reminds me of endless shortcomings in my own lifestyle (busy green activists are often far from the paragons of environmental virtue that they might aspire to be – and no one aspires more than I do!), it encourages rather than turns me off.

As Karen says, there’s no point being “grim and miserable” if you are seeking a greener way of life and a greener home.  At its simplest (but most easily overlooked) level, environmentalism is all about celebrating the gift of life – life writ large, that is, not just the human end of it.  Better by far to be celebrating that gift wreathed in smiles than permanently garbed in sackcloth and ashes.   To celebrate, for instance, the joy of good fresh food rather than becoming obsessed by what we should or shouldn’t be eating.

Karen declares that her secret to happiness is “not getting more but wanting less”.  I suspect that she and I are still working away at that secret.  Eco Living is about work in progress, not about some revealed truth from a distant green guru – and it is all the more useful and enjoyable for it.