A review by pmhandley
Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change by Tanja Hester

hopeful informative fast-paced

3.75

This is a good intro if you're looking for a starting point on sustainability and being a more ethical consumer. I have read multiple books on similar topics previously, so I'm not sure I got as much out of it as I would have otherwise, but there was some genuinely new and surprising information to me in here. I appreciated that so much of this book was frank and direct about what choices you should make. Obviously, we are facing deeply entrenched systemic problems that individual choices will not fix, and that is covered plenty in here, along with an acknowledgement most choices will not be clearly bad or good, but it gives pretty point blank advice whenever possible. Sometimes with these types of books you finish feeling unsure what to do and kind of hopeless and that none of it matters because capitalism will negate any of your individual actions anyway. Wallet Activism largely avoids this. The organic vs non organic vs GMO section was excellent because it outlined consumer choices so clearly, telling you what's better to buy organic, what is actually probably worse to buy organic, and that GMOs aren't doing weird poisoning to you but there are other ethical concerns around them when it comes to big agriculture business practices. It also emphasized the well-being of farm workers in its recommendations which is so often not even considered in advice on sustainability and what diet is "best" for the planet. If your organic produce requires workers to labor longer in dangerous conditions to harvest the same amount as traditionally grown, is that really "better" because less fertilizer was used? It was refreshing to see this type of analysis included.