Ian Skelly

This is an amazingly good book about humanity and its (lost) relationship with nature, about ecology on a deep level and about how we are going to live our future.

While I did know that the Prince of Wales was very involved in all sorts of charities, I did not know at all that he had actually built up such a deep and developed understanding of the world as he is demonstrating in this highly recommendable book.
He initially calls for a revolution - an internal revolution of our mindsets geared show more towards global and local sustainability. While he is highly critical about modernity (and apparently everything that happened after Descartes) he is apparently highly conservative. From this starting point he manages to draw an almost utopian plan for a better, durable and more harmonic world. This encompasses many areas of life, especially architecture, agriculture and urban planning. His ideas comprise concepts and patterns that are typically thought to be radically ecological: deep ecology, strong sustainability, spirituality, indigenous people's cultures, strong criticism of capitalism and economic growth and many more. The authors manage to actually bring together the green environmental movement with conservative, traditional values. I greatly appreciate this!

Who would have thought that? This book makes sense on a deep level and can be read by anyone who is interested in ecology, sustainability, environmental protection, tree-hugging or simply by anyone who has grown weary of the promises of economic growth and corporate power. Anyone who feels that the world in which we live is foul on deep level, unsustainable and artificial will find ideas how it can be improved. This book is well written, exciting to read and radical on a fundamental level.

One would hope that this book finds a lot of readers! show less

Although at times he takes on the patrician tone of a monarch lecturing to his recalcitrant subjects, overall Charles comes across as someone who has given a great deal of thought to his place in the world, and how he can best make use of his bully pulpit to make it a better place.

He starts with a fairly standard description of the challenges facing the environment (climate change, pollution, deforestation, mass extinction, etc.), then makes the case that the underlying cause is our show more disassociation from Nature. He goes through the history of what he calls "harmony" and essentially amounts to a rejection of the mechanization typifying the modern worldview.

Along the way we learn about his deep-seated hatred for modern architecture, which perhaps isn't too surprising for someone who splits his time between living in a castle and living in a palace (technically Clarence House is neither, but you get the point).

I listened to audiobook version, which he narrated himself, and he comes across as deeply caring about the holistic approach to sustainability, and provides lots of examples of his personal involvement without being too self congratulatory, which isn't easy to pull off. Some of his ideas are a bit too traditional or conservative for my taste, and I think that he downplays some of the benefits of modern technology to potentially solve some of our problems, but overall there are a lot worse things for him to focus on. show less

Recomended

A worthwhile tho difficult read at times.