Sunday book review – Just Earth by Tony Juniper – Mark Avery

Tony Juniper is arguably the leading UK environmentalist of his generation so his latest title raises hopes and expectations. This is, in my opinion, his best book and provides a detailed analysis of our failure to make enough progress with environmental issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change. He provides a compelling argument for the importance of lack of social justice in environmental problems.

Tony is a naturalist and once worked for the International Council for Bird Preservation, the forerunner of BirdLife International. He has since been the Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth, advised King (then Prince) Charles, worked at WWF-UK and is currently chair of the statutory conservation agency Natural England.

Through considering environmental issues with which he has been personally involved and conversations with others the author has come to believe that lack of social justice, basically inequality, is a major brake on environmental progress. Too much power is in the hands of those who gain most from environmental damage and that’s the problem.

I think he is right although I haven’t thought about it as much or as deeply as this book does – that’s why I found it a riveting read. It is a convincing analysis of the problem.

There are many UK examples but also many global ones and picking the brains of environmentalists from all over the world is most enlightening. I recommend this book not just to those based in the UK so that they understand our situation better but to a much wider readership as I feel the common themes and threads are drawn out well.

Very near the beginning of the book, and back in 2008, the author asks the former Swedish environment minister, Lena Sommestad, at a chance encounter at a dinner, why Sweden was so much greener than the UK. Good question! Her answer was ‘It’s simple, it’s because we are so much more equal than you are’. Great answer! And that set the book up for me: 250 pages later I was sold on this analysis. The penultimate chapter, A Just Transition, lists 10 areas which must change in an over-developed country such as the UK. These include new measures of progress (not growth and Gross Domestic Product), switching subsidies away from damaging industries and having fair transition plans so that benefits can be felt and recognised by all members of society.

The last words of that chapter recognise that it is one thing to have a list of things that need to change and another to know how to bring about those changes quickly. The final chapter sketches some ideas on how to change the world but, understandably (and characteristically for books of this type), doesn’t have all the answers. That’s fair enough, this book gets us closer to understanding how deep our problems are and although that may not be comfortable, who ever thought that changing the world would be easy?

The cover? It sums up the subject in an arresting way so I’d give it 8/10.

Just Earth: how a fairer world will save the planet by Tony Juniper is published by Bloomsbury.

Buy this book direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them).