Paul Wheaton - Building a Better World in Your Backyard

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Welcome to the eBook version of Building a Better World in Your Backyard!

Dozens of people wrote to us to make sure that we made the eBook version the right way with a reflowable format that can be easily read on all sorts of readers, using fonts that can be changed for people with special font needs.

The print version of this book is heavily loaded with doodles that do not go well with the reflowable stuff, so we took those out. Most of them were just silly bits of fun that were not crucial to the understanding of the content. Any illustrations that were important and relevant, we left in.

We hope you enjoy this final product which, we are told, is much easier to read partly because it is lighter on images.

The information in this book is condensed from a larger body of work. As a result, this book conveys ideas, but is not a complete how to guide and should not be taken as such. For full details on how to follow through with these ideas, please do your own research. For anything you choose to do as a result of reading this book, the complete list of things that anybody involved in creating this book is obligated to do is:

possibly point and laugh

2019 Paul Wheaton & Shawn Klassen-Koop

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

For permissions contact

First edition, 2019.

Cover design and illustrations by Tracy Wandling www.tracywandling.com

eBook adaptation by Luca Funari

For errata, suggestions for a second edition, reviews, and comments:

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Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wheaton, Paul, author. | Klassen-Koop, Shawn, author.

Title: Building a better world in your backyard , instead of being angry at bad guys / Paul Wheaton ; Shawn Klassen-Koop.

Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Winkler, Manitoba: Shawn Klassen-Koop, 2019.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781999171407 (pbk.) | 9781999171421 (PDF ebook) | 9781999171438 (EPUB) | 9781999171445 (MOBI) | 9781999171414 (audiobook)

Subjects: LCSH Sustainable living. | Climate change mitigation. | Human ecology. | Self-reliant living. | Urban homesteading. | Permaculture. | Sustainable agriculture. | Home economics. | Conservation of natural resources. | Environmentalism. | Environmental protection Citizen participation. | BISAC HOUSE & HOME / Sustainable Living | REFERENCE / Personal & Practical Guides

Classification: LCC TD171.7 .W43 2019 | DDC 363.7 dc23

to Lawton Emerson McDaniel

for caring for a broken boy

~ Paul

to Andrea

without whose support this book would not exist

~ Shawn

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

It is the best of times. We have the internet, cars, jets, space travel, movies, electricity, and comforts for the masses far beyond the imagination of Dickens.

It is the worst of times. Political debate continues on whether the human species will survive climate change. Mercury in the atmosphere has made all fish toxic even fish found in the most remote wilderness. The palette for toxins has changed it is more subtle but far more dangerous and varied. We now have massive patches of garbage in our oceans, and we continue to route sewage laden with toxic waste into many of our waterways. Cancer now kills 100 times more people, per capita, than during the smoky days of Dickens. War, starvation, and poverty have yet to be rooted out. We now have a collection of new illnesses we are struggling to understand. Most of our electronics have the shame of modern slavery woven into them, and our addiction to these toys forfeits our privacy to a variety of nefarious entities. Not to mention we

Sorry about that. I have now smacked the pause button on the dark stuff. The list still runs on for a few hours, but it was twisting my innards and I think you get the general vibe: the list of global problems is massive and overwhelming.

When confronted with such significant problems, our first instinct is to tell the bad guys to stop being bad. Of course, wed be doing so on a rigged playing field. And for each person who actually does write a letter or confront the bad guys, there might be a hundred people who simply develop an ulcer.

About seven years ago, a friend contacted me to tell me he had become obsessed with fracking. He was actively protesting two or three times a week. He lived in Colorado, so I asked him how he heats his home. He responded, with natural gas. After all of his protesting, it never occurred to him that he was feeding the monster. When I pointed this out to him, his first response was to switch to electric heat. I then pointed out the environmental problems with electric heat, including how natural gas is now being used to generate electricity in his area. So he then contemplated going without any heat at all. Yikes!

For nearly every global problem, there are solutions we can implement in our backyard that save us money and help us live more luxuriant lives. If a few of us do these things and bask in the glow of the opulence and extra cash, others will observe and think I want extra luxury and money too! Not fair! So they emulate, and on and on it goes. Then the global problems sort of just dry up and blow away. Thats what this book is about.

I think the reason we see so many people angry is that they genuinely care. But they seem to get stuck at being angry. Some people spend a hundred hours a week for twenty years being angry and not much changes. But I think that if you spend a tiny fraction of that time doing the things mentioned in this book, your global positive impact will be a thousand times greater.

This book is one massive, steaming pile of my opinion. Well, our opinion. About 70% of the book is made from articles, podcasts, videos, presentations, and interviews I (Paul) have shared publicly. And then Shawn and I spent the better part of a year polishing it and augmenting it to make it a single, cohesive piece in order to express a collective position. Because these thoughts and experiences were Pauls before Shawn came along, we agreed to maintain the first person presentation. So when you read this book in your head, you can read it in Pauls voice or, at least, what you imagine it sounding like. At the same time, we agreed that there would be no word in this book that Shawn disagreed with unless there was some sort of accompanying note showing his dissent. It turned out there was no need for such a note.