James Glave, a self-professed “child of suburbia” and SUV driver, has an ecological awakening and decides he wants to live a carbon-reduced lifestyle without dropping out of society, alienating his friends and family, or breaking the bank. Lacking the budget to build an environmentally friendly house, he does the next best thing by constructing a new model home in miniature: a “green” writing studio.
Along the way, he employs local gurus and energy-savvy builders, tries—and sometimes fails—to navigate the emerging social landscape of the nouveau-green world, and finds himself ensnared in the emotional entanglements of the high-octane era. With two small kids, escalating debt, and mounting material pressures, Glave begins to wonder whether he can really endure the strain of being a “culdesactivist.” As he probes the crazy zone between the relentlessly upbeat eco-evangelists and the Hummer pilots that roam his small suburban community, Glave explores one of the biggest questions of our age: Can a man with a modest salary afford to live a green lifestyle, and at what cost to his family?
How does one embrace a greener life and keep everybody in it happy along the way? Almost Green is a hilarious, informative, and refreshingly irreverent account of one man’s fumbling quest to reinvent suburbia—starting with his own front yard.
