Sustainability: A Love Story

In Sustainability: A Love Story, Nicole Walker questions what it means to live sustainably while still being able to have Internet and eat bacon. After all, who wants to listen to a short, blond woman who is mostly a hypocrite anyway — who eats cows, drives a gasoline-powered car, who owns no solar panels — tsk-tsking them? Armed with research and a bright irony that playfully addresses the devastation of the world around us, Walker delves deep into scarcity and abundance, reflecting on matters that range from her uneasy relationship with bats to the fragility of human life, from adolescent lies to what recycling can reveal about our not so moderate drinking habits. With laugh-out-loud sad-funny moments, and a stark humor, Walker appeals to our innate sense of personal commitment to sustaining our world, and our commitment to sustaining our marriages, our families, our lives, ourselves.

This book is for the burnt-out environmentalist, the lazy environmentalist, the would-be environmentalist. It's for those who believe the planet is dying. For those who believe they are dying. And for those who question what it means to live and love sustainably, and maybe even with hope.

“With her sobering and at times darkly humorous writing, Walker brings a refreshingly original perspective to sustainability. She is at once pessimistic and optimistic, somewhat fearful and cautiously hopeful....Her book is a challenge to others to think about the unique role they can play in sustaining the planet.” Foreword Reviews

“A book about life lived on a variety of edges, Sustainability: A Love Story is singular and gorgeous. Walker melds so beautifully environmentalist research with the fierce love between members of a family, daily domestic life, and the observations of a writer.” Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In

“I didn’t want the journey to end, just as [Walker] doesn’t want the world to end; there are too many great things to live for, this book being one of them.” NewPages

Nicole Walker is an Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University and the author of Egg, Where the Tiny Things Are, and co-editor of Bending Genre: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction.