Coming to a forest clearing, a monkey sees a tasty banana in a jar. He reaches in and grabs it, but then finds himself unable to extricate both his hand and the fruit. Rather than abandon his prize, the monkey stays there, immobilised, until the humans who set the monkey trap return. This perhaps apocryphal hunting method furnishes the guiding metaphor for the poet and novelist Hamilton-Paterson’s book. We are all that stuck monkey, refusing to let go of the treats of modern civilisation that will surely doom us.
This is a highly detailed and eye-opening enumeration of the environmental costs of more or less everything that makes modern life pleasant and fun, or just modern. Hamilton-Paterson has a fine sense for the darkly absurd fact: “The average Australian buys twenty-seven kilos of new clothing annually and dumps twenty-three of them to landfill.” Aviation and fast fashion, we know, are environmentally destructive, but so too is almost everything else. Owning a cat or dog, for example: a fascinating chapter about Big Pet Food notes that if the pet-food industry were a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest consumer of meat in the world. (Pet-food scientists, we are told, work assiduously on its “craveability”.) Motorsport is bad in an obvious way; football slightly less obviously, with teams taking 20-minute domestic flights to away games; most ironically, golf courses, while providing a simulacrum of tended nature, are themselves harming it with their outsized water requirements.
