Building a Better World in Your Backyard: Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys Book by Paul Wheaton

About the Book

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, doing so would be on a rigged playing field. And for each person that actually does write a letter or confront the bad guys, there might be a thousand people that simply develop an ulcer.

We think the reason we see so many people angry is because they genuinely care. But they seem to get stuck at being angry. Some people spend a hundred hours a week for 20 years being angry and not much changes. We 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.

For nearly every global problem there are solutions we can implement in our backyard that, at the same time, save us money and help provide 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 sorta just dry up and blow away. That’s what this book is all about.

Paul Wheaton, dubbed “The Duke of Permaculture” by Sepp Holzer and Geoff Lawton, is an author, producer, certified advanced master gardener, and tyrannical ruler of two on-line empires. After a successful career as a software engineer in aerospace, Paul became obsessed with everything permaculture. He has created hundreds of youtube videos, hundreds of podcasts and written dozens of articles, all of which can be found at permies.com.