A lot of environmental books/movies leave me feeling hopeless and terrified (a la McKibben's Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, the movie The Future of Food, etc.) - but this book provided a high-level overview of how to implement the necessary infrastructural changes to allow society to proceed in a sustainable, non-destructive way.
It deals with the topics of how goods are manufactured both from the perspective of how we expect them to be made (a cradle-to-grave mentality, if they even last that long) and how the manufacturers cater to a population satisfied with disposable goods. It addresses energy infrastructure, and the sometimes dubious methods involved in producing energy for a developed/developing world.
It uses relate-able examples that simplify the task of visualizing such a world.
And the most important thing, for me, was simply that it is so hopeful, without being naively optimistic. It provides for a groundwork for implementing these ideas in a manner that's economically feasible, a requirement in today's increasingly capitalist present-centric (with an increasingly blind eye towards the future) world.
I urge anyone who has any sort of curiosity in these matters to read the book. It's not long, nor a tough read (unlike
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays which had me pausing after every few paragraphs to digest it!) One could even approach it as a whimsical sci-fi book, a portrayal of a not-TOO-different world in which we're not slowly burying ourselves in a rapidly heating world towards a government-sponsored oblivion. Whimsy indeed - we need not all live in yurts to survive the next century.