Customer Reviews

One Makes the Difference: Inspiring Actions that Change our World

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I bought this book to use in the classroom for a lesson I
was doing in my 12th grade American Government class. It was
great for the students! They could really relate to information.
I was amazed at how eager my students were to make efforts to
help our environment. I admire Ms. Hill and all the efforts she
has made in raising awareness!!!

I consider myself environmentally conscious. I use fluorescent bulbs, print office stuff on both sides of each sheet, eat organic food, etc. Still, I haven't thought about a lot of things Julia Hill suggests. Now I use the same styrofoam cup for 2 weeks and I stopped using plastic cuttlery. I knew burghers were not the best food but I didn't know that, by eating one at a fast food restaurant, I destroy rain forest. It is amazing how much stuff we waste without thinking about it and how much we take for granted. As Julia pointed out, we can learn a lot from trips to "3rd world" countries. For example, there are people out there who save every drop of drinking water while we take a shower for an hour. We buy bigger and bigger gasoline-guzzling and air-poluting cars we don't need as status symbols. We act as if our resourses were unlimited.

Written by the legendary environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, "One Makes the Difference" provides a wealth of useful information on how we can work, both individually and collectively, to restore our fragile biosphere. While some of the advise is commonsense (buy organic, recycle, ride a bike), there are many other less obvious hints on how we can minimize our impact on the planet. Whether one's interested in protecting endangered species, cleaning up the air, saving our oceans or stopping the deforesting of the tropics, there is much that readers will learn from this text. Furthermore, Hill's simple writing style makes the book accessible for kids and adults alike. As such, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in living a more sustainable lifestyle.

Maybe if there were more people like Julia Butterfly Hill, the world would be a better place. Since her heroic act of sitting a tree called Luna to prevent it from being cut down (along with many other giant sequoia trees), she has been an inspiration to many. This book is filled with the inspiring tales of people who are like Julia Hill, who do care and who have made a difference in our world. It also is packed with information on all sorts of environmental issues from water conservation to the clear-cutting of trees to to the very positive effects of vegetarianism on the environment. It has lists of the things you can do in your everyday life to make a difference. It lets you know that even the smallest things do make a difference. This is a great book for budding activists, anyone seeking inspiration, as well as just for the curious.--Reviewed by Courtney Bronte

I must say I found this book to be quite a disappointment, especially after Hill's inspiring "Legacy of Luna". Part of the problem with "One Makes the Difference" is that it's not sure what it wants to be. Is it a handbook for applying environmentalism to everyday life? If it is, it fails. Many strategies (for instance, biodiesel) lack enough detail for the reader to translate them into action. It's also broken down into artificial sections, like "air" and "water" and "land"; in reality many strategies for environmental living benefit more than one of these. A better way to organize would've been into different categories of human action, like transportation, diet, and home-heating/cooling. Humans can compartmentalize; nature cannot.
Another source of frustration with this book was the "inspiring" tales of people who "made a difference". While it *can* be inspiring to read about people who succeeded, I was ultimately left wishing that the author had explained more about *why* these people were successful. Otherwise, the stories feel like nothing more than mere chance amidst the many attempts at environmental activism that fail.
I would suggest this book only to those who are relatively new to the environmental movement.