Doug Fine's thoughts and recollections on his first year of sustainable and eco-friendly living, Farewell, My Subaru, is an accessible, funny, sensible foray into environmentally thoughtful living and environmentalism, which I would recommend to anyone. Despite your political affiliations, views on gun control, or religion (unless you bathe in oil and club baby seals before your breakfast of genetically modified food pellets) you will find Fine's treatise on the simple and immensely rewarding joys of sustainable living, growing your own food and connecting to the earth around you a tempting and rational call to a richer way of life.

Not only charming, hilarious and heart-winning, it is peppered with factoids and garnished with mouth watering recipes Fine prepared with his own cultivated and carefully tended fruits of labor. His dedication to his goals and aspirations is inspiring to say the least. I mean, I love ice cream, and I love the homemade variety. But I don't know if I could go so far as to raise, vaccinate and shepherd goats for over a year in order to make it. And yet, when Fine describes it, it doesn't only seem possible, but enviable.

Fine weathers floods, droughts, hail, coyotes, loneliness, bureaucratic paperwork, clogged fuel lines, a runaway car, and all other unimaginable challenges with humor, grace and an indomitable spirit that keeps you cheering him on! While certainly an environmentalist, Fine is not strictly a vegetarian, and even hunts which might put off some hard core Greenies, but is forgivable given his unique attempt at the activity.

I might have been the only hunter in New Mexico history to have his laptop, complete with wireless Internet, with him as he aimed for dinner, and so I sent a lot of colorful e-mails to friends about sunsets ... I had packed local bean burritos for the trip, so Sadie and I ate quite splendidly as well. As we dined, we listened to NPR.

Needless to say, his hunting was unsuccessful. Read, enjoy, then recycle this book by passing it along!