Leo Hickman’s The Final Call, which I have mentioned before, is now out in a new paperback edition. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in what can be done to make tourism a positive force rather than the “pernicious disease” Hickman finds it to be in so many places. Have the publishers decided that the book will only sell now if there’s a woman in a bikini on the cover? She wasn’t on the original edition…
Fred Pearce’s Confessions of an Eco Sinner (review copies of which have been in abundant supply — see “Multiple sins”, below) is another thought-provoking read. It’s the story of “a globalised consumer” travelling to the source of the stuff he has come to take for granted: the cotton in his shirt, the phone in his hand, the coffee in his mug.
  Pearce, a regular contributor to New Scientist, Geographical and The Ecologist as well as the Telegraph’s Earth Channel, had long taken the greenness of trains for granted. Then, prompted by ads for Virgin Trains and Eurostar, he began to question his assumptions. He writes:

“An express coach carrying twenty passengers emits 37 grams per passenger-kilometre, compared to 50 grams for an average train averagely loaded. Coaches are the greenest way to travel. At the time of writing I haven’t seen any big posters advertising this fact. But they can’t be long delayed.”