Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. The real attraction here, for me at least, is the grab-bag nature of it. There are a couple of dozen contributors, and they all take very different approaches to the idea of ecofeminism, and only a couple of those approaches are academic. (I'm sorry, my tolerance for academic prose is low at the moment.) There are a couple of poems, an extract from a novel, explorations of spirituality and sexuality and experience, and how these intersect with the ideas and practices of ecofeminism. There's even a short essay in here by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is reason enough to pick up any book!

The chapters - I call them chapters, for want of any better word - that most appealed to me were the ones that described activism, often in the non-Western world. "Women and Environmental Protection in India," by Pamela Philipose, for example, described how rural women came together to protect their local forests. It's this kind of intersection that speaks most to be - partly because it speaks plainly, and partly because it describes concrete, sensible action. There's not a shred of woolliness there. That does sneak into a couple of the other chapters, though. There's one on the importance of holistic medicine and women's history in medicine, and, you know, I can agree entirely with the argument about persecution of women herbalists as witches in the Middle Ages, and I can agree entirely with the argument against the disgusting practice of vivisection, but when the argument starts in favour of practices like homeopathy, well, you have entirely lost me with your credulity and lack of rigour.

That being said, there's something here for everyone I think. That Plant has clearly encouraged the contributors to this book to approach the topic in any way they please may cause the collection as a whole to occasionally suffer from lack of focus, but it also makes it an appealing and thought-provoking read.