Stephanie Jane reviewed Manifesto by John Robb
Interesting and inspiring
4 stars
Despite having chosen Ecotricity for our energy supplier in the days when we still lived in a bricks and mortar home, I knew little about Dale Vince, the man who founded the company. Ecotricity's aims and vision so chimes with my own though that, when I saw Vince's Manifesto memoir on NetGalley, I was eager to read his words. In Manifesto, Vince discusses his New Age traveller lifestyle and how the practical skills he learned in those years proved invaluable when he set out to build his first wind turbine, a process which eventually led to Ecotricity. This is a massively inspirational book about the power of self-belief. I can now understand why so many established figures sneered at Vince in the early years. By taking a very different path, he clearly illustrated how closed-minded and outdated the British energy industry truly is, while simultaneously demonstrating that his green approach …
Despite having chosen Ecotricity for our energy supplier in the days when we still lived in a bricks and mortar home, I knew little about Dale Vince, the man who founded the company. Ecotricity's aims and vision so chimes with my own though that, when I saw Vince's Manifesto memoir on NetGalley, I was eager to read his words. In Manifesto, Vince discusses his New Age traveller lifestyle and how the practical skills he learned in those years proved invaluable when he set out to build his first wind turbine, a process which eventually led to Ecotricity. This is a massively inspirational book about the power of self-belief. I can now understand why so many established figures sneered at Vince in the early years. By taking a very different path, he clearly illustrated how closed-minded and outdated the British energy industry truly is, while simultaneously demonstrating that his green approach is both an environmental and an economically successful model.
The final section of Manifesto sets out Vince's vision for Britain's potential future and, as I read, I could feel myself becoming energised and hopeful again for the first time in several years. His ideas for energy creation alongside job creation and resource conservation are completely at odds with the industry's usual profit-at-any-cost way of doing things, but laid out in this book it all seems such an obvious way forward that will benefit everybody, not just an already-wealthy few. I understood that Vince speaks from the heart throughout Manifesto. I appreciated that his style and language reflects his life experience of facing practical challenges and doggedly learning how to overcome them. Such a hands-on approach has been much maligned over recent decades, but the ticking climate emergency clock means we need to make drastic changes now and the resurgence of interest in traditional and alternative technologies might just be the most timely solution. Britain's landscape was already once dotted with windmills and watermills after all. Vince repeatedly states how much influence individual people do have through the purchasing decisions they make - what we buy or, indeed, whether we choose to make, borrow or do without instead. As a result of reading Manifesto, I'm fired up to redouble my own efforts.