The Crazy Things Girls Do for Love

Acknowledgements

As the characters in my novel discover, it is sometimes easy to feel very alone when you decide to “go Green”. You look around and everybody’s eating hamburgers and filling their plastic shopping bags with things that aren’t very friendly to the environment. They may love their dogs and cats – give them names and personalities and dress them up for major holidays – but they don’t spend much time worrying about the life of your average battery chicken. They may accept the fact of climate change, but they don’t think a lot about trying to at least slow it down.

When I did the research for this novel, however, I realized that there are a lot of concerned and aware people and groups, eager to share information with the world – and even more eager to try and save it. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for being out there. Thank you.

In addition, I thought I’d like to mention some of the many books, films and websites I found that helped me the most.

Books: The Last Green Book on Earth? by Judy Allen, illustrated by Martin Brown (Red Fox, 1994); What’s in this Stuff?: The Essential Guide to What’s Really in the Products You Buy in the Supermarket by Pat Thomas (Rodale, 2006); Endgame v. 1: The Problem of Civilization and Endgame v. 2: Resistance by Derrick Jensen (Seven Stories Press, 2006); How it all Vegan, Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002); Not On the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate by Felicity Lawrence (Penguin Books, 2004) and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (Penguin Books, 2002).

Websites: www.vegansociety.com; www.vegsoc.org; www.peta.org.uk; www.revbilly.com (web home of the dynamic – and very funny – Reverend Billy and The Church of Life After Shopping) and www.seashepherd.org (official site for the dedicated Captain Paul Watson and crews of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society).

Documentaries: Food, Inc. (directed by Robert Kenner); An Inconvenient Truth (directed by Davis Guggenheim); What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (directed by Timothy S. Bennett); The Age of Stupid (directed by Franny Armstrong); Whale Wars (from the Animal Planet series) and The Witness (directed by Jenny Stein about the Brooklyn animal rights champion, Eddie Lama). The Witness, though thought-provoking and very moving, was probably the most entertaining. Some of the documentaries I watched, I have to honestly say, were pretty distressing. One of the best, Earthlings (directed by Shaun Monson), is the film Clemens shows that turns Ms Kimodo into a vegetarian in my novel. I closed my eyes a lot when I screened it.