Like any good environmentalist, GreenTOpia (Coach House, 256 pages, $24.95) abhors decadence. Readers drawn to the previous uTOpia volumes — pop-critical anthologies that captured Toronto’s post-millennial kudzu of creativity and civic pride in various plans of action, think pieces and dreamy visions — for the essays about popular indie-rock message boards and cool cartographical fantasies may grimace when they crack open this one to a 10-page essay about retrofitting suburban high-rises. Flights of fancy are a carbon nightmare, after all.

The good news is that the book’s policy-oriented austerity eliminates two of the previous TOpias’ biggest shortcomings: downtown-centrism and a weakness for airy, insubstantial visions. As the introduction (or “inTrOducTiOn”) says, “we wanted specificity,” and they meant it: the book includes a 56-page-long directory that covers every green subject under the sun. GreenTOpia is the closest practical-minded enviro-nerds will ever come to a revolutionary program.

Granted, Pasha Malla’s opening rallying cry is a bit of a false start, as it alternates between priggishness (“Like most people, at least those not directly profiting from the plundering of the Earth, I am concerned about the environment”) and strained humour (including an excruciating Justin Timberlake pun). But the book soon eases into a natural rhythm, with longer thoughts and proposals for Toronto’s sustainability sandwiched between briefer blips and notions. Jacob Allderdice sketches out an alternative to misconceived car-free zones in a couple of pages: just ratchet up the density of the street to match the buildings surrounding it, so that everything moves at the speed of bike.

In a typically cogent piece, John Lorinc explains how the energy-hogging suburbs could become a launching pad for solar power on a grand scale. Amy Lavender Harris and Peter Fruchter’s meditation on dumpster diving occasionally lurches into overwrought hectoring about consumerism. Still, they make a good point about the class issues surrounding garbage picking, suggesting that smug bohos who shop for curbside scores have a lot to learn from the marginalized capitalists who scrape together a subsistence-level living by illegally scavenging for scrap metal and bottles to resell. (Read an excerpt from this essay on page 8.)

Replacing artsy types with urban and environmental theorists grants GreenTOpia a rigorous focus, but it also occasionally leads to dull prose. The shorter pieces in particular often read like boiled-down press releases or grant applications. And there are not a lot of laughs — I thought Anna Bowness might be pulling a Swift one in her description of the “diaper-free” movement, but no, there really are people vying to save the planet with supernatural precognition of the exact moments their spawn plan to shit all over the floor. The idiosyncratic outbursts from The State of the Arts, like Kate Carraway’s bourgeois confessional or Carl Wilson’s enormous essay on “participatory art” are sorely missed.

However, the pieces that do deviate from the policy-wonk template — Kerry Potts’ evocation of urban aboriginals, Wayne Reeves’ environmental history of “Tkaronto” (can we get an entire book about this?) — are all the more fascinating for their rooted, obstinate sense of place.

True, there are still one or two vague specks of futurist fluff floating around, but one imaginative trifle is the best thing in the whole book anyway. Cautiously optimistic despite the “collapsing shit factory” we live on, Darren O’Donnell and Marney Isaac suggest covering the Gardiner with an urban garden in the name of Toronto’s disunited Multitude and detail an entirely serious plan to do just that. It’s demented, brilliant and completely inspiring, an echo of the era when environmentalists hopped on their ships and pursued polluter fleets with the gusto of pirates. Of course we all need to make our living spaces more energy efficient and stop using disposable coffee cups, but a revolution of everyday life is empty without those weirdos who dream of a “recreated horizon” at its close.