Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by Toby Hemenway
from Chelsea Green
Permaculture is a verbal marriage of “permanent” and “agriculture.” Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include:
Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of MonetÂ’s palette, a wash of color, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.
The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you--good olÂ’ homo sapiens--are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.
This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro.
The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time
by Elizabeth Rogers
from Three Rivers Press
Ellen DeGeneres, Robert Redford, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Martha Stewart, Tyra Banks, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Tiki Barber, Owen Wilson, and Justin Timberlake tell you how they make a difference to the environment.
Inside The Green Book, find out how you can too:
- Don’t ask for ATM receipts. If everyone in the United States refused their receipts, it would save a roll of paper more than two billion feet long, or enough to circle the equator fifteen times!
- Turn off the tap while you brush your teeth. You’ll conserve up to five gallons of water per day. Throughout the entire United States, the daily savings could add up to more water than is consumed every day in all of New York City.
- Get a voice-mail service for your home phone. If all answering machines in U.S. homes were replaced by voice-mail services, the annual energy savings would total nearly two billion kilowatt hours. The resulting reduction in air pollution would be equivalent to removing 250,000 cars from the road for a year!
With wit and authority, authors Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen provide hundreds of solutions for all areas of your life, pinpointing the smallest changes that have the biggest impact on the health of our precious planet.
Easy Green Living: The Ultimate Guide to Simple, Eco-Friendly Choices for You and Your Home
by Renee Loux
from Rodale Books
As recent special issues of Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, and other major publications have demonstrated, going green is an idea whose time has come. Whether addressing big-picture topics like renewable energy, or offering simple suggestions for everyday living, this complete lifestyle guide shows that healthier choices don't mean a radical or complicated life change--it is, after all, easy to be green.
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (New Society Publishers)
by Richard Heinberg
from New Society Publishers
The twentieth century saw unprecedented growth in population, energy consumption, and food production. As the population shifted from rural to urban, the impact of humans on the environment increased dramatically.
The twenty-first century ushered in an era of declines, in a number of crucial parameters:
- Global oil, natural gas, and coal extraction
- Yearly grain harvests
- Climate stability
- Population
- Economic growth
- Fresh water
- Minerals and ores, such as copper and platinum
To adapt to this profoundly different world, we must begin now to make radical changes to our attitudes, behaviors, and expectations.
Peak Everything addresses many of the cultural, psychological, and practical changes we will have to make as nature rapidly dictates our new limits. This latest book from Richard Heinberg, author of three of the most important books on Peak Oil, touches on the most important aspects of the human condition at this unique moment in time.
A combination of wry commentary and sober forecasting on subjects as diverse as farming and industrial design, this book tells how we might make the transition from the Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction, while preserving the best of our collective achievements. A must-read for individuals, business leaders, and policymakers who are serious about effecting real change.
Richard Heinberg is a journalist, lecturer, and the author of seven books, including The Party's Over, Powerdown, and The Oil Depletion Protocol. He is one of the world's foremost Peak Oil educators.
Natural Resource Conservation: Management for a Sustainable Future (9th Edition)
by Daniel D. Chiras
from Prentice Hall
Written from a sustainable perspective, this readable, yet rigorous, book provides comprehensive coverage of a variety of local, regional, national, and global resource and environmental issues from population growth to wetlands to agriculture to global air pollution. It emphasizes practical, cost-effective, sustainable solutions to these problems that make sense from social, economic, and environmental perspectives. Overall increased emphasis on international and global issues (includes many examples from Canada). New information on Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing—integrated GIS Remote Sensing boxed information appears throughout, including 12 case studies. Expanded coverage of ecosystem management and watershed management, global climate change, ozone depletion, wetlands protection, and policy—including new international treaties, new federal laws, and more. The friendly, approachable writing style makes the book accessible to a wide range of readers—from those who want an introduction in natural resource conservation and natural resource management to professionals in this field.
Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad
by Frances Moore Lappe
from Small Planet Media
Winner of the 2008 JAMES BEARD HUMANITARIAN AWARD, 2008 NAUTILUS SMALL PRESS GOLD AWARD and 2008 NAUTILUS SILVER AWARD in the category of Social Change/Activism
Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad is a little book with a big message. Frances Moore Lappe--author of fifteen books, including three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet--distills her world-spanning experience and wisdom in a conversational yet hard-hitting style to create a rare "aha" book. In nine short chapters, Lappe leaves readers feeling liberated and courageous. She flouts conventional right-versus-left divisions and affirms readers' basic sanity--their intuitive knowledge that it is possible to stop grasping at straws and grasp the real roots of today's crises, from hunger and poverty to climate change and terrorism. Because we are creatures of the mind, says Lappe, it is the power of "frame"--our core assumptions about how the world works--that determines outcomes. She pinpoints the dominant failing frame now driving out planet toward disaster. By interweaving fresh insights, startling facts, and stirring vignettes of ordinary people pursuing creative solutions to our most pressing global problems, Lappe uncovers a new, empowering "frame" through which real solutions are emerging worldwide.She writes: "My book's intent is to enable us to see what is happening all around us but is still invisible to most of us. It is about people in all walks of life who are penetrating the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, ingenious innovation--and courage."
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Michael Shellenberger
from Houghton Mifflin Co
In the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy with their essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it they argued that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept up. Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new can be born. Now, three years later, Break Through delivers on the authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits.
If environmentalists and progressives are to seize the moment offered by the collapse of the Bush presidency, they must break from the politics of limits, and grapple with some inconvenient truths of their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms have failed. The nations that ratified the Kyoto protocol have seen their greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest deforestation has accelerated.
What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union--those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future.
The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.
Break Through offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more than casual consideration. With its challenge to conventional environmentalist, conservative, and progressive thought, and its proposal for a politics of possibility, Break Through will influence the political debate for years to come.
Questions for Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Amazon.com: Your book grew out of an essay you wrote, "The Death of Environmentalism," that had an impact on the environmental discussion beyond even your own expectations, I assume. What did you argue in the essay, and why do you think it struck a chord?
Shellenberger and Nordhaus: We wrote the essay thinking that it would generate discussion among grantmakers and environmental insiders. We really didn't expect it to go viral and to be read by environmentalists and liberals all over the world. The essay was mostly about the failure of the environmental movement to make much progress on its agenda over the previous decade, but we could just as well have written it about any of the other liberal interest groups over that period. In the months after George W. Bush's reelection, a lot of liberals and environmentalists were ready to take a hard look at their political agenda, the Democratic Party, and the interest groups they supported. For that reason, our essay really did strike a chord.
In the essay, we argued that the great successes of the modern environmental movement in the '60s and '70s had laid the seeds of their failure in the early years of the 21st century. That they had built institutions filled with lawyers and scientists well suited to lobby policy makers who basically shared their world view. This worked well when liberals controlled the Congress and much of the federal bureaucracy, and when the politics of the time were more supportive of active government efforts to regulate the economy and clean up the environment. But as social values shifted through the '80s and '90s, as modern conservatism rose to power, and as the electorate became a good deal more skeptical of both government and environmentalists, these strategies, and the institutions that were created to prosecute them, foundered.
We argued that environmentalists needed to rethink the entire project, that these problems would not be solved simply with better PR and spin. Most especially, we argued that environmentalists needed to stop imagining that they were representing a thing called Nature or the Environment, separate from us (e.g. humans) in politics. It was for this reason that we argued that environmentalism had become a special interest, incapable of addressing large, complex, and global problems such as global warming.
Amazon.com: You wrote the essay three years ago. What have you learned from the response it got?
Shellenberger and Nordhaus: First and foremost, we learned that there was a generational component to the debate that we really hadn't been conscious of when we wrote the essay. Those who came of age in the '60s and '70s, when the environmental movement, along with the larger liberal political agenda, was ascendant, were most defensive and critical of the essay. Their identities as environmentalists, and their identification with the environmental politics and strategies of that era, were most resistant to the idea that environmentalism needed to die so that a larger, more expansive politics might be born. Younger generations were much more open to our thesis and excited to get to work creating a post environmental movement. This remains the case. As we travel the country speaking to audiences about Break Through, it is younger audience members who are most inspired by our message and most committed to building a movement and a politics that not only saves us from global warming apocalypse but is also equitable, free, and prosperous.
Amazon.com: On one hand, you argue that global warming is a "monumental" crisis that demands a response beyond the more limited (and limiting) environmental policies of the past. On the other, you acknowledge that, despite a great deal of press attention, "global warming" still ranks at the very bottom of voters' concerns. How do you confront a crisis that voters don't care about?
Shellenberger and Nordhaus: By getting it out of the global warming/environmental ghetto. We know that things like energy independence, getting off oil, getting out of the Middle East, and creating jobs and economic development in the new clean energy industries of the future are much higher priorities for most voters than capping carbon emissions or taxing dirty energy sources. So why not redefine our agenda as the solution to those problems? We can still cap carbon, but that needn't be at the top of the agenda that we communicate to voters. Making big investments to get off oil, making clean energy alternatives widely available and cheap, and creating millions of new jobs in clean energy industries is a winner with American voters and can carry the whole suite of policies that we need to address global warming.
Amazon.com: It seems that in the 2008 election, the possible candidates who have most identified themselves with environmental issues, like Al Gore and even Newt Gingrich, are sitting this one out, and it hasn't yet become a central issue among the declared candidates. Barack Obama did just give a major speech on the environment that has gotten some attention, though--do you think, despite voter apathy on the subject, that the issue could move the needle for a candidate?
Shellenberger and Nordhaus: We don't think that environmental issues, traditionally defined, including global warming, are likely to be make or break issues politically in this election. Voters simply have too many other pressing concerns, from health care, to energy prices, to the war in Iraq. The key, as noted above, is to reorient our agenda around those higher priority concerns. The good news is that all three leading Democratic candidates have made big commitment to large public investments to build the clean energy economy. Hilary Clinton has announced plans to invest $50 billion dollars, John Edwards recently announced a commitment to invest $13 billion annually, and just last week Barack Obama announced a $150 billion investment plan. The candidates read the same surveys we do. They know that there is extraordinary opportunity politically when we redefine our agenda around clean energy investment.
Amazon.com: I was fascinated by the section in your book in which you look favorably on Rick Warren's small-group evangelical movement [see The Purpose-Driven Life] as a possible model for providing belonging in our bowling-alone society, but you don't provide many specifics about what a similar environmental movement would look like. Do you have some ideas? Birdwatching? Boy Scouts?Shellenberger and Nordhaus: We don't provide a lot of answers because we really don't have them. We wrote Break Through not to tell our readers what to do but rather as an invitation to join us in asking the right questions and experimenting with answers. For secular, liberal environmentalists, maybe we will find those "strong ties," through health clubs, or internet chat rooms, or mom's groups, or public service projects. What is key is that we understand that in a highly mobile and autonomous post-industrial society, we need to find easy ways for people to find connection and relationship with other people whom they may never have met, the literal equivalent of the evangelical service that is conducted several times every day, where people can come and go as they want, with child care and dry cleaning and whatever else liberals need to integrate that kind of regular activity into their everyday lives, and then we need to find ways to deepen those ties and connections, in ways that support and affirm secular values and personal autonomy. That is the starting point for creating a powerful secular political movement that is grounded in something more personal than direct mail campaigns, telephone appeals, and email alerts.
Amazon.com: Some skeptics of your technological optimism argue that the kinds of breakthroughs you expect as a result from massive investment just don't come easily in the energy sector. Solar power, nuclear energy, hydrogen fuel cells: they have all been around for decades without weaning us from oil and coal. What makes you think that the next decades will be different?Shellenberger and Nordhaus: They are right in part; energy is a sector of the economy that has been particularly resistant to innovation. This is precisely the problem. It is why we are still dependant on energy sources that are 100 to 150 years old while virtually every other sector of the economy has transformed itself. This is why we believe that the faith that many environmentalists still hold that carbon regulations and taxes will drive sufficient private sector investment into energy markets to create the kind of innovation we need is unfounded. It is worth noting that virtually every alternative energy source we have--solar, wind, nuclear, and battery and fuel cell technologies for storage--resulted from public innovation and R&D, not private. The problem is that we haven't done enough of it, and we have done it inconsistently. After a brief couple of years in the late '70s, public funding for clean energy technologies dried up and has been on the decline ever since. The levels of technology investment in the energy sciences pales compared to the kinds of investment we make in the computer and bio-sciences. Skepticism about the potential to achieve the kinds of breakthroughs we need has been a self fulfilling prophecy. We don't make the investments we need to make, the sector fails to innovate, and then we conclude that it can't innovate. All of the barriers to innovation in the energy sector are arguments for a big commitment to public investment. Only the public sector can make the kind of long-term, common investments that we need to overcome those barriers to innovation.
The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists
by Michael Brower
from Three Rivers Press
Paper or plastic? Cloth or disposable? Regular or organic? Every day, environmentally conscious consumers are faced with the overwhelming catch-22 of a capitalist society--reconciling the harm we do by consuming, while still providing ourselves and our families with the goods and services we need. It's enough to make a city dweller crazy. Fret no more! The Union of Concerned Scientists has put together a well-researched and eminently practical guide to the decisions that matter. The authors hope that the book will help you set priorities, stop worrying about insignificant things, and understand the real environmental impacts of household decisions. For instance, you may be surprised to learn that buying and eating meat and poultry is much more harmful to the environment than the packaging the meat is wrapped in, even if it's Styrofoam. This guide takes on both sides of the consumer-impact argument, goring sacred cows of the environmentalist movement (like the strident emphasis on recycling) and the industrialist perspective (like the relentless message to buy more, more, more). If you're confused and overwhelmed by all the environmental decision-making in the modern world, you'll find new inspiration in this book. --Therese Littleton
From one of the most prestigious nonprofit organizations devoted to environmental issues comes a clear, practical, and rational overview of the relationship between consumers and the environment.
       Â
Paper or plastic? Bus or car? Old house or new? Cloth diapers or disposables? Some choices have a huge impact on the environment; others are of negligible importance. To those of us who care about our quality of life and what is happening to the earth, this is a vastly important issue. In these pages, the Union of Concerned Scientists help inform consumers about everyday decisions that significantly affect the environment. For example, a few major decisions--such as the choice of a house or vehicle--have such a disproportionately large affect on the environment that minor environmental infractions shrink by comparison.
               Â
This book identifies the 4 Most Significant Consumer-Related Environmental Problems, the 7 Most Damaging Spending Categories, 11 Priority Actions, and 7 Rules for Responsible Consumption. Learn what you can do to have a truly significant impact on our world from the people who are at the forefront of scientific research.
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
by Paul Hawken
from Viking
One of the worldÂ’s most influential environmentalists reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity
Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of peopleÂ’s needs worldwide.
Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of this movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries-old history. The culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in these fields, it will inspire, surprise, and delight anyone who is worried about the direction the modern world is headed. Blessed Unrest is a description of humanity’s collective genius and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another. Like Hawken’s previous books, Blessed Unrest will become a classic in its field— a touchstone for anyone concerned about our future.
Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World
by Joanna R. Macy
from New Society Publishers
Many of us feel called to respond to the ecological destruction of our planet, yet we feel overwhelmed, immobilized, and unable to deal realistically with the threats to life on Earth. Noted spiritual and environmental thinkers Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown contend that this crippling response to world crisis is a psychological defense mechanism that has been endemic since the years of the Cold War arms race, when we had to adapt within a single generation to the horrific possibility of nuclear holocaust.
Since its publication in 1983, Joanna Macy's book, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age has sold nearly 30,000 copies and has been the primary resource for groups of men and women confronting the challenging realities of our time without succumbing to paralysis or panic. Coming Back to Life provides a much needed update and expansion of this pioneering work. At the interface between spiritual breakthrough and social action, Coming Back to Life is eloquent and compelling as well as being an inspiring and practical guide. The first third of the book discusses with extraordinary insight the angst of our era, and the pain, fear, guilt and inaction it has engendered; it then points forward to the way out of apathy, tio "the work that reconnects". The rest of the book offers both personal counsel and easy-to-use methods for working with groups in a number of ways to profoundly affect peoples' outlook and ability to act in the world.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Mathew Fox
1. To Choose Life
2. The Greatest Danger: Apatheia, The Deadening of Mind & Heart
3. The Basic Miracle: Our True Nature & Power
4. The Work that Reconnects
5. Guiding Group Work
6. Affirmation: Coming from Gratitude
7. Despair Work: Owning & Honoring Our Pain for the World
8. The Shift: Seeing with New Eyes
9. Deep Time: Drawing on Past & Future Generations
10. The Council of All Beings: Rejoining the Natural World
11. Going Forth
12. Meditations for Coming Back to Life
Joanna Macy has developed an international following over the course of 40 years as a speaker and workshop leader on Buddhist philosophy and the deep ecology movement
+++
