Dave Bonta and Stephen Snyder, New Green Home Solutions: Renewable Household Energy and Sustainable Living. Green living begins at home, and New Green Home Solutions tells you how. Most of the energy-derived pollution we produce comes as a direct result of our homes-how we heat them, how we cool them, how we keep them well-lit and full of things that make our lives so comfortable. The good news is that we have tremendous power to create change
New Green Home Solutions offers easy “whole house strategies” for using renewable energy. “The days of building cookie-cutter mcMansions are over, and the era of thinking about the real cost of a house has begun. And this is the guide to doing it with enormous elegance, real frugality, and a commitment to the health of the world beyond your walls.”
– Bill McKibben, author Deep Economy
Jim Merkel,
Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth. Jim Merkel, currently a Corinth, Vermont resident working as Dartmouth's Sustainability Manager, quit his job as a military engineer following the Exxon Valdez disaster and has since worked to develop tools for personal and societal sustainability. He founded the Global Living Project to further this work and conducts workshops around North America on this topic.
The book builds on steps from Your Money or Your Life so readers can design their own personal economics to save money, get free of debt, and align their work with their values. It uses refined tools from Our Ecological Footprint so readers can measure how much nature is needed to supply all they consume and absorb their waste.
Combining lyrical narrative, compassionate advocacy, and absorbing science, Radical Simplicity is a practical, personal answer to twenty-first century challenges that will appeal as much to Cultural Creatives and students as to spiritual seekers, policy makers, and sustainability professionals.
Michael Brower,
Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. 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.
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.
Alan AtKisson,
Believing Cassandra: An Optimist Looks at a Pessimist's World. Consultant, raconteur, and musical performer Alan AtKisson sees a parallel between Cassandra's situation and that of today's environmentalists - concerned citizens and scientists who see the world hurtling toward self-destruction. Is it true that most of the human race could care less about their dire warnings? "AtKisson provides us with a bridge passing over the brink of despair to the crest of an enticing future. He enables the reader to join the pioneers who embrace the ideas techniques, and practices of sustainable living - the people who are "believing Cassandra."
On a nationwide and global level, we can greatly reduce our resource depletion by basing our economy on "Development" instead of "Growth."
Growth can be defined as increasing the total number of resources extracted and used up. Development can be defined as finding more efficient and less material-intensive ways to meet our needs. Development means being smart and thinking our way into a sustainable future without sacrificing what we call our standard of living.
The Development scenario contends that services might just as well be provided without the use of materials. For instance, many of us would like the service of learning about what's going on in the world. Currently, we buy newspapers to fulfill that service. The actual paper is not what we need, it's the information on it. If we could read the Times, the Globe, and the Wall Street Journal on our computer with comfort and ease, the same service would be provided without the destruction of trees, the use of harsh chemicals, the burning of fuels to move the material, and the waste product at the end.
