This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate


Naomi Klein - 2014
    It's not about carbon—it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers Shock Doctrine and No Logo, exposes the myths that are clouding climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the 'free-market' playbook. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. It's about changing the world, before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink. This Changes Everything is a book that will redefine our era.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water-Harvesting Earthworks


Brad Lancaster - 2008
    The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, enhancing the soil carbon sponge, and improving water and air quality.This dramatically revised and expanded full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, ranch, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!

The Super Metabolism Diet: The Two-Week Plan to Ignite Your Fat-Burning Furnace and Stay Lean for Life!


David Zinczenko - 2017
    The answer lies within your metabolism, the body's crucial, energy-burning engine that for so many of us is revving at less than half speed. With the help of this book, you can quickly and easily turn your metabolism into a fat-melting machine.The Super Metabolism Diet features daily menus, handy shopping guides, a vast trove of amazing (though optional) workouts, and tons of delicious recipes--all designed to get your metabolism firing hotter than ever before! So say goodbye to bloat, harsh dieting, weight-loss fads, and even stress. Say bye-bye to belly fat and hello to a new and improved you.The Super Metabolism Diet is built on five core pillars (captured in a handy acronym) to ensure that your body burns more energy and stores less fat:Super Proteins, Super Carbs, and Super Fats Upping Your Energy Expenditure Power Snacks Essential Calories, Vitamins, and Minerals Relaxing and RechargingAs Zinczenko reports: If you're heavier than you want to be or moving sluggishly through your days, you don't need to cut your favorite foods from your diet. You just need to up your intake of core proteins that will build more energy-burning muscle, consume the healthiest fats that help increase satiety and speed nutrients throughout your body, and reach for plenty of good-for-you carbs--yes, carbs!--that provide essential fiber.The result will be a stronger, leaner, happier you. And you'll be stunned at how good you look and feel in no time at all."You'll see results almost immediately, never be hungry, and watch the weight keep coming off!"--Michele Promaulayko, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan and former editor in chief of Women's Health Includes a bonus PDF with recipes and exercises.

Vegetables Every Day: The Definitive Guide to Buying and Cooking Today's Produce, with Over 350 Recipes


Jack Bishop - 2001
    Consumers are tempted by kale and kohlrabi, taro and tomatillos, bok choy and burdock, along with all the familiar choices. Now acclaimed cookbook author and food writer Jack Bishop offers a comprehensive A-to-Z guide to this bounty of produce, complete with selection tips, preparation instructions, and hundreds of recipes for more than sixty-six commonly available vegetables. With Bishop's expert advice, you'll learn how to coax the very best flavor from every vegetable, whether it's a carrot, cauliflower, or cardoon. Wondering how and when to buy the sweetest green beans? Bishop suggests buying at the height of summer, and selecting beans that are crisp and slim (older, thicker beans will be mealy and bland). Confused about how to cook the spring's first sorrel? Bishop offers such unique and delicious dishes as Sorrel and Potato Soup and Sorrel Frittata. These recipes -- like all 350 in the book -- are clear and uncomplicated, ensuring success for even the novice cook. So whether you are looking for a salad or side dish, a vibrant main course, or simply great mashed potatoes, you are sure to find it in this essential kitchen companion. We all know that vegetables are the key to healthful eating -- now it's time to discover how great they can taste, each and every day!

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals


Hal Herzog - 2010
    Herzog’s groundbreaking research on animal rights activists, cockfighters, professional dog-show handlers, veterinary students, and biomedical researchers. Blending anthropology, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy, Herzog carefully crafts a seamless narrative enriched with real-life anecdotes, scientific research, and his own sense of moral ambivalence.Alternately poignant, challenging, and laugh-out-loud funny, this enlightening and provocative book will forever change the way we look at our relationships with other creatures and, ultimately, how we see ourselves.

Blithe Tomato


Mike Madison - 2006
    Biography. Across America, people are escaping fluorescent-lit grocery store aisles to rediscover the fresh, seasonal offerings of the farmers' market. A new and thriving culture has sprung up as thousands gather each weekend to pinch, poke, smell, and probe the produce-and at times each other. Who knew that buying peaches and eggplants could be such fun? Mike Madison, who raises organic flowers, melons, olives, and apricots, has been setting up at these markets for over twenty years. With keen observations and sly wit, Madison presents a series of essays and vignettes that introduce us to the characters who make our food, the economy that produces it, and the spirit that has placed farmers' markets among the fastest growing movements in the country.

Valley Walls: A Memoir of Climbing and Living in Yosemite


Glen Denny - 2016
    Photographer Glen Denny was a key figure in this golden age of climbing, capturing pioneering feats on camera while tackling challenging ascents himself.In entertaining short pieces enlivened by his iconic black-and-white images of Yosemite's big wall legends, Denny reveals a young man's coming of age and provides a vivid look at Yosemite’s early climbing culture. He relates such precarious achievements as hauling water in glass gallon jugs up the east face of Washington Column, nailing the 750-foot Rostrum in a punishing heat wave, and dangling overnight on El Capitan’s Dihedral Wall in a lightning storm. Each true tale captures the spirit of historic Camp 4, where Denny and others plan the next big climb while living on the cheap and dodging park rangers.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made


Gaia Vince - 2014
    But all too often the full picture of change is obstructed by dense data sets and particular catastrophes. Struggling with this obscurity in her role as an editor at Nature, Gaia Vince decided to travel the world and see for herself what life is really like for people on the frontline of this new reality. What she found was a number people doing the most extraordinary things.During her journey she finds a man who is making artificial glaciers in Nepal along with an individual who is painting mountains white to attract snowfall; take the electrified reefs of the Maldives; or the man who's making islands out of rubbish in the Caribbean. These are ordinary people who are solving severe crises in crazy, ingenious, effective ways. While Vince does not mince words regarding the challenging position our species is in, these wonderful stories, combined with the new science that underpins Gaia's expertise and research, make for a persuasive, illuminating — and strangely hopeful — read on what the Anthropocene means for our future.

The Seasons on Henry's Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm


Terra Brockman - 2009
    There, Henry Brockman and his family — five generations of farmers, including sister Terra — farm in a way that produces healthy, nutritious food without despoiling the land. Terra Brockman tells their story in the form of a yearlong diary/memoir — with recipes — that takes readers through each season of life on the farm. Studded with vignettes, photographs, family stories, and illustrations of the farm's vivid plant life, the book is a one-of-a-kind treasure that will appeal to readers of Michael Pollan, E. B. White, Gretel Ehrlich, and Sandra Steingraber. The book opens a window into what sustainable farming really entails and why it is vital and relevant to everyone who eats. Though rooted in the rolling oak-hickory hills and fertile fields and flood plains of the Mackinaw River Valley, the book ranges widely, incorporating literary, scientific, and culinary reflections occasioned by the week-by-week events of farm life.

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution


Menno Schilthuizen - 2018
    In Darwin Comes to Town, evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen shows that evolution can in fact happen extremely quickly, and in the strangest of places: the heart of the city.Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating the evolution of the animals and plants around us. Cities are extreme environments and, in a world of adapt or die, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is being forced to adopt fascinating new ways of surviving, and often thriving.--Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts.--Spiders in Vienna are adapting to build their webs near moth-attracting streetlights, while moths in some cities are developing a resistance to the lure of light bulbs.--Certain Puerto Rican city lizards are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete.--Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heard over the din of traffic, while many pigeons have eschewed traveling “as the crow flies” in favor of following manmade roads.Darwin Comes to Town draws on these and other eye-popping examples to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward overpopulation might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Clean & Lean Diet Cookbook: Over 100 Delicious Healthy Recipes with a 14-Day Menu Plan


James Duigan - 2012
    Illustrating what you should be eating to keep your body in its best-ever shape, 'Clean & Lean Cookbook' takes you through lunch and dinner with ideas for quick, easy meals that won't impact on your waistline.

Year of the Cow: How 420 Pounds of Beef Built a Better Life for One American Family


Jared Stone - 2015
    With the help of an incredibly supportive wife and a cadre of highly amused friends, Jared offers a glimpse at one man's family as they try to learn about their food and ask themselves what's really for dinner. Year of the Cow follows the trials and tribulations of a home cook as he begins to form a deeper relationship with food and the environment. From meeting the rancher who raised his cow to learning how to successfully pack a freezer with cow parts, Stone gets to know his bovine and delves into our diets and eating habits, examining the ethnography of cattle, how previous generations ate, why environmentalists and real food aficionados are mad for grass-fed beef, why certain cuts of beef tend to end up on our plates (while boldly experimenting with the ones that don't), and much more. Over the course of dozens of nose-to-tail meals, Jared cooks his way through his cow armed with a pioneering spirit and a good sense of humor. He becomes more mindful of his diet, makes changes to his lifestyle, and bravely confronts challenges he never expected—like how to dry beef jerky without attracting the neighborhood wildlife to the backyard, and how to find deliciousness in the less-common cuts of meat like the tongue and heart—sharing a recipe at the end of each chapter. By examining the food that fuels his life and pondering why we eat the way we do, Jared and his family slowly discover to how live a life more fully—and experience a world of culinary adventures along the way.

Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale


Adam Minter - 2019
    Decluttering. A parent's death. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country-or even halfway across the world-to people and places who find value in what we leave behind.In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry of reuse: thrift stores in the American Southwest to vintage shops in Tokyo, flea markets in Southeast Asia to used-goods enterprises in Ghana, and more. Along the way, Minter meets the fascinating people who handle-and profit from-our rising tide of discarded stuff, and asks a pressing question: In a world that craves shiny and new, is there room for it all?Secondhand offers hopeful answers and hard truths. A history of the stuff we've used and a contemplation of why we keep buying more, it also reveals the marketing practices, design failures, and racial prejudices that push used items into landfills instead of new homes. Secondhand shows us that it doesn't have to be this way, and what really needs to change to build a sustainable future free of excess stuff.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things


William McDonough - 2002
    But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.Waste equals food. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being "recycled" -- really, downcycled -- into low-grade materials and uses. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do as well.

Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World--80+ Recipes for a Greener Planet and a Healthier You


Matthew Prescott - 2018
    Check it out." -Ellen DeGeneres In Food Is the Solution, Matthew Prescott, Senior Food Policy Director for the Humane Society and a leader in the environmental food movement, shows how our plates have the power to heal the world. This lavishly designed resource and recipe collection shows how anyone can help solve the world’s major issues—environmental problems chief among them—simply by incorporating more plants into their diets. Featuring investigative reporting, compelling infographics, and essays from notable contributors like Dr. Michael Greger, John Mackey, James Cameron, Paul McCartney, and Wolfgang Puck, Food Is the Solution will inspire us all to put more plants on our plates. What we eat will determine what kind of world we live in and what kind of world we live on—and Matthew Prescott proves that meat-heavy diets are destroying the planet. Imagine a world in which we are all healthier. Imagine a world where the air is clean, forests dense, water pure, and animal life healthy. That world is a happier world, a better world—and the delectable plant-based foods Prescott shows us how to prepare in Food Is the Solution will help us create it.“Food is power, and this book will help you use it.”— Chef David Chang, Momofuku“Devour this book. Eat it up. It might just save your life and the world.” — Michael Greger, MD, New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Die