Cities for People


Jan Gehl - 2010
    In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people.Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl explains how to develop cities that are lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy.The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century


Alex Steffen - 2006
    Each chapter will offer practical answers to important questions, such as: Why does buying locally produced food make sense? What steps can we take to influence our workplace toward sustainability? How do we volunteer and advocate more effectively? How can we travel, live, work and learn in world changing ways? How, in short, can every human being help build a better future locally and globally? Illustrated with photographs and designed by Stefan Sagmeister, one of the most influential graphic designers working today, Worldchanging will prove that a life that is sustainably prosperous, just and democratic, dynamic and peaceful, is not just possible, it's here.

Houseplants for a Healthy Home: 50 Indoor Plants to Help You Breathe Better, Sleep Better, and Feel Better All Year Round


Jon Vanzile - 2018
    Plants are a quick and easy way to add life, color, and texture to any indoor space. But houseplants offer so much more than just visual interest to a room. They can purify the air, reduce stress, improve sleep—and much more! Houseplants for a Healthy Home explains the specific health and wellness benefits of 50 common, easy-to-grow, and popular houseplants, while introducing you to new favorites bound to brighten your life. You will find an A-to-Z guide of a variety of the plants that includes a beautiful illustration of each plant, along with the plant’s health benefits and clear, detailed care instructions. Let Houseplants for a Healthy Home lead you to a life in full bloom.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach


Ben Falk - 2013
    The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies(relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading.The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings."The Resilient Homestead" is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

The Jewel Garden: A Story of Despair and Redemption


Montagu Don - 2004
    At the same time THE JEWEL GARDEN is the story of a creative partnership that has weathered the greatest storm, and a testament to the healing powers of the soil. In his weekly column for the Observer, Monty Don has always been candid about the garden's role in helping him to pull back from the abyss of depression; THE JEWEL GARDEN elaborates on this much further. Written in an optimistic, autobiographical vein, Monty and Sarah's story is truly an exploration of what it means to be a gardener.

The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time


Elizabeth Rogers - 2007
    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.

The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living


Helen Nearing - 1970
    This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything


Mike Berners-Lee - 2010
    By talking through a hundred or so items, Mike Berners-Lee sets out to give us a carbon instinct for the footprint of literally anything we do, buy and think about. He helps us pick our battles by laying out the orders of magnitude. The book ranges from the everyday (foods, books, plastic bags, bikes, flights, baths...) and the global (deforestation, data centres, rice production, the World Cup, volcanoes, ...) Be warned, some of the things you thought you knew about green living may be about to be turned on their head. Never preachy but packed full of information and always entertaining.

Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution


Auden Schendler - 2009
    Soccer moms drive Priuses. And the business consultants say it's easy and profitable. In reality, though, many green-leaning businesses, families, and governments are still fiddling while the planet burns. Why? Because implementing sustainability is brutally difficult.In this witty and contrarian book, Auden Schendler, a sustainable business foot soldier with over a decade's worth of experience, gives us a peek under the hood of the green movement. The consultants, he argues, are clueless. Fluorescent bulbs might be better for our atmosphere, but what do you say to the boutique hotel owner who thinks they detract from his?We'll only solve our problems if we're realistic about the challenge of climate change. In this eye-opening, inspiring book, Schendler illuminates the path.

The Spy Who Fell to Earth


Ahron Bregman - 2016
    Did he jump or was he pushed? He is identified as an Egyptian millionaire who has been living in the UK since the early 1980s. His name is Ashraf Marwan. But that is only part of the tale, for Marwan was also an international businessman and arms dealer, married to Mona Abdel Nasser, daughter of the legendary Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser. A few years before, I blew Marwan’s cover, unmasking him as a top spy who had been working for Egypt’s biggest enemy – Israel. But there is a twist – one that even the most audacious writer of fiction might baulk at. Soon after I exposed him, Marwan made contact. We met, became friends, and then kept in touch for almost five years. The day before he plunges to his death, Marwan phones. He is anxious and shaken and he asks for an urgent face-to-face meeting. We schedule it for the next day. It never takes place. Around the time we are due to meet, Marwan’s body is found in the private rose garden below his flat in central London. This is the story of what came to be known as ‘The Marwan Affair’, which shocked the public and the Intelligence community. It is based on my diary notes; together with messages I sent Marwan over the years they tell the inside story of my relationship with the spy some call the greatest secret agent of the twentieth century.

Who We Be: The Colorization of America


Jeff Chang - 2014
    A four-letter word. The greatest social divide in American life, a half-century ago and today. During that time, the U.S. has seen the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in its history, what can be called the colorization of America.But the same nation that elected its first Black president on a wave of hope—another four-letter word—is still plunged into endless culture wars. How do Americans see race now? How has that changed—and not changed—over the half-century? After eras framed by words like "multicultural" and "post-racial," do we see each other any more clearly?Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin into a powerful, unusual, and timely cultural history of the idea of racial progress. In this follow-up to the award-winning classic Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang brings fresh energy, style, and sweep to the essential American story.

Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World


Charles, Prince of Wales - 2010
    Prince Charles shows how the solutions to problems like climate change lie not only in technology but in our ability to change the way we view the modern world.For decades, the Prince of Wales has been studying a wide array of disciplines to understand every aspect of man's impact on the natural world, and in that time he has examined everything from architecture to organic farming to sustainable economics. Now, for the first time, he speaks out about his years of research, presenting a fascinating look at how modern industrialization has led us to a state of disharmony with nature, created climate change, and pushed us to the brink of disaster.From the rice farms of India to the prairies of America's corn belt, from the temples of Ancient Egypt to the laboratories of industrial designers, Harmony spans the globe to identify the different ways that contemporary life has abandoned the hard-earned practices of our history, a shift that has spurred a host of social problems and accelerated climate change.Drawing on cases from farming, healthcare, transportation, and design, the Prince of Wales also offers solutions for change, creating a new vision for our world, one that incorporates the traditional wisdom of our past with the modern science of our present to avert catastrophe. In the end, Harmony paints a holistic portrait of what we as a species have lost in the modern age, while outlining the steps we can take to regain the harmony of our ancestors.Illustrated with lush, four-color photographs and charts, this intelligent, practical, and well-reasoned guide is an indispensable weapon in the battle to save our planet.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities


Jane Jacobs - 1961
    In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America


Thomas L. Friedman - 2008
    Friedman speaks to America's urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet--one that is "hot, flat, and crowded."  In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession.  The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its economy, but to lead the world in radically innovating toward cleaner energy.  And it could inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, and concern for the common good that are our greatest national resources. Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge--and the promise--of the future.

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back


Jane Holtz Kay - 1997
    Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.