Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water


Peter H. Gleick - 2010
    A world-renowned scientist and freshwater expert, Gleick is a MacArthur Foundation "genius," and according to the BBC, an environmental visionary. And he drinks from the tap. Why don’t the rest of us?   Bottled and Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years—and why we are poorer for it. It’s a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than thirty billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales.   Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles? With a scientist’s eye and a natural storyteller’s wit, Gleick investigates whether industry claims about the relative safety, convenience, and taste of bottled versus tap hold water. And he exposes the true reasons we’ve turned to the bottle, from fearmongering by business interests and our own vanity to the breakdown of public systems and global inequities.   "Designer" H2O may be laughable, but the debate over commodifying water is deadly serious. It comes down to society’s choices about human rights, the role of government and free markets, the importance of being "green," and fundamental values. Gleick gets to the heart of the bottled water craze, exploring what it means for us to bottle and sell our most basic necessity.

Green Beauty Recipes: Easy Homemade Recipes to Make your Own Skincare, Hair Care and Body Care Products


Julie Gabriel - 2010
    You will learn which vegetable oils, herbs, floral waters, essential oils, plant-based emulsifiers, and natural preservatives to use, how to pack and label your own beauty products, and how to store them safely.The book contains more than 200 recipes and step-by-step techniques used by the author, holistic nutritionist Julie Gabriel (THE GREEN BEAUTY GUIDE) to create her own organic skincare line, Petite Marie Organics.Free from artificial ingredients and based on traditional beauty wisdom, recipes and advice in this book are easy to follow and cost very little to prepare. Practical, straightforward, and fun, these recipes are equally suitable for green beauty enthusiasts as well as professional beauty practitioners.After reading this book, you will be able to create your own creams, lotions, cleansers, toners, masks, hair treatments, sun protection and baby care products. Facial cleansers, moisturizers, anti aging serums, sun protection lotions, hair treatments, and even deodorants can be prepared easily at home using only natural, easily available ingredients.In just minutes, you will be able to prepare a green, organic beauty product at a fraction of a cost of conventional chemical brew. You can pamper yourself head to toe with luxurious hair masks, deep cleansing home facials, aromatic massage oils, nourishing body lotions, and age-rewinding moisturizers in the most natural, luxuriously green way!

Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties


Beth Kobliner - 1996
    And who could blame them? These so-called millennials have come of age in the wake of the worst economic crisis in memory, and are now trying to get by in its aftermath. They owe record levels of student loan debt, face sky-high rents, and struggle to live on a budget in an uncertain economy. It’s time for them to get a financial life. For two decades, Beth Kobliner’s bestseller has been the financial bible for people in their twenties and thirties. With her down-to-earth style, she has taught them how to get out of debt, learn to save, and invest for their futures. In this completely revised and updated edition, Kobliner shares brand-new insights and concrete, actionable advice geared to help a new generation of readers form healthy financial habits that will last a lifetime. With fresh material that reflects the changing digital world, Get a Financial Life remains an essential tool for young people learning how to manage their money. From tackling taxes to boosting credit scores, Get a Financial Life can show those just starting out how to decrease their debt, avoid common money mistakes, and navigate the world of personal finance in today’s ever-changing landscape.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures


Merlin Sheldrake - 2020
    It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative


Florence Williams - 2017
    Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth


James E. Lovelock - 1979
    Written for the non-scientist, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's living matter-air, ocean, and land surfaces-forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life. Since Gaia was first published, many of Jim Lovelock's predictions have come true, and his theory has become a hotly argued topic in scientific circles. Here, in a new Preface, Lovelock outlines his present state of the debate.

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference


Greta Thunberg - 2019
    Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

Money: A User’s Guide


Laura Whateley - 2018
    It will teach you how to get a great credit score, how to save hundreds on bills, and offer practical advice on every difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding including:Housing (for renters and buyers)Student LoansPensionsPaying off debtStocks and sharesEthical investmentsMoney and Mental healthMoney and LoveThis essential book will give you the confidence and clarity to take back control of your bank account, enabling you to thrive in all areas of your life.

All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest for Health and Happiness in an Age of Ecological Anxiety


Nathanael Johnson - 2013
    This ecological anxiety has polarized a new generation of Americans: many are drawn to natural solutions and organic lifestyles, while others rally around high-tech development and industrial efficiencies. Johnson argues that both views, when taken to extremes, can be harmful, even deadly.Johnson, raised in the crunchy-granola epicenter of Nevada City, California, lovingly and rigorously scrutinizes his family's all-natural mindset, a quest that brings him into the worlds of an outlaw midwife, radical doctors, renegade farmers and one hermit forester. Along the way, he uncovers paradoxes at the heart of our ecological condition: Why, even as medicine improves, are we becoming less healthy? Why are more American women dying in childbirth? Why do we grow fatter the more we diet? Why have so many attempts to save the environment backfired?In this sparklingly intelligent, wry, and scrupulously reported narrative, Johnson teases fact from faith and offers a rousing and original vision for a middle ground between natural and technological solutions that will assuage frustrated environmentalists, perplexed parents, and confused consumers alike.

The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be


J.B. MacKinnon - 2013
    MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. What remains today is an illusion of the wild--an illusion that has in many ways created our world. In 3 beautifully drawn parts, MacKinnon revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and 20 times more whales swim in the sea. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. Finally, he calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. MacKinnon never fails to remind us that nature is a menagerie of marvels. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world," MacKinnon writes, "and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."

Not On The Label


Felicity Lawrence - 2002
    She discovered why beef waste ends up in chicken, why a single lettuce might be sprayed six times with chemicals before it ends up in our salad, why bread is full of water. And she showed how obesity, the appalling conditions of migrant workers, ravaged fields in Europe and the supermarket on our high street are all intimately connected. Her discoveries would change the way we thought about the UK food industry for ever. And, when the horsemeat scandal hit the headlines in 2013, her book seemed extraordinarily prescient once again. Now, in this new edition of her seminal work, Felicity Lawrence delves deeply into that scandal and uncovers how the great British public ended up eating horses. 'A brave examination of the calamities caused by a policy laughingly called one of 'cheap food'' Jeremy Paxman, Observer 'Book of the Year' 'Challenges each and every one of us to think again about what we buy and eat. It's almost like uncovering a secret state within the state' Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4's Start The Week 'A thorough, complex and shocking insight into the food we eat in the twenty-first century . . . Perhaps this should be sold as the most effective diet book ever written' Daily Mail Felicity Lawrence is an award-winning journalist and editor who has been writing on food-related issues for over twenty years. She lives in London.

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors


Carolyn Finney - 2014
    Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the great outdoors and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces. Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.

How Not to Kill Your Houseplant: Survival Tips for the Horticulturally Challenged


Veronica Peerless - 2017
    You need this book. Give plants a chance.Help your plant live with survival tips and learn the simple ways not to kill your plants.With over 50 different types of popular houseplants, How Not to Kill Your Houseplant summarizes what type of care your plants do (or don't) need. Be on the lookout for warning signs of a sick plant, from brown spots to crispy leaves, and make sure you take the proper action to rescue your plant.Learn the basics of horticulture, from watering your plant to what kind of soil it should be placed in to how much light it needs every day to if a certain type of plant will thrive in your living space. Find out how to keep a cactus alive, where to hang air plants, and how to repot succulents.Full of helpful tips, pictures, and informational panels, How Not to Kill Your Houseplant will turn your home into a beautiful greenhouse of healthy, happy plants.

Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything


B.J. Fogg - 2019
    Start with two pushups a day, not a two-hour workout; or five deep breaths each morning rather than an hour of meditation. In Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg brings his experience coaching more than 40,000 people to help you lose weight, de-stress, sleep better, or achieve any goal of your choice.  You just need Fogg’s behavior formula: make it easy, make it fit your life, and make it rewarding. Whenever you get in your car, take one yoga breath. Smile.  Whenever you get in bed, turn off your phone. Give yourself a high five. Change can be easy—once it starts, it grows.  Let B.J. Fogg show you exactly how.

The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done


Piers Steel - 2010
    Writing with humour, humanity and solid scientific information reminiscent of Stumbling on Happiness and Freakonomics, Piers Steel explains why we knowingly and willingly put off a course of action despite recognizing we'll be worse off for it.For those who surf the Web instead of finishing overdue assignments, who always say diets start tomorrow, who stay up late watching TV to put off going to sleep, The Procrastination Equation explains why we do what we do — or in this case don't — and why in Western societies we're in the midst of an escalating procrastination epidemic.Dr. Piers Steel takes on the myths and misunderstandings behind procrastination and motivation — showing us how procrastination affects our lives, health, careers and happiness and what we can do about it. With accessible prose and the benefits of new scientific research, he provides insight into why we procrastinate even though the result is that we are less happy, healthy, even wealthy. Who procrastinates and why? How many ways, big and small, do we procrastinate? How can we stop doing it? The reasons are part cultural, part psychological, part biological. And, with a million new ways to distract ourselves in the digitized world — all of which feed on our built-in impulsiveness — more of us are potentially damaging ourselves by putting things off. But Steel not only analyzes the factors that weigh us down but the things that motivate us — including understanding the value of procrastination.