Church leaders often fall into ruts, working on automatic pilot just trying to get things together, which does not allow for much creativity or focus on designing services that lead to transformation for those involved in them.Engage is a step-by-step, stress-free guide to planning worship services that allow for and foster true life change. Comprehensive in scope, Engage provides teaching pastors, worship leaders, and volunteers with the tools they need to work together to develop and implement a worship planning system that improves communication, enhances creativity, and honors Jesus every week.

    The tactics have been slick, but PR expert James Hoggan and investigative journalist Richard Littlemore have compiled a readable, accessible guidebook through the muck. Beginning with leaked memos from the coal industry, the oil industry and the tobacco-sponsored lie-about-science industry, the authors expose the plans to "debunk" global warming; they track the execution of those plans; and they illuminate the results—confusion, inaction, and an epidemic of public mistrust.Climate Cover-Up names names, identifying bogus experts who are actually paid lobbyists and flaks. The authors reveal the PR techniques used to misinform, to mangle the language, and to intimidate the media into maintaining a phony climate change debate. Exposing the seedy origins of that debate, this book will leave you fuming at the extent, the effect, and the ethical affront of the climate cover-up.

    Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.If you would like to harvest your own vegetables, raise city chickens, or convert to solar energy, this practical, hands-on book is full of step-by-step projects that will get you started homesteading immediately, whether you live in an apartment or a house. It is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.Projects include: How to grow food on a patio or balcony How to clean your house without toxins How to preserve food How to cook with solar energy How to divert your greywater to your garden How to choose the best homestead for you Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this illustrated, smartly designed, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. Authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen happily farm in Los Angeles and run the urban homestead blog www.homegrownrevolution.org.

    The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows—ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity—for their civilized existence. In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel–driven civilization.Humans are the only species that can systematically harness energies outside their bodies, using the power of their intellect and an enormous variety of artifacts—from the simplest tools to internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors. The epochal transition to fossil fuels affected everything: agriculture, industry, transportation, weapons, communication, economics, urbanization, quality of life, politics, and the environment. Smil describes humanity's energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering readers a magisterial overview. This book is an extensively updated and expanded version of Smil's Energy in World History (1994). Smil has incorporated an enormous amount of new material, reflecting the dramatic developments in energy studies over the last two decades and his own research over that time.

    VALUE(S) is a meditation on his experiences that examines the short-comings and challenges of the market in the past decade which he argues has led to rampant, public distrust and the need for radical change.Focusing on four major crises-the Global Financial Crisis, the Global Health Crisis, Climate Change and the 4th Industrial Revolution-- Carney proposes responses to each. His solutions are tangible action plans for leaders, companies and countries to transform the value of the market back into the value of humanity.

    “In the case of Andrew Harvey, the light he sheds is like a meteor burst across the inner sky.”In The Hope, Andrew Harvey offers not only a guide to discovering your divine purpose but also the blueprint for a better world. It consists of the necessary elements that can inspire greatness in each of us. Based on Harvey’s concepts of Sacred Activism, a global initiative designed to save the world from its downward spiral of greed, pain, and self-destruction, the book is an enlightening text that reflects our world today, while in turn, shapes our future.There are seven laws of Sacred Activism that have the potential to transform our world. Each law, in its own unique way, promotes love above all other impulses. Sacred Activism is about finding gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion; it is about opening yourself up to the kindness within you, letting go of pain, and making a conscious choice to help heal the world.Learn how to incorporate a spiritual practice into your life, transform anger into positive energy, and take part in a global community. Reclaim a world that for too long has been driven by selfishness and hatred. Discover the infinite joy of giving. Turn away from everything you have been and done and believed, and dive into the consciousness of a divine love that embraces all beings. While the future may appear bleak, The Hope provides practical advice to all those who want positive change.

    Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself. Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling towards ten billion by 2100. Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes’s singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.

    From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist to emerging sectors such as peer-to-peer lending (Zopa), "swap trading" (Swaptree), and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not only what we consume but how we consume. While ranging enormously in scale and purpose, these companies and organizations are redefining how goods and services are exchanged, valued, and created—in areas as diverse as finance and travel, agriculture and technology, and education and retail. Traveling among global entrepreneurs and revolutionaries and exploring rising ventures as well as established companies adapting to these opportunities, authors Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers outline in bold and imaginative ways how Collaborative Consumption may very well change the world. Anyone interested in the business opportunities and social power of collaboration will enjoy this smart, timely book.

    Imagine a planet where North American and Eurasian navies are squaring off over shipping lanes through an acidified, ice-free Arctic. Centuries later, their northern descendants retreat southward as the recovering sea freezes over again. And later still, future nations plan how to avert an approaching Ice Age... by burning what remains of our fossil fuels. These are just a few of the events that are likely to befall Earth and human civilization in the next 100,000 years. And it will be the choices we make in this century that will affect that future more than those of any previous generation. We are living at the dawn of the Age of Humans; the only question is how long that age will last. Few of us have yet asked, "What happens after global warming?" Drawing upon the latest, groundbreaking works of a handful of climate visionaries, Deep Future helps us look beyond 2100 a.d. to the next hundred millennia of life on Earth.

    Yet it is so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the present century. These two contrasting truths—unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril—have become compellingly clear during the past two decades of research on biological diversity.In this dazzlingly intelligent and ultimately hopeful book, Wilson describes what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose forever—in many cases animals, insects, and plants we have only just discovered, and whose potential to nourish us, protect us, and cure our illnesses is immeasurable—and what we can do to save them. In the process, he explores the ethical and religious bases of the conservation movement and deflates the myth that environmental policy is antithetical to economic growth by illustrating how new methods of conservation can ensure long-term economic well-being.The Future of Life is a magisterial accomplishment: both a moving description of our biosphere and a guidebook for the protection of all its species, including humankind.

    So any strategy without sustainability at its core is just plain irresponsible - bad for business, bad for shareholders, bad for the environment. These challenges represent unprecedented opportunities for big brands - such as Clorox, Dell, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Wal-Mart - that are implementing integral, rather than tangential, strategies for sustainability. What these companies are doing illuminates the book's practical framework for change, which involves engaging employees, using transparency as a business tool, and reaping the rewards of a networked organizational structure.Leave your quaint notions of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism behind. Werbach is starting a whole new dialogue around sustainability of enterprise and life as we know it in organizations and individuals. Sustainability is now a true competitive strategic advantage, and building it into the core of your business is the only means to ensure that your company - and your world - will survive.

    Global in scope, each story is set in the year 2040 and imagines what the world might look like if the dire warnings issued by the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C were to come true. Using fiction—informed here and there by realism and climate science—this issue explores the tangible, day-to-day implications of these cataclysmic scientific projections. Featuring Tommy Orange, Elif Shafak, Luis Alberto Urrea, Asja Bakic, Rachel Heng, and others, with gorgeous full-color illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.From the issue’s introduction by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Chief Program Officer of the NRDC: “Each story in this special issue is the product of a unique collaboration between its author and an NRDC policy expert with specialized knowledge of how climate change is already affecting the world, and how it could continue to affect the world in the decades to come. The result, we hope, is a collection where fiction’s already considerable power is fortified by science.”Featuring original stories by:Tommy OrangeClaire G. ColemanBirna Anna BjörnsdóttirLuis Alberto UrreaElif ShafakAbbey Mei OtisAsja BakićRachel HengKanishk TharoorMikael Awake

    In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.We follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet’s wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.le we still can.

    But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it. More urgently, it is now clear that the ecosystems that sustain our economies are collapsing under the impacts of rising consumption. Unless we can radically lower the environmental impact of economic activity - and there is no evidence to suggest that we can - we will have to devise a path to prosperity that does not rely on continued growth.Economic heresy? Or an opportunity to improve the sources of well-being, creativity and lasting prosperity that lie outside the realm of the market? Tim Jackson provides a credible vision of how human society can flourish �1/2 within the ecological limits of a finite planet. Fulfilling this vision is simply the most urgent task of our times.This book is a substantially revised and updated version of Jackson's controversial study for the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK Government. The study rapidly became the most downloaded report in the Commission's nine year history when it was launched earlier this year.

    Tallamy’s first book, Bringing Nature Home, sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being. In Nature's Best Hope, he takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots, home-grown approach to conservation. Nature's Best Hope advocates for homeowners everywhere to turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. This home-based approach doesn’t rely on the federal government and protects the environment from the whims of politics. It is also easy to do, and readers will walk away with specific suggestions they can incorporate into their own yards. Nature's Best Hope is nature writing at its best—rooted in history, progressive in its advocacy, and above all, actionable and hopeful. By proposing practical measures that ordinary people can easily do, Tallamy gives us reason to believe that the planet can be preserved for future generations.