Environment Books - Page 4

Green Goes with Everything: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet

Sloan Barnett

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Personal Health -> Healthy Living
Subjects -> Home & Garden -> How-to & Home Improvements -> Cleaning, Caretaking & Relocating
Subjects -> Home & Garden -> How-to & Home Improvements -> Green Housecleaning

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Imagine if your best friend gave you vital information that could protect you and your family, and save you money, and help the planet. Imagine if you were given clear, simple choices, small changes that could have a big impact on your life. And you could still wear leather shoes and deodorant. You'd listen, right?

Well, think of Today show contributor Sloan Barnett as that friend. A mother of three, a dedicated consumer advocate, Sloan gives us a fast, simple, down-toearth primer on the ways our homes are making us sick, and what we can all do to transform them into the safe sanctuaries we want and need them to be.

Sloan exposes the toxic truth behind the household products we use every day -- from laundry detergent to toothpaste to lipstick. She explains how these and other seemingly benign stuff can harm us and our children. She offers an array of alternatives, and inspires us to see that we're never helpless: Every day, we have the power to make better, smarter, safer choices.

Packed with common sense and sass, product picks and practical tips, Green Goes With Everything is for everyone who wants to live a healthier life.

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition

Lester R. Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

exhaustive and detail oriented 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is a difficult book to get wrapped around. Which is good news, and then again it is bad news.

The good news is that this is an excellent and wide-sweeping run-up to the current health of our Earth.

Such topics as Our Socially Divided World, Eradicating Poverty, Designing Cities For People, and The Great Mobilization are spread over 287 pages of dense statistics and research, backed up by nearly another 100 pages of footnotes.

The bad news? There is far more content than is of interest to me - the motivated renewable energy reader. Some day I will wade through the less interesting parts, and then leave the remainder as a source reference.

The book cover heralds "REVISED AND EXPANDED". Actually, I would have preferred the less-is-more previous edition.

Editorial Review:

"How to build a more just world and save the planet....We should all heed Brown's advice."—Bill Clinton

In this updated edition of the landmark Plan B, Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first-century civilization. The world faces many environmental trends of disruption and decline, including rising temperatures and spreading water shortage. In addition to these looming threats, we face the peaking of oil, annual population growth of 70 million, a widening global economic divide, and a growing list of failing states. The scale and complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent

With Plan A, business as usual, we have neglected these issues overly long. In Plan B 3.0, Lester R. Brown warns that the only effective response now is a World War II-type mobilization like that in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 216 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency was an underground hit, going into nine printings of the hardcover edition. His shocking vision for our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders and was the subject of much debate, stimulating discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels. Now in paperback, with a new afterword, The Long Emergency is set to reach an even larger audience.

The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind, much of it based on the exploitation of cheap, nonrenewable fossil-fuel energy. But the oil age is at an end. Life as we know it is about to change radically, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Riveting and authoritative, The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore.

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring

Richard Preston

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees–the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

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

Elizabeth Rogers, Thomas M. Kostigen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ellen DeGeneres, Robert Redford, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Martha Stewart, Tyra Banks, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Tiki Barber, Owen Wilson, and Justin Timberlake tell you how they make a difference to the environment.

Inside The Green Book, find out how you can too:

- Don’t ask for ATM receipts. 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.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)

Bjorn Lomborg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 97 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A much welcome, balanced and clear-headed argument 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book is excellent in that it is neither written from the point of view of an alarmist nor of a denier. This middle ground is sadly lacking from the climate change debate in this day and age. Non-economists might find the constant cost-benefit analysis somewhat hard to fathom, but there are very few hard-to-understand parts.

Obviously, the science used to justify Lomborg's claims have, and will continue to be, challenged. Nevertheless, it is useful just to point out the danger of climate change hysteria that predominates the media.

My only problem with this book is the disproportionately large section at the back of the book denoted to notes. While this is necessary, it means the book is substantially shorter than it appears. I enjoyed the book and a little disappointed that so much of it is bibliography. But I still highly recommend it.

Editorial Review:

A startling book that reshapes the debate about global warming and offers a moderate approach to meeting its challenges.

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered—the Kyoto Protocol, for example—have a staggering potential cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, but, ultimately, will have little impact on the world's temperature. He suggests that rather than institutionalizing these programs to “cool” the earth's temperature 100 years from now, we should focus our resources on some of the world's most pressing immediate concerns, such as: fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS, and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply. And he considers why and how this debate has developed an atmosphere in which dissenters are immediately demonized.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 84 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Most businesses still operate according to a world view that hasn't changed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Then, natural resources were abundant and labor was the limiting factor of production. But now, there's a surplus of people, while natural capital natural resources and the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services is scarce and relatively expensive. In this groundbreaking blueprint for a new economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution. Natural Capitalism describes a future in which business and environmental interests increasingly overlap, and in which companies can improve their bottom lines, help solve environmental problems and feel better about what they do all at the same time. Citing hundreds of compelling stories from a wide array of sectors, the book shows how to realize benefits both for today's shareholders and for future generations and how, by firing the unproductive tons, gallons, and kilowatt-hours it's possible to keep the people who will foster the innovation that drives future improvement.

World Made by Hand: A Novel

James Howard Kunstler

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Not yet published By: Grove Press

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 96 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever.

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them

Iain Murray

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

From a former environmentalist teacher, now a conservationist steward 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 18 people found this review helpful.

I once proudly called myself an environmentalist. Now I am a conservationist and a steward.

I believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there!

Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance".

I am now embarrassed by all of that.

Why? Because I fell for the hype and did not do simple things like check sources and see if what I was being told was backed up by other testimony. Sometimes, simple facts get in the way (like Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" book predictions never quite came true, like those predictions in the videos I showed to my class) and make it hard to follow that line of reasoning any longer.

So, what are the 7 environmental catastrophes:

1. DDT & Malaria in Africa
2. Ethanol as fuel
3. The "Pill" and its effect on fish downstream from water treatment plants.
4. The burning of Yellowstone and other National lands
5. The Cuyahoga River burning
6. The Endangered Species Act "Shoot, Shovel and Shut up!"
7. The Aral Sea

Positives:

This book is extremely well-written and approachable. It is also well-documented with more than 300 footnotes.

His commentary on DDT & Malaria is not only well thought out, but correctly placed as the first disaster since it causes around 1 Million deaths per year. He does not deny that DDT can have an affect on large birds, but he points out that it was not the use of DDT that caused it, but rather the mis-use of it. DDT is effective in small doses and does not need multiple applications to control bug populations. The multiple applications is a mis-use that makes it dangerous for birds (although it begs the question: Is any bird species worth 1 million lives every year - we are now up to nearly 40 million dead due to malaria carried by mosquitos). It does not cause human birth defects as Rachel "Silent Spring" Carson suggested. He skewers her research. Why it is still held up with pride as the start of the modern environmental movement is a mystery to me.

His commentary on Al Gore (do as I say, not as I do) and what he characterizes as the Church of Eco-Paganism are brilliant. He builds on Michael Crichton's commentary along the same lines and calls it a form of eco-Lutheranism (not to insult Lutherans - I am one and thought it was brilliant) since it is based on "Not one works, but on Faith alone," which is why the high priest of the movement, Al Gore, can use more than 20 times the electricity of the average Tennessean, own 2 more homes and jet around the world while telling us to cut back - he has the Faith!

The commentary on the Endangered Species Act was strong and largely built on an essay by the author of Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt. It studies the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act in which some people kill endangered species or destroy their habitats so they don't lose their property rights to a series of federal mandates.

Negatives:

His commentary on ethanol is strong, but goes overboard. His math sometimes does not make sense. He claims (correctly, I'm pretty sure) that all of the gasoline must be 10% ethanol. A few pages later he notes that if this were to happen an extra 55 million acres of corn would have to be planted. Well, we're already doing it. He also cites sources that claim we'd have to clear cut forests to plant all of this corn. I live in the cornbelt (Indiana) and I grew up on the farm. Every farmer has fields that are devoted to hay, straw or pastureland that will be converted to fields before we start clearing forests. Plus, increased yields (an achievement Murray points out in this chapter) will make up some of the difference as well.

The Aral Sea disaster (it was drained to provide water to meet Soviet cotton crop targets) is awful, but can only loosely be placed at the feet of environmentalists. He cites it as an example of poor choices of central planning and a cautionary tale to central planning schemes like Kyoto or carbon credits, but this is a loose association at best.

So, in sum, this is a pleasure to read. Well-cited, but not a perfect book.

Editorial Review:

Iain Murray's rollicking exposé reveals how environmental blowhards waste more energy, endanger more species, and actually kill more people than the environmental villains they finger.

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

Janine M. Benyus

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This profound and accessible book details how science is studying nature's best ideas to solve our toughest 21st–century problems.

If chaos theory transformed our view of the universe, biomimicry is transforming our life on Earth. Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature – taking advantage of evolution's 3.8 billion years of R\'9126D since the first bacteria. Biomimics study nature's best ideas: photosynthesis, brain power, and shells – and adapt them for human use. They are revolutionising how we invent, compute, heal ourselves, harness energy, repair the environment, and feed the world.

Science writer and lecturer Janine Benyus names and explains this phenomenon. She takes us into the lab and out in the field with cutting–edge researchers as they stir vats of proteins to unleash their computing power; analyse how electrons zipping around a leaf cell convert sunlight into fuel in trillionths of a second; discover miracle drugs by watching what chimps eat when theyᱥ sick; study the hardy prairie as a model for low–maintenance agriculture; and more.