Urban Homesteading

Concerns for our unsustainable, fossil-fuelled lifestyle underlie Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume’s book, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living. The book provides a colourful overview of what each of us can do to build a more self-sufficient future. It explains the principles of homesteading and permaculture, and provides a wide range of ideas and how-to projects for the urban dweller. Presented in a straightforward and accessible manner, skills depicted range from growing and preserving your own food – both plant and animal – to natural building and grey water recycling. The authors explain how even small changes we make will benefit our communities, our environment and ourselves. is a revised edition of a book that addresses the common feeling that the planet is in trouble and we have little control over the outcome. Author Frances Moore Lappé tackles the issues of the world by acknowledging the problems and the overwhelming task of dealing with them, and then doesn’t waste any time offering up solutions.Click through for our full review… Continue reading Urban Homesteading

Getting A Grip 2

Getting A Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want is a revised edition of a book that addresses the common feeling that the planet is in trouble and we have little control over the outcome. Author Frances Moore Lappé tackles the issues of the world by acknowledging the problems and the overwhelming task of dealing with them, and then doesn’t waste any time offering up solutions.Click through for our full review… Continue reading Getting A Grip 2

Book Review: Getting A Grip 2

Getting A Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want is a revised edition of a book that addresses the common feeling that the planet is in trouble and we have little control over the outcome. Author Frances Moore Lappé tackles the issues of the world by acknowledging the problems and the overwhelming task of dealing with them, and then doesn’t waste any time offering up solutions.Click through for our full review… Continue reading Book Review: Getting A Grip 2

The Secret Life of Stuff

The underlying message in Julie Hill’s book, The Secret Life of Stuff: A Manual for a New Material World, is one of conscious simplification. Not one to slap the wrists of consumers, she professes a love of shopping and the joy she gets from the perfect “find” for pennies. She does, however, question the ways in which we currently try to “green” our buying habits.Click through for our full review… Continue reading The Secret Life of Stuff

Recovering a Lost River

In Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities, author Steven Hawley leads readers on a meandering journey up the Snake River – dropping in on the communities it threads through – to its wilderness headwaters in Idaho. The largest tributary of the Columbia River, the Snake was once one of the continent’s most productive salmon-bearing rivers, with salmon returns estimated to number in the tens of millions each year. Today its salmon runs are only a shadow of their former abundance and the species has been extirpated from some tributaries altogether.
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The Ptarmigan’s Dilemma

If I were asked by a visitor from outer space for the best information on the history and ecology of life on Earth, I’d offer this book. Deservedly short-listed for the 2010 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, The Ptarmigan’s Dilemma covers all the bases, bridging the authors’ decades of research into animal ecology and their many engaging encounters with animals. From Alternatives Journal 37.3: EcoBooks, published May 2011
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