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About the Author

Eric Holt-Jimenez's Official Website

Eric Holt-Giménez is the executive director of FoodFirst/Institute for Food and Development Policy. Eric is the editor of the 2011 Food First book, Food Movements Unite! Strategies to transform our food systems, the author of the 2009 Food First Book Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice. Eric is available for public speaking events. You can view some of his presentations by going to the tab on the left labeled Vimeo. His earlier book, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture chronicles the development of this movement in Mexico and Central America over two and a half decades. Eric worked with farmers, participated in their farmer-to-farmer trainings, and recorded their triumphs with his camera and pen. This engaging book is the product of that longitudinal participatory research. More information about the author can be found at http://www.foodfirst.org/ericvita/

	Food Movements Unite Food Movements Unite! is a collection of essays by food movement leaders from around the world that all seek to answer the perennial political question: What is to be done? The answers—from the multiple perspectives of community food security a, peasants and family farm leaders, labor activists, and leading food systems analysts—will lay out convergent strategies for the fair, sustainable, and democratic transformation of our food systems. Authors will address the corporate food regime head on, arguing persuasively not only for specific changes to the way our food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed, but specifying how these changes may come about, politically.		Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice By Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel with Annie ShattuckFood Rebellions! contains up to date information about the current political and economic realities of our food systems. Anchored in political economy and an historical perspective, it is a valuable academic resource for understanding the root causes of hunger, growing inequality, the industrial agri-foods complex, and political unrest. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Holt-Giménez and Patel give a detailed historical analysis of the events that led to the global food crisis and document the grassroots initiatives of social movements working to forge food sovereignty around the world. These social movements and this inspiring book compel readers to confront the crucial question: Who is hungry, why, and what can we do about it?
	Compesino a Compesino Campesino a Campesino tells the inspiring story of a true grassroots movement: poor peasant farmers teaching one another how to protect their environment while still earning a living. The first book in English about the farmer-led sustainable agriculture movement in Latin America, Campesino a Campesino includes lots of first-person stories and commentary from the farmer-teachers, mixing personal accounts with detailed analysis of the political, socioeconomic, and ecological factors that galvanized the movement.

About the Author

Born in South Africa, Marq de Villiers is a veteran Canadian journalist and the author of eight books on exploration, history, politics, and travel, including Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction), Down the Volga in a Time of Troubles, and Into Africa: A Journey Through the Ancient Empires, written with Sheila Hirtle. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and through eastern Europe and spent many years as Editor and then Publisher of Toronto Life magazine. More recently he was Editorial Director of WHERE Magazines International.

Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

In his award-winning book WATER, Marq de Villiers provides an eye-opening account of how we are using, misusing, and abusing our planet's most vital resource. Encompassing ecological, historical, and cultural perspectives, de Villiers reports from hot spots as diverse as China, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, where swelling populations and unchecked development have stressed fresh water supplies nearly beyond remedy. Political struggles for control of water rage around the globe, and rampant pollution daily poses dire ecological theats. With one eye on these looming crises and the other on the history of our dependence on our planet's most precious commodity, de Villiers has crafted a powerful narrative about the lifeblood of civilizations that will be "a wake-up call for concerned citizens, environmentalists, policymakers, and water drinkers everywhere" (Publishers Weekly).

About the Author

Brian Swimme's Official Website

Dr. Brian Swimme is a mathematical cosmologist on the graduate faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. (1978) from the University of Oregon specializing in gravitational dynamics, mathematical cosmology and singularity theory. Swimme was a faculty member in the Dept. of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington from 1978-1981. He was a member of the faculty at the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California from 1983-1989. He is the producer of a twelve-part dvd series Canticle to the Cosmos which has been distributed worldwide. Other dvd programs featuring Swimme’s ideas include The Earth’s Imagination and The Powers of the Universe. Brian Swimme's primary field of research is the nature of the evolutionary dynamics of the Universe. Swimme brings us a meaningful interpretation of the human as an emergent being within the Universe and Earth. His central concern is the role of the human within the Earth community.

	The Universe is a Green Dragon Communicating his ideas in the form of a classical dialogue between a youth and a wise elder, cosmologist Brian Swimme crafts a fascinating exploration into the creativity suffusing the universe. His explication of the fundamental powers of the cosmos is mystical and ecstatic and points directly to the need to activate one’s own creative powers.		The Universe Story Cosmologist Brian Swimme and cultural historian Thomas Berry provide a new, science-based cosmology for our times that provides an epic and poetic explanation of the creation of the universe and our place in it. A celebration of the unfolding of the cosmos--from the primordial flaring forth to the ecozoic era. From the big bang to the present and into the next millenium, "The Universe Story" unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity's evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.
	The Hidden Heart Of The Cosmos: Humanity And The New Story What does it mean to be human, to live on planet Earth, in the universe as it is now understood? In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos best-selling author and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme takes us on a journey through the cosmos in search of the "new story" that is developing in answer to this age-old question. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos opens up not only the exhilarating truths that science reveals of the birth of the universe, but how these truths can transform our lives. In such a view the cosmos appears as awesome and meaningful, its dynamics revelatory, and in this revelation can be found the wisdom humanity needs to face and overcome its present crises, particularly the soul-numbing consumerism that threatens to overwhelm not only individuals, families or societies, but the Earth itself. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos helps us to grasp the larger significance of the human enterprise in this evolving university. Upon meeting that challenge rests much of the vitality of Earth community, and the future quality of life, for ourselves and our children.

About the Author

David Suzuki's Official Website

David has received consistently high acclaim for his 30 years of award-winning work in broadcasting, explaining the complexities of science in a compelling, easily understood way. He is well known to millions as the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science television series, The Nature of Things. His eight part series, A Planet for the Taking won an award from the United Nations. His eight-part PBS series The Secret of Life was praised internationally, as was his five-part series The Brain for the Discovery Channel. For CBC Radio he founded the long running radio series, Quirks and Quarks and has presented two influential documentary series on the environment, From Naked Ape to Superspecies and It's a Matter of Survival. An internationally respected geneticist, David was a full Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. He is professor emeritus with UBC's Sustainable Development Research Institute. From 1969 to 1972 he was the recipient of the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship Award for the "Outstanding Canadian Research Scientist Under the Age of 35".

	The Sacred Balance This powerful book captures David Suzuki's vision for a world in which we can rediscover our place in nature and live in balance with our surroundings. It offers concrete suggestions for meeting our physical and spiritual needs while creating a way of life that is sustainable, fulfilling and just. It also tells the stories of people who have put their beliefs into action and are helping to create such a way of life.		The Big Picture David Suzuki and Dave Robert Taylor look beyond our environmental problems to examine the forces that are preventing real change. Whether they’re discussing how to reconcile economy with ecology or why we may need to start eating jellyfish for dinner, they point in the direction we must go if we hope to meet the environmental challenges we face in the twenty-first century. Covering suburban sprawl, sustainable transportation, food shortages, biodiversity, technology, public policy, and more, The Big Picture identifies the problems facing our world and proposes solid, science-based solutions.
	Tree: A Life Story "Only God can make a tree," wrote Joyce Kilmer in one of the most celebrated of poems. In Tree: A Life Story, authors David Suzuki and Wayne Grady extend that celebration in a "biography" of this extraordinary — and extraordinarily important — organism. A story that spans a millennium and includes a cast of millions but focuses on a single tree, a Douglas fir, Tree describes in poetic detail the organism’s modest origins that begin with a dramatic burst of millions of microscopic grains of pollen. The authors recount the amazing characteristics of the species, how they reproduce and how they receive from and offer nourishment to generations of other plants and animals. The tree’s pivotal role in making life possible for the creatures around it — including human beings — is lovingly explored. The richly detailed text and Robert Bateman’s original art pay tribute to this ubiquitous organism that is too often taken for granted.

About the Author

Joanna Macy's Official Website

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground- breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science. Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna's workshops and trainings. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches, and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

The Work That Reconnects

Here is a visual tool for educators, clergy, helping professionals, and activists who wish to understand this work. It is also a training guide for those currently facilitating the work and for those who may be inspired to do so. You will see Joanna teaching the conceptual foundations of the work, including the Great Turning, systems theory, deep ecology, and despair work, as well as many of her favorite exercises. To these she adds for the viewer guidelines on critical aspects and choice points of the experiential work. The Work That Reconnects is a pioneering form of group work that began in the 1970s. It demonstrates our interconnectedness in the web of life and our authority to take action on its behalf. It has helped many thousands around the globe find insight, solidarity, and courage to act, despite rapidly worsening conditions. Based on systems theory, spiritual teachings, and deep ecology, its methods are described in "Coming Back to Life".

World As Lover, World As Self

Weaving together the Buddhist principle of dependent co-arising with deep ecology, Macy offers a blueprint for positive social change and for reversing the destructive attitudes that have brought us to the brink of extinction. A thorough overview of two decades of this prominent eco-philosopher's ground-breaking work.

About the Author

David Korten's Official website

Dr. Korten is co-founder and board chair of Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, a quarterly magazine, a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.[2], and a member of the Club of Rome. Korten came to believe that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world -- including the United States and other "developed" countries. Furthermore he came to the conclusion that the United States was actively promoting -- both at home and abroad -- the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. For the world to survive, the United States must change.

	The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community The Great Turning is an essential resource which cuts through the complexity of our time to illuminate a simple, but elegant truth. We humans live by stories. We are held captive to the ways of Empire by a cultural trance of our own creation maintained by stories that deny the higher possibilities of our human nature—including our capacities for compassion, cooperation, responsible self-direction, and self-organizing partnership. In "The Great Turning," Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he defines as "Empire"—the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years—fortune for the few and misery for the many. Now, thanks to modern technologies, the way of Empire is increasingly destructive to children, family, community, and nature itself, rapidly leading us all to the brink of worldwide environmental and social collapse.		When Corporations Rule The World The Second Edition of the Modern Classic, Released April 2001. Considered by many to be the "bible" of the emerging global Living Democracy Movement, When Corporations Rule the World has become a modern classic with a message that seems increasingly prophetic with each passing day. Its central message is a clear and unequivocal wake up call to humanity. The global economy has become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonization of the planet's living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial institutions. It has turned these once useful institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is destroying livelihoods, displacing people, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money. It forces us all to act in ways destructive of ourselves, our families, our communities, and nature. This destructive process is driven by a combination of institutional forces and an extremist ideology of corporate libertarianism that invokes the theories of Adam Smith and market economics to advance policies that systematically undermine both the market and democracy.
	Agenda For A New Economy Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to liberate the latent entrepreneurial energies of Main Street from Wall Street’s deadly grip and bring into being a new economy—locally based, community-oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits. It will require courageous and imaginative changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money. Korten outlines a challenging, but practical agenda summarized at the end of the book in his version of the economic address to the nation he wishes Barak Obama were able to deliver.

About the Author

Thomas Berry's Official Website

From his academic beginnings as a historian of world cultures and religions, Berry developed into a historian of the Earth and its evolutionary processes. He describes himself as a "geologian". Berry received his Ph.D. in European Intellectual History with a thesis on Giambattista Vico's philosophy of history. Widely read in Western history, he also spent many years studying the cultural history of Asia. He has lived in China and traveled to other parts of Asia. He authored two books on Asian religions, Buddhism and Religions of India (distributed by Columbia University Press). For two decades, he directed the Riverdale Center of Religious Research along the Hudson River. During this period he taught at Fordham University where he chaired the history of religions program and directed 25 doctoral theses. His major contributions to the discussion on the environment are in his books The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988 reprinted, 2006), The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (Random House, 1999) and, with Brian Swimme, The Universe Story (Harper San Francisco, 1992). His latest collection of essays is Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (Sierra Club Books and University of California Press, 2006).

	The Dream of the Earth This landmark work, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1988, has established itself as a foundational volume in the ecological canon. In it, noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity. Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to respond to the Earth's need for planetary renewal, and what we must do to break free of the "technological trance" that drives a misguided dream of progress. Only then, he suggests, can we foster mutually enhancing human-Earth relationships that can heal our traumatized global biosystem.		The Universe Story Cosmologist Brian Swimme and cultural historian Thomas Berry provide a new, science-based cosmology for our times that provides an epic and poetic explanation of the creation of the universe and our place in it. A celebration of the unfolding of the cosmos--from the primordial flaring forth to the ecozoic era. From the big bang to the present and into the next millenium, "The Universe Story" unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity's evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.
	The Great Work The future can exist only if humans understand how to commune with the natural world rather than exploit it, explains Thomas Berry. "Already the planet is so damaged and the future is so challenged by its rising human population that the terms of survival will be severe beyond anything we have known in the past."		Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community Among the contemporary voices for the Earth, none resonates like that of noted cultural historian Thomas Berry. His teaching and writings have inspired a generation's thinking about humankind's place in the Earth community and the universe, engendering widespread critical acclaim and a documentary film on his life and work. This new collection of essays, from various years and occasions, expands and deepens ideas articulated in his earlier writings and also breaks new ground. Berry opens our eyes to the full dimensions of the ecological crisis, framing it as a crisis of spiritual vision. Applying his formidable erudition in cultural history, science, and comparative religions, he forges a compelling narrative of creation and communion that reconciles modern evolutionary thinking and traditional religious insights concerning our integral role in Earth's society. While sounding an urgent alarm at our current dilemma, Berry inspires us to reclaim our role as the consciousness of the universe and thereby begin to create a true partnership with the Earth community. With Evening Thoughts, this wise elder has lit another beacon to lead us home.

About the Author

Michael Pollans's Official Website

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own (1997); and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004); Best American Essays (1990 and 2003) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing.

	In Defense of Food Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part. "In Defense of Food" shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.		Omnivore's Dilemma In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves— from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food- science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.
	Second Nature In his articles and in best-selling books such as The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan has established himself as one of our most important and beloved writers on modern man's place in the natural world. A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere. Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the seventy-five greatest books ever written about gardening, Second Nature captures the rhythms of our everyday engagement with the outdoors in all its glory and exasperation. With chapters ranging from a reconsideration of the Great American Lawn, a dispatch from one man's war with a woodchuck, to an essay about the sexual politics of roses, Pollan has created a passionate and eloquent argument for reconceiving our relationship with nature.		The Botany of Desire Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires--sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control--with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

About the Author

Bill McKibben's Website

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent. In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

	American Earth As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, inspiring, and timely anthology gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. "Each advance in environmental practice" in our nation's history, McKibben observes in his introduction, "was preceded by a great book." Here, for the first time in a single volume, are the words that made a movement. Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—are set alongside an emerging activist movement, revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Throughout, some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers take a turn toward nature, recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.		Deep Economy In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. Deep Economy makes the compelling case for moving beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. Our purchases need not be at odds with the things we truly value, McKibben argues, and the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.
	End of Nature Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement. More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.		Fight Global Warming Now Bestselling author Bill McKibben turns activist in the first hands-on guidebook to stopping climate change, the world's greatest threat. Hurricane Katrina. A rapidly disappearing Arctic. The warmest winter on the East Coast in recorded history. The leading scientist at NASA warns that we have only ten years to reverse climate change; the British government's report on global warming estimates that the financial impact will be greater than the Great Depression and both world wars—combined. Bill McKibben, the author of the first major book on global warming, The End of Nature, warns that it's no longer time to debate global warming, it's time to fight it.

About the Author

Paul Hawken's Official Website

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author. Starting at age 20, he dedicated his life to sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His practice has included starting and running ecological businesses, writing and teaching about the impact of commerce on living systems, and consulting with governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy.

	Blessed Unrest Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another." - Viking Press		The Ecology of Commerce "Hawken touches on a raw nerve here. How might millions of people live and work in a complex business environment while causing "as little suffering as possible to all and everything around us?" Hawken, no Luddite, believes that "we need a design for business that will ensure that the industrial world as it is presently constituted ceases and is replaced with human-centered enterprises that are sustainable producers." Avoiding stormy rhetoric, Hawken thoughtfully reviews ecological theories and disasters and insists that "ecology offers a way to examine all present economic and resource activities from a biological rather than a monetary point of view." Calling for a restorative economy, he proposes rational, achievable goals: stop "accelerating the rate that we draw down capacity"; refrain from "buying or degrading other people’s environment"; and avoid displacing "other species by taking over their habitats." This noteworthy study should kindle debates within the business community." — Publishers Weekly
	Natural Capitalism "Hawken . . . and . . . the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank, have put together an ambitious, visionary monster of a book… The authors have two related goals: first, to show the vast array of ecologically smart options available to businesses; second, to argue that it is possible for society and industry to adopt them. Hawken and the Lovinses acknowledge such barriers as the high initial costs of some techniques, lack of knowledge of alternatives, entrenched ways of thinking and other cultural factors. In looking at options for transportation (including the development of ultralight, electricity-powered automobiles), energy use, building design, and waste reduction and disposal, the book's reach is phenomenal. It belongs to the galvanizing tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet and Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog. Whether all that the authors have organized and presented so earnestly here can be assimilated and acted on by the people who run the world is open to question. But readers with a capacity for judicious browsing and grazing can surely learn enough in these pages to apply well-reasoned pressure." — Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver's Official Website

Kingsolver's short fiction and poetry began to be published during the mid-1980's, along with the articles she wrote regularly for regional and national periodicals. She has written eleven books. She has contributed to dozens of literary anthologies, and her reviews and articles have appeared in most major U.S. newspapers and magazines. Her books have earned major literary awards at home and abroad, and in 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our nation's highest honor for service through the arts. In 1997 Barbara established the Bellwether Prize, awarded in even-numbered years to a first novel that exemplifies outstanding literary quality and a commitment to literature as a tool for social change.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

About the Author

Van Jones' Official Website

Van Jones is founding president of Green For All and a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. He is also a TIME Magazine 2008 Environmental Hero, one of Fast Company’s 12 Most Creative Minds of 2008, and the the New York Times Bestselling author of The Green Collar Economy (Harper One 2008), which is endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle and Al Gore. He is a tireless advocate, committed to creating "green pathways out of poverty" and greatly expanding the coalition fighting global warming. In 2008, Van was awarded: one of Essence Magazine's "Influential/Inspiring African Americans of 2008"; the Puffin/Nation prize for "Creative Citizenship"; the Elle Magazine "Green Award 2008"; selection as one of the George Lucas Foundation's "Daring Dozen 2008"; Hunt Alternatives "Prime Mover Award 2008"; Campaign for America's Future "Paul Wellstone Award 2008"; Global Green USA "Community Environmental Leadership Award 2008"; designation as one of the nation's "Plenty 20" in the October/November 2008 edition of Plenty Magazine; San Francisco Foundation "Community Leadership Award 2008"; Environment News Feed's "2008 Top Eco-entrepreneur of the Year"; in 2008, and one of the 20 Hottest Influences in the National Urban League's Urban Influence Magazine.

Green Collar Economy

Provocative, personal, and inspirational, New York Times best-seller The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country--the failing economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable. The economy is built on and powered almost exclusively by oil, natural gas, and coal, all fast-diminishing nonrenewable resources. As supplies disappear, the price of energy climbs and nearly everything becomes more expensive. With costs and unemployment soaring, the economy stalls. Not only that, when we burn these fuels, the greenhouse gases they create overheat the atmosphere. As the headlines make clear, total climate chaos looms over us. The bottom line: we cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot drill and burn our way out of these dual dilemmas. Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.

About the Author

Al Gore's Official Website

Former Vice President Al Gore is cofounder and Chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm that is focused on a new approach to Sustainable Investing. Gore is also cofounder and Chairman of Current TV, an independently owned cable and satellite television network for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism. A member of the Board of Directors of Apple Computer, Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Google, Inc. Gore is also Visiting Professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Mr. Gore is the author of An Inconvenient Truth, a best-selling book on the threat of and solutions to global warming, and the subject of the movie of the same title, which has already become one of the top documentary films in history. In 2007, An Inconvenient Truth was awarded two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song. Since his earliest days in the U. S. Congress 30 years ago, Al Gore has been the leading advocate for confronting the threat of global warming. His pioneering efforts were outlined in his best-selling book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992). He led the Clinton-Gore Administration's efforts to protect the environment in a way that also strengthens the economy.

Earth In The Balance

As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, inspiring, and timely anthology gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. "Each advance in environmental practice" in our nation's history, McKibben observes in his introduction, "was preceded by a great book." Here, for the first time in a single volume, are the words that made a movement. Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—are set alongside an emerging activist movement, revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Throughout, some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers take a turn toward nature, recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

An Inconvenient Truth

A passionate and lifelong defender of the environment, Vice President Al Gore describes in this classic best-selling book how human actions and decisions can endanger or safeguard the vulnerable ecosystem that sustains us all. The book's groundbreaking analysis helped place the environment on the national agenda, summoning politicians, the media, and the public to attention and action. The message remains just as urgent today as it did eight years ago: while much has been accomplished, we must meet a global environmental challenge that reaches into every aspect of our society. In brave and unforgettable terms, Earth in the Balance probes the roots of the environmental crisis and offers a bold and forceful vision of a new, more sustainable path. Having provoked international discussion upon its original publication, it continues to confront us with profound challenges. Human civilization must change its course if we are to heal our ailing environment and preserve the earth's ecology for future generations. Vice President Gore describes in a new foreword to this classic what we have achieved and what remains to be done, and issues a clarion call to begin the millennium with an "Environment Decade." It is time to reflect deeply on the fate of our planet and commit ourselves to its future.

About the Author

Fred Pearce is currently the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to the London Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, Times Higher Education Supplement and Country Living. Fred's Footprint, his fortnightly environment blog, appears on the New Scientist web site. He has also written for several US publications including Foreign Policy, Audubon magazine, Seed, Popular Science and Time. He has written a wide range of books on environment and development issues published in both the UK and US including Confessions of an Eco Sinner, When the Rivers Run Dry, Earth: Then and Now, including a foreword by Zac Goldsmith, The Last Generation (on climate change) and Deep Jungle. His books have been translated into at least ten languages including French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish. He is a regular broadcaster and international speaker on environmental issues, and has given public presentations on all six continents in the past two years. Among his engagements have been the Edinburgh, Hay and Salisbury Book Festivals, the Ottawa and Melbourne International Writers Festivals, the Brisbane RiverSymposium in 2006[8], Yale and Cambridge Universities, a speaking tour for the British Council in India, and presentations to business and financial groups, such as Anglo American PLC in South Africa, Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong and UBS in London. He has also written reports and extended journalism for WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank, the European Environment Agency, and the UK Environment Agency. He is a trustee of the Integrated Water Resources International.

	Confesson of an Eco-sinner Pearce shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the origins of everything in his own life. In conversational and convivial prose, Pearce surveys his home and then tracks down the people behind the production and distribution of everything from his socks to his computer to the food in his fridge. It's a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world's more than six billion inhabitants-all eating, consuming, making-have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods.		The Last Generation Climate Change has always been part of the world’s history, as he points out there have been only two prolonged periods of stability in the earth’s climate. But in documenting how the earth’s climate history has been punctuated by moments of rapid and extreme climate change, the author is showing just how dramatic an effect the consequences of human society are. Currently we are responsible for adding "4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere". This is a colossal amount, and it is enough to nudge to fragile climate systems in dangerous directions. It highlights something often unmentioned by popular and political accounts of climate change, we don’t face a problem which is gradually going to get worse, we face a situation where existing climate problems will create greater problems that snowball out of our control. Unless of course we all act, collectively, to solve the problem now.
	When the Rivers Run Dry We are a heavily water intensive society globally, and the planet has passed the point of having enough water, on current patterns of usage, for everyone. Engineering solutions (usually dams, reservoirs and canals) usually produce short term gains and serious long- term problems; and most reservoir schemes don’t get close to meeting their promised energy and/or irrigation targets. Eventually, silt does for the river scheme and salt for the land. The traditional benefits of natural rivers systems (flooding, fertilisation etc) aren’t well priced by planners and therefore are overlooked. The ‘green revolution’ has enabled us to feed most of our expanding global population but the water intensity has been high; agriculturalists are moving to a ‘more crop per drop’ model. The outlook is not good - already many areas are reverting to desert - but the most promising approaches involve simple local (and often traditional) solutions about harnessing and harvesting rainwater.		Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World Earth Then and Now records the dramatic way our planet has changed over the past century. On one page is a specific part of the world as it was 5, 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. On the facing page is the same place as it looks today. Each stark visual comparison tells a compelling story -- a melting glacier, an expanding desert, an encroaching cityscape, a natural disaster. It reminds us that nothing is without a cost. Highly topical and thought provoking chapters in this book include: "Environmental change": Bearing witness to the effects of global warming "Industrialization": Revealing the hidden costs of "progress" "Urbanization": Showing the effects of our spreading cities "Natural disasters": Reminding us of the power of nature "War": Using comparisons to show the impact of armed conflict "Travel and tourism": Illustrating the predatory nature of development. Concise captions explain the facts and then allow the reader to draw personal conclusions. Anyone concerned about the environment will enjoy and appreciate Earth Then and Now.
	With Speed and Violence As Pearce began working on this book, normally cautious scientists beat a path to his door to tell him about their fears and their latest findings. With Speed and Violence tells the stories of these scientists and their work—from the implications of melting permafrost in Siberia and the huge river systems of meltwater beneath the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica to the effects of the "ocean conveyor" and a rare molecule that runs virtually the entire cleanup system for the planet. Above all, the scientists told him what they're now learning about the speed and violence of past natural climate change-and what it portends for our future. With Speed and Violence is the most up-to-date and readable book yet about the growing evidence for global warming and the large climatic effects it may unleash. "If you want to quickly get up to date on climate change and its consequences, I recommend With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. If you can read only one book on climate change, this is it." - Lester Brown, president, Earth Policy Institute

About the Author

Rachel Carson Website

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and nature writer whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson started her career as a biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Carson turned her attention to conservation and the environmental problems caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented portion of the American public. Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy—leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides—and the grassroots environmental movement the book inspired led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter.

Silent Spring

Rarely does a single book alter the course of history, but Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did exactly that. The outcry that followed its publication in 1962 forced the government to ban DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson's book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months, and not only the targeted insects but countless more, and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed birds and animals and had contaminated the entire world food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life -- from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children -- had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

About the Author

James Gustave Speth Website

From 1993 to 1999, Dean Speth served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. Throughout his career, Dean Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation’s Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America’s Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Environmental Law Institute, and the Blue Planet Prize. Publications include The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment; Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment; and articles in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Environmental Science and Technology, the Columbia Journal World of Business, and other journals and books.

	The Bridge At The End Of The World What kind of a system should follow our present, environmentally and socially destructive one? The Bridge at the Edge of the World lays the groundwork. Speth’s proposals demand a lot from world citizens and especially from Americans. At our current moment of economic insecurity, panic about the present could overwhelm even the most pressing concerns about the future. The knee-jerk scramble to fire up the stalling engines of economic growth leaves little room for big-picture assessment. Voices such as Speth’s that call for careful reconsideration of our assumptions are hard to hear. Although our position is undeniably difficult, Speth finds hope in the very real interest of young people and many others in finding solutions, and in the rich ideas being generated by top thinkers devoted to the problem. Solutions that seemed foolish yesterday and that seem radical today will seem sensible and necessary tomorrow, he argues.		Red Sky At Morning This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world. "Gus Speth brought global environmental concerns to the world's attention nearly a quarter of a century ago. His extraordinary new book is an impassioned plea to take these issues seriously before it is too late. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to read Red Sky at Morning and take action while we can." - Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States
	Worlds Apart: Globalizaton and the Environment Worlds Apart presents a cohesive set of essays by leading thinkers on the subject of globalization, offering a thoughtful overview of the major environmental issues related to globalization in a clear, reasoned style. Framed by Gus Speth’s introduction and conclusion, essays range from Jane Lubchenco’s discussion of the scientific indicators of global environmental change to Robert Kates’ examination of the prospect that our growing global interconnectedness could lead a transition to a more sustainable world to Vandana Shiva’s impassioned plea for a new "living democracy" that counters the degrading, dehumanizing tendencies of the global economy. Other contributors include Maurice Strong on the Rio Earth Summit and the future course of environmentalism, José Goldemberg on energy, Jerry Mander on the inherent destructiveness of the global economic system, Stephan Schmidheiny on the forestry industry, and Daniel Esty and Maria Ivanova on global environmental governance. Edited by one of the world’s leading experts on international environmental issues, the book brings together the most respected thinkers and actors on the world stage to offer a compelling set of perspectives and a solid introduction to the social and environmental dimensions of globalization.		Global Environmental Governance Today's most pressing environmental problems are planetary in scope, confounding the political will of any one nation. How can we solve them? Global Environmental Governance offers the essential information, theory, and practical insight needed to tackle this critical challenge. It examines ten major environmental threats-climate disruption, biodiversity loss, acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, freshwater degradation and shortages, marine fisheries decline, toxic pollutants, and excess nitrogen-and explores how they can be addressed through treaties, governance regimes, and new forms of international cooperation

About the Author

Daniel Goleman Website

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries. Dr. Goleman was a co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), with the mission to help schools introduce emotional literacy courses. Dr. Goleman has received many journalistic awards for his writing, including two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for his articles in the Times, and a Career Achievement award for journalism from the American Psychological Association. In recognition of his efforts to communicate the behavioral sciences to the public, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Ecological Intelligence

The bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman reveals the hidden environmental consequences of what we make and buy, and shows how new market forces can drive the essential changes we all must make to save our planet. Ecological Intelligence draws on cutting-edge research to reveal why "green is a mirage," illuminates inconsistencies in our response to the ecological crisis, and introduces new technologies that reveal with "radical transparency" the eco-impact of products we buy, with the potential to drive consumers to make smarter decisions and companies to reform their business practices.

About the Author-Peter G. Brown

Moral Economy Project Website

Peter Brown is a professor in the School of Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. Before coming to McGill, he was Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland's graduate School of Public Affairs. While at the University of Maryland, he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, the School of Public Policy itself, and established the School's Environmental Policy Programs. He is a graduate of Haverford College, holds a Master's Degree in the Philosophy of Religion from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in Philosophy. He is the author of Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America (Beacon Press, 1994), and Ethics, Economics and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life, Second Edition (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). It is published in North America as The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth, Second Edition (Black Rose Books, 2008). He is actively involved in conservation efforts in the James Bay and Southern regions of Quebec, and in Maryland. He operates tree farms in Maryland and Quebec and is a Certified Quebec Forest Producer, and in 1995 was Tree Farmer of the Year in Garrett County, Maryland. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

About the Author-Geoff Garver

Moral Economy Project Website

Geoff Garver is an environmental law and policy consultant in Montreal, Quebec. From 2000 to 2007, he served as Director of Submissions on Enforcement Matters at North America's Commission for Environmental Cooperation, directing the unit that handles assertions by North American citizens that one of the NAFTA countries -- Mexico, the United States or Canada -- is failing to effectively enforce its environmental law. Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division as a trial attorney and then as an Acting Assistant Chief handling cases concerning land and natural resource management, water rights and environmental impact assessment. His major cases included suits dealing with Everglades water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park and water rights in Idaho and Oregon. From 1993 to 1995, he was special assistant and Senior Policy Counsel to the Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining the U.S. Justice Department in 1989, he was a judicial clerk for the Hon. Conrad Cyr in the U.S. District Court in Maine. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1982 and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 1987. Geoff grew up in a Quaker family in rural Western New York.

Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy

Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (February 2009) is available now from Berrett-Koehler. Click here to purchase directly from the publisher and save! Most people have been conditioned to accept the operation of the economy as an article of faith. Unlimited growth and wealth accumulation are seen as the "natural law" of the economy and nothing can be done to alter this fact – even if it means the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems are severely damaged in the process. This "inconvenient truth" is now a moral challenge. We are faced with a choice: bring the economy into right relationship with the planet and its inhabitants, or suffer the consequences -- the increasing destruction of Earth’s life support systems and social structures. Drawing on the Quaker principle of "right relationship," the book Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy presents a proposal for bringing our economy, our ethics, and our environment into alignment.

http://www.patternliteracy.com/index.html

About the Author

Toby Hemenway Website

After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. His current project is developing urban sustainability resources in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He is available for workshops, lectures, and consulting on a wide variety of topics related to permaculture, ecological design, Peak Oil, local food systems, and other subjects.

Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

The first edition of Gaia's Garden, sparked the imagination of America's home gardeners, introducing permaculture's central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers. Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening — which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants — can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it's fun and easy to create a "backyard ecosystem" by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions. The revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it's established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that's needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden. This extensively revised and expanded edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban gardeners. The text's message is that working with nature, not against it, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

About the Author

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India ’s leading physicists. She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a Ph.D. in particle physics. Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. She addressed the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, 1999, as well as the recent World Economic Forum in Melbourne , 2000. In 1993, Shiva won the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). The founder of Navdanya ("nine seeds"), a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, she also set up the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in her mother’s cowshed in 1997. Its studies have validated the ecological value of traditional farming and been instrumental in fighting destructive development projects in India.

	Water Wars In Water Wars, Vandana Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to analyze the historical erosion of communal water rights. Examining the international water trade, damming, mining, and aquafarming, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of their rights to a precious common good. Shiva reveals how many of the most important conflicts of our time, most often camouflaged as ethnic wars or religious wars, such as the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are in fact conflicts over scarce but vital natural resources. Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. She calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns like the one in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where citizens fought for and retained their water rights.		Stolen Harvest In Stolen Harvest, "the South's best known environmentalist" (New Internationalist) and 1993 Right Livelihood Award winner, Vandana Shiva, continues her path-breaking work on uncovering the devastating human and environmental impacts of corporate-engineered international trade agreements. Shiva charts the impacts of industrial agriculture and what they mean for small farmers, the environment, and the quality and healthfulness of the foods we eat. A short, impassioned, and inspiring book that will shape the debate about genetic engineering and commercial agriculture for years to come. Finalist for 2001 Independent Press Awards Best Environment/Ecology Book and Finalist for World Hunger Year's Harry Chapin Media Award
	Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge In this intelligently argued and ethically principled book, internationally renowned Third World environmentalist Vandana Shiva exposes the latest frontier of the North's ongoing assault against the South's biological and other resources. Since the land, the forests, the oceans, and the atmosphere have already been colonized, eroded, and polluted, she argues, Northern capital is now carving out new colonies to exploit for gain: the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals. Under agreements such as GATT, she argues, the North claims a need to be "protected" from the South so it can continue its uninterrupted theft of the Third World's genetic diversity. This theft, Shiva shows, has profoundly disturbing consequences for women, the Third World, and the environment. With specific considerations of gene-patenting, genetic engineering, and biotechnology, Biopiracy is essential reading for anyone concerned with technology, imperialism, feminism or the environment.		Earth Democracy Starting from the initial enclosure of the commons-the privatization of 6 million acres of public land in 18th-century Britain—Shiva goes on to reveal how the "commons" continue to shrink as more and more natural resources are patented and fenced. Accompanying this displacement from formerly accessible territory, she argues, is a growing attitude of disposability that erodes our natural resources, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. Worse, human beings are by no means safe from this assignment of disposability. Through the forces of neoliberal globalization, economic and social exclusion work in deadly synergy to perpetrate violence on vulnerable groups, extinguishing the lives of millions. Yet these brutal extinctions are not the only trend shaping human history. Forthright and energetic, Vandana Shiva updates readers on the movements, issues, and struggles she helped bring to international attention—the genetic engineering of food, the theft of culture, and the privatization of natural resources—and deftly analyzes the successes and new challenges the global resistance now faces. From struggles on the streets of Seattle and Cancún and in homes and farms across the world has grown a set of principles based on inclusion, nonviolence, reclaiming the commons, and freely sharing the earth's resources. These ideals, which Shiva calls Earth Democracy, will serve as unifying points in our current movements, an urgent call to peace, and the basis for a just and sustainable future.
	Soil Not Oil With Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva brilliantly reveals what connects humanity’s most urgent crises—food insecurity, peak oil, and climate change—and why any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial biofuels and agriculture as recipes for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small independent farm instead. With millions hungry and the earth’s future at peril, only sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood can both feed and safeguard the world for generations to come. Bold and visionary, Soil Not Oil calls for a return to sound agricultural principles—and a world based on self-organization, community, and environmental justice.		Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed lays out, with practical steps and far reaching concepts, a program to ensure food and agriculture become more socially and ecologically sustainable. It harvests the work and ideas produced by thousands of communities around the world. Emerging from the historic gatherings at Terra Madre, farmers, traders, and activists diagnose and offer prescriptions to reverse perhaps the worst food crisis faced in human history. There is a growing realization that food politics is vital to the health of our bodies, economies, and environment—in other words, a matter of life or death. Featuring contributions by Michael Pollan, Prince Charles, Vandana Shiva, the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, and more, this pocket-sized and galvanizing collection grapples with these enormous costs, daring to imagine a food system—a world—that is sustainable, healthy, and ultimately, just.

About the Author

Italian founder and president of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini coined the term "eco-gastronomy" to describe his vision of good food sustainably produced. Petrini first came to prominence in the 1980s for taking part in a campaign against the fast food chain McDonald's opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome. He began writing about wine and food in 1977, and has contributed to hundreds of Italian periodicals and other publications around the world. In 1983, Petrini was instrumental in creating and developing the Italian non-profit food and wine association, Arcigola. Founder and president of the organization of Slow Food International, this organization exists in over 50 countries and has over 80,000 members and supporters. Slow Food International is responsible for publishing periodicals, books, and guides that are read in many languages around the world. Petrini is an editor of multiple publications at the publishing house Slow Food Editore and writes several weekly columns for La Stampa. He was one of Time Magazine's heroes of 2004. In 2004, he founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences, a school intended to bridge the gap between agriculture and gastronomy. Carlo is the recipient of many awards and honorsand was was also named "Innovator" in the 2004 Time Magazine list of European heroes.

	Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Dining and Living Founded in Italy in 1986 by charismatic Italian gourmand Carlo Petrini, Slow Food has grown into a phenomenally successful movement against the uniformity and compromised quality of fast food and supermarket chains. With nearly 85,000 members in 45 countries around the world, Slow Food has developed from a small, grassroots group into the most influential gastronomic movement in the world. Known as the "WWF of endangered food and wine," Slow Food not only focuses on a slower, more natural and organic lifestyle that complements nature, but also works to preserve dying culinary traditions, conserve natural biodiversity, and protect fading agricultural practices threatened in this age of mass consumerism. The book takes the reader on a gastronomic journey through the practices and traditions of the world's ethnic cuisines, from the artisanal cheeses of Italy to the oysters of Cape May and the native American turkey. It includes testimonies from Slow Food representatives—such as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse—illustrating exactly what they are doing—and what still needs to be done—to preserve them.		Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair By now most of us are aware of the threats looming in the food world. The best-selling "Fast Food Nation" and other recent books have alerted us to such dangers as genetically modified organisms, food-borne diseases, and industrial farming. Now it is time for answers, and "Slow Food Nation" steps up to the challenge. Here the charismatic leader of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, outlines many different routes by which we may take back control of our food. The three central principles of the Slow Food plan are these: food must be sustainably produced in ways that are sensitive to the environment, those who produce the food must be fairly treated, and the food must be healthful and delicious. In his travels around the world as ambassador for Slow Food, Petrini has witnessed firsthand the many ways that native peoples are feeding themselves without making use of the harmful methods of the industrial complex. He relates the wisdom to be gleaned from local cultures in such varied places as Mongolia, Chiapas, Sri Lanka, and Puglia. Amidst our crisis, it is critical that Americans look for insight from other cultures around the world and begin to build a new and better way of eating in our communities here.
	Slow Food: The Case for Taste (Arts & Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History Slow Food is poised to revolutionize the way Americans shop for groceries, prepare and consume their meals, and think about food. The book not only recalls the origins, first steps, and international expansion of the movement from the perspective of its founder, it is also a powerful expression of the organization's goal of engendering social reform through the transformation of our attitudes about food and eating. As Newsweek described it, the Slow Food movement has now become the basis for an alternative to the American rat race, the inspiration for "a kinder and gentler capitalism.

About the Author

Senator Paul Simon Website

American politician and educator (b. Nov. 29, 1928, Eugene, Ore.—d. Dec. 9, 2003, Springfield, Ill.), had a long career in public life that was highlighted by two terms as a U.S. senator (1985–97) and a brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. He blended his liberal social outlook with fiscal conservatism and forged a reputation for honesty and forthright integrity. Simon entered the University of Oregon at age 16, transferred to Dana College, Blair, Neb., a year later, and at age 19 left school to buy and run a struggling weekly newspaper in Troy, Ill. Through the paper he fought against illegal gambling interests and organized crime, a crusade that attracted the attention of Democratic Party leaders interested in reform, and in 1954 he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Simon was elected a state senator in 1962, and in 1968, although a Republican was elected governor, he was elected lieutenant governor—the only time in Illinois history that the two offices had been split between parties. He was defeated in the primary when he ran for governor in 1972, however, and taught college journalism for two years, but in 1974 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, in which he served five terms before entering the Senate. As a senator he counted a balanced budget, job creation, reduction in violence on television, adult literacy, and federal loans for college students among his major concerns and was a firm believer in the government’s power to solve social problems. The late Paul Simon served as the founding director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He also taught courses in political science, journalism, and history. Prior to leaving the U.S. Senate and joining the SIUC faculty in 1997, Simon ranked as the senior senator from Illinois. In the 104th Congress, he served on the budget, labor and human resources, judiciary, and Indian affairs committees. He was the author or coauthor of nineteen books, including "Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy," "Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do Abo

Tapped Out

Simon, a former Democratic senator from Illinois, delivers a call-to-arms to citizens and political leaders to act to save the world's water supply. "Within a few years," he writes, "a water crisis of catastrophic proportions will explode on us." Simon, who was a newspaperman before he was a politician, is a clear and forceful writer who makes use of compelling statistics to outline the looming crisis: 9500 children die every day due to thirst or polluted water and a projected three billion people will be living in regions afflicted by severe water shortages in just 25 years. Among the most immediate problems Simon covers are vanishing groundwater reserves in California, polluted drinking water in India and the potential for geopolitical violence in the arid Middle East. Simon urges governments to step up their support for desalination, conservation and pollution control. He also calls for policy changes such as charging consumers for the actual cost of conveying their water. Although suffering from a drought of firsthand vignettes and individual case studies, Simon's book is well reasoned and well researched and deserves serious attention not least because he offers the bracing example of a former public servant still committed to the intelligent and informed discussion of a pressing issue.

About the Author

Irena Salina’s first feature-length documentary, Ghost Bird: The Life and Art of Judith Deim (2000) won numerous prestigious international prizes. FLOW: For the Love of Water (2008) won various awards for its exploration of the global water crisis that threatens world health and stability.

Written in Water: Messages of Hope for Earth's Most Precious Resource

A Message for the Future comprises a collection of essays authored by heroes and leaders in the field of water solutions and innovations—a broad range of people from varied disciplines who have contributed their hearts and minds to bringing awareness to and conserving Earth’s freshwater supply. In their own words, authors tell of such tragedies as water slavery, drought, or contamination, as well as their own professional struggles and successes in pursuit of freshwater solutions. Contributors include: Alexandra Cousteau, social environmental advocate and granddaughter of legendary marine scientist Jacques Cousteau; Peter Gleick, environmental visionary and winner of a 2003 MacArthur "genius grant"; Bill McKibben, bestselling author and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship; Sylvia Earle, oceanographer and Time magazine’s first "hero for the planet"; and Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with more than a dozen other notable people. These visionaries’ stories touch, surprise, and amaze as they help us see the essential role played by water in our world, our lives, and our future. These are all people who are thinking far beyond the realm of self; they are devoted to creating a better world for all of us.

About the Author

Anna Lappé is a nationally recognized public speaker, writer, and cofounder of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund. She is the coauthor of the national bestseller Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. Named one of Time magazine’s “eco” Who’s Who, Lappé is a founding principal of the Small Planet Institute and the Small Planet Fund. She can be seen as the host of MSN’s Practical Guide to Healthy Living and as cohost of the public television series The Endless Feast. She lives in Bryant Terry is a chef, food justice activist, and founding director of b-healthy! (Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth), a New York City-based nonprofit. Bryant lives in Oakland, California.

Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen Precious Resource

Combining a straight-to-the-point exposé about organic foods (organic doesn't mean fresh, natural, or independently produced) and the how-to's of creating an affordable, easy-to-use organic kitchen, Grub brings organics home to urban dwellers. It gives the reader compelling arguments for buying organic food, revealing the pesticide industry's influence on government regulation and the extent of its pollution in our waterways and bodies. With an inviting recipe section, Grub also offers the millions of people who buy organics fresh ideas and easy ways to cook with them. Grub's recipes, twenty-four meals oriented around the seasons, appeal to eighteen- to forty-year-olds who are looking for fun and simple meals. In addition, the book features resource lists (including music playlists to cook by), unusual and illuminating graphics, and every variety of do-it yourself tip sheets, charts, and checklists.

Diet for a Hot Planet

In her groundbreaking new book, the Lappé exposes another hidden cost of our food system: the climate crisis. While you may not think “global warming” when you sit down to dinner, our tangled web of global food, from pork chops raised in Poland, with feed from Brazil, shipped to South Korea, contributes to as much as one-third of the global warming effect. If we’re serious about the climate crisis, says Lappé, we have to talk about food. Lappé also exposes the interests resisting this conversation and the spin-tactics companies are employing to defuse the heat. She offers a vision of a food system that can be part of healing the planet and the climate. Lappé explores how food can be a powerful entry point for tackling our most pressing environmental problems. With seven principles for a climate-friendly diet and success stories from sustainable food advocates around the globe, Lappé dishes upstrategies and stirring inspiration to bring to life food that’s better for people and the planet. An engaging call to action, a spirited call for a food system for tomorrow, Diet for a Hot Planet delivers a hopeful message during this troubling time.

About the Author

Frances Beinecke is the president of NRDC. Frances has worked with NRDC for more than 30 years. In addition to her work at NRDC, Frances has played a leadership role in several other environmental organizations. She currently serves on the boards of the World Resources Institute, the Energy Future Coalition and Conservation International's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business and is on the steering committee of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. She has been a member of the boards of the Wilderness Society, the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development and the New York League of Conservation Voters. Frances received a bachelor's degree from Yale College and a master's degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She now co-chairs the Leadership Council of the Yale School of Forestry, is a member of the School of Management's Advisory Board and a former member of the Yale Corporation Frances has received the Rachel Carson Award from the National Audubon Society, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, the Annual Conservation Award from the Adirondack Council and the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society.

Clean Energy, Common Sense

In her first book, Clean Energy Common Sense, NRDC President Frances Beinecke issues a plainspoken, heartfelt call to action on global warming. As Robert Redford writes in his forward, this little book -- for believers, skeptics and everyone in between -- just might help change the world. This is, in many ways, a new kind of book, written in the moment, using very current information, and produced on a sharply accelerated schedule so it can become part of the conversation when it matters most - as the Senate takes up climate change legislation and the world looks to Copenhagen for the UN climate change summit in December. This little book documents the problem, sets forth solutions, and challenges each of us to do our part of embrace a clean and sustainable energy future, today and in the years ahead. Doing so, Beinecke convincingly argues, will help put Americans back to work, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and create a healthier planet, for ourselves and for our children.

About the Author

Darrin Nordahl is the city designer at the Davenport Design Center, which was formed in 2003 as a division of the Community & Economic Development Department of the City of Davenport, Iowa. He has taught in the planning program at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of My Kind of Transit. Darrin Nordahl was born in 1970 in Oakland, California. He completed his bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture at the University of California at Davis and his master’s degree in urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. Darrin has taught in the City and Regional Planning Department at UC-Berkeley and in the Landscape Architecture program at UC-Berkeley Extension.

Public Produce

Public Produce makes a uniquely contemporary case not for central government intervention, but for local government involvement in shaping food policy. In what Darrin Nordahl calls "municipal agriculture," elected officials, municipal planners, local policymakers, and public space designers are turning to the abundance of land under public control (parks, plazas, streets, city squares, parking lots, as well as the grounds around libraries, schools, government offices, and even jails) to grow food. Public agencies at one time were at best indifferent about, or at worst dismissive of, food production in the city. Today, public officials recognize that food insecurity is affecting everyone, not just the inner-city poor, and that policies seeking to restructure the production and distribution of food to the tens of millions of people living in cities have immediate benefits to community-wide health and prosperity._ _This book profiles urban food growing efforts, illustrating that there is both a need and a desire to supplement our existing food production methods outside the city with opportunities inside the city. Each of these efforts works in concert to make fresh produce more available to the public. But each does more too: reinforcing a sense of place and building community; nourishing the needy and providing economic assistance to entrepreneurs; promoting food literacy and good health; and allowing for "serendipitous sustenance." There is much to be gained, Nordahl writes, in adding a bit of agrarianism into our urbanism.

About the Author

Author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek, The United States of Appalachia and In the Sierra Madre, Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, educator, and radio correspondent across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico. He served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West. His award-winning stories have appeared on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon, among many others newspapers, magazines and online journals. A contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, he regularly blogs for the Huffington Post and Grist. A member of the multimedia theatre performance company, Coal Free Future Project , Biggers is a frequent speaker and performer at festivals, conferences and educational institutions. His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, a Field Foundation Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award/Fellowship. He serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center. In the 1990s, as part of his work to develop literacy and literary programs in rural communities in the American Southwest, he founded the Northern Arizona Book Festival. In the 1980s, Biggers served as an assistant to former Senator George McGovern in Washington, DC, and as a personal aide to Rev. William Sloane Coffin at the Riverside Church in New York City, where he co-founded the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing.

Reckoning At Eagle Creek

Award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us on a journey into the secret history of coal mining in the American heartland. Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy. Reckoning at Eagle Creek digs deep into the tangled roots of the coal industry beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, chronicling the removal of Native Americans and the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln. It uncovers a century of regulatory negligence, vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining. At the heart of our national debate over climate change and the crucial transition toward clean energy is the Obama administration's controversial pursuit of "clean coal." Biggers exposes the fallacy that lies at the heart of this policy and shatters the Big Coal marketing myth that southern Illinois represents the "Saudi Arabia of coal." Reckoning at Eagle Creek is ultimately an exposé of "historicide"—one that traces coal's harrowing legacy through the great American family saga of sacrifice, resiliency and the extraordinary process of recovering our nation's memory. Coal will never be called clean or cheap again.