books
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Damning look at Canada’s tar sands tops enviro journalism awards
Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk won the top prize from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual reporting awards for his investigation of oil extraction in the tar sands of northern Alberta. Nikiforuk’s book — Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent — examines the high social and environmental costs of the process of […]
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Terrorism laws are wrongly being used to round up eco-activists, says author Dean Kuipers
Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, during Rodney Coronado’s radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to […]
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Farm City author cuts the foodie-elite snobbery from urban farming
Food writer and urban farmer Novella Carpenter is everything the elitist, foodie stereotype is not: she squat-farms near downtown Oakland, Calif., dumpster-dives to feed her rabbits, and offers to show anyone who still thinks otherwise exactly “what urban farming smells like.” Novella Carpenter and cute baby animals today, dinner tomorrow.Photo: Courtesy of Novella CarpenterIn Seattle […]
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So what is carbon anyway?
This is an excerpt from the book The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat, newly released in paperback. Carbon is all over the news, but what is it?“You will be astonished when I tell you what this curious play of carbon amounts to.” — Michael Faraday Welcome to the Carbon […]
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Summer reading
I generally don’t read business books. Eight years of government work–TQM! ISO9000! ISTJ–and I had enough acronymn-based solutions for a lifetime. But Adam Werbach sent me his latest, Strategy for Sustainability, and darned if I didn’t spend half my trip home from visiting my folks reading it, and the other half scribbling notes in my […]
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Ask Umbra on paperback writers
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Hi Umbra, I’m in the book business, and there are many who try and make sure books never make it to landfills and are donated to worthy causes. However, I have been wondering for some time about the environmental impact of such authors as Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, and […]
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Anthology features Americans’ personal stories of global warming
Union of Concerned Scientists“I knew climate change had no boundaries,” writes Michelle Nijhuis, prominent science writer and Grist contributor, in Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming, “even so, I didn’t expect to see its effects on the shores of Walden Pond.” In what proves to be an appropriate opening to Thoreau’s Legacy, a new […]
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Coleman’s elegant year-round vegetable production blueprint
The June National Geographic features a story The End of Plenty which starts off saying that even though humans produced a record amount of grain last year, we still had to dip into stockpiles from past years to feed ourselves. Sobering stuff. But then for solutions it goes deep on the same tired green revolution […]
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Can a lazy environmentalist really change the world?
“You can guilt-trip me and you can moralize and you can gloom-and-doom about it, but there are probably certain behaviors I have that I’m just not going to change. But if you presented me with solutions … if we can figure out ways to reduce my impact — that I can afford — great! I’m […]
