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Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway, now in a second edition, is one of the best books you could get on permaculture. (That link takes you to a page about what permaculture is.) One great thing about permaculture is that once you get a system going, it is not that hard to maintain. Sounds good to me! This book covers the topics listed below, and is meant for urban dwellers as well as those of us with more space. — Zana

• ISBN13: 9781603580298
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher.

Product Description
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. Read the rest of this entry »

I was pleased to find this guest post, a useful article on living inexpensively. Good any time, essential now for many people! — Zana

Hanging by a Shoestring – How to Survive on Next to Nothing

By Jennifer Carpenter

An estimated 47% of American households live paycheck to paycheck or very close. It doesn’t look like statistic will get any better soon; in fact it’s likely to get worse as the unemployment numbers rise. Not having much of a disposable income doesn’t mean you have to feel deprived, it just means you have to learn to survive on less fancy foods, repaired clothing, homemade old-fashioned household and beauty products and simple forms of entertainment. If you can learn how to and commit to doing at least these things, living n a shoestring budget won’t seem so much like deprivation.

Cut Your Food Bill

There are many different ways to save money at the supermarket. My favorites are shopping the sales and buying generic. Read the rest of this entry »

This book  is currently one of the bestsellers at Amazon in the sustainable living category. Decluttering really helps with living in smaller spaces. If you tend to be cluttered, try playing around with greater simplicity in your apartment, house, motorhome, or whatever you live in — and see how it makes you feel! I have lived in very small spaces a LOT and have fought my packrat tendencies many times. — Zana

Product Description
When Peter Walsh, organizational guru of TLC’s hit show Clean Sweep and a regular contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show, appeared on national television shows and told people how they could reclaim their lives from the suffocating burden of their clutter, the response was overwhelming. People flooded Peter’s website (www.peterwalshdesign.com) with success stories about how his book had changed their lives.

Peter’s unique approach helped people everywhere learn to let go of the emotional and psychological clutter that was literally and figuratively choking the life out of their homes. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend recently sent me the link to Paul Chefurka’s thoughtful website called Approaching the Limits to Growth. He writes long articles and I was pleased to see the small print at the bottom which said,

“This article may be reproduced in whole or in part , in any manner and for any purpose whatsoever, with no restrictions..”

So I tried to copy one article completely, but I wasn’t able to cut and paste the illustrations. Still, here is the start to his thoughts about consumption, overpopulation, and the planet. There’s a link at the end of the excerpt right to his page.

A fairly common belief among western environmental activists is that “overpopulation is causing our ecological overshoot”. It’s a simple idea to present, as it just requires people to accept that more people cause more environmental damage.

Unfortunately this simple idea has a number of problems.  The main one is the old conundrum of who bears the responsibility for bringing the situation back into balance.  Should rich countries whose population growth is already slowing cut their consumption, or should poor countries that are not overconsuming cut their populations?

I used to believe that population was “the” ecological problem of the world.  I’ve recently changed my mind, as the result of a variety of investigations into the Ecological Footprint. Read the rest of this entry »

We recently visited an intentional community here in Mexico, less than two hours from where we live. Some Mexican friends of ours from Guadalajara had been looking for the right place to move to, and this place was it. It has over twenty families, living in regular houses. Each family seems to own its own place; our friends were renting a rather simple and very nice house, and had just purchased land within the community to build their own.

This couple invited us to visit on a recent Sunday, and I’m so glad we went. (We are currently living in Mexico, by Lake Chapala.)

“To live ecologically is important,” said our friend Sandro over lunch. (We spoke mostly in Spanish, with a bit of English here and there.)  “But it’s not everything. There is spirituality. ” I was in agreement. “And you must have tradition,” he finished.

I wondered how many Americans would have added tradition, but it’s at the very heart of the success of this Mexican community, now over 25 years old.  Teopantli Kalpulli  is out several miles on a narrow, dusty dirt road from what appeared to be an ordinary semi-rural Mexican town, which our friends said was about an hour from the edge of Guadalajara. Read the rest of this entry »

This article comes from Yahoo Answers. I have permission to use it here on the blog. It is organized so that the question is in the blog post section, and the answers are in the comments portion. Feel free to add your own thoughts.

I sort through the material I find there, looking for things that I think deserve wider circulation. So this page is powered by Yahoo! Answers. — Zana

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Where can I find good tips for green living?

I’m doing all the big things but I want to make sure I do the little things too.

suggestions? websites?