In one of the most beautifully created books I’ve seen short of expensive art books, she writes about how she and her family became the core of what became the SSE. Her passion for saving valuable old heirloom seeds and keeping them from dying out runs through just about every page of the book. I was moved and inspired.

I’ve gardened mainly with heritage seeds and so unknowingly I am one of the many who owe these dedicated people a big thank you!

The book is personal autobiography woven with the story of meetings, a house where seed collections threatened to take over every inch that Ott Whealy, her husband Kent, and their children lived in! Since she and I are of the same generation, I specially enjoyed her stories of different eras.

A terrific, important, and visually pleasing book, highly recommended! It’s available at http://www.seedsavers.org/Details.aspx?itemNo=B1392. And while you’re there, browse around the site and learn more about this group. You might want to become a member or buy some wonderful seeds.

This article came from: Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, by Diane Ott Whealy at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Description

It’s easier than you think to clean your home in a nontoxic, environmentally responsible way! Conceptualized and designed by legendary publishing visionary Joost Elffers—the force behind such bestsellers as Play With Your Food and The 48 Laws of Power—this wonderful guide will help get your house shipshape without hurting the environment or your health. Inspirational cleaning guru Michael de Jong writes with humor and a Zen-like spirit as he presents five safe, all-natural products that take care of just about anything:

• Baking Soda,
• Borax,
• Lemon,
• Salt, and
• White Vinegar.

Each one gets a chapter featuring dozens of clever tips, while a handy alphabetized directory, organized by category, makes it easy to locate the information you need. With its graphically stunning and easy-to-use design, Clean helps you find your spic-and-span center.

Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing

This article came from: Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

I took the book and buried it in a large pile until I had the emotional stamina to tackle the state of the world. That was a couple of days ago.  For two days, off and on, I read one discouraging fact after another until my heart was down in my shoes.

“I’m not going to read any more of it today,” I said to my husband at dinner last night. “I want a good night’s sleep and if I read one more example of how the planet is being destroyed, I think I will melt down.”

So I did other things during the evening. But a curiosity was growing in me. He had held out the carrot at the start of the book, that the ending was optimistic. I kept wondering how he was going to pull that off.

So I succumbed. I read the last part of the book. And yes, it is profoundly optimistic. I felt much better. He writes of the morphic field, of our connection with God, of David and Goliath, of the power of each of us to make a difference day by day. I felt more and more connected as I read, and I felt more hope and excitement about my own work and my own life. As for the Big Bad Picture, I realized I needed to have some patience.

But did I sleep well? Ha.

Highly recommeded. And he has a newer book , along very similar lines: Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

Both this link and the image above will take you to Amazon. To find out more about Hartmann, including his free podcasts, go to www.thomhartmann.com.

This article came from: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

I pretty much missed the macmansioning of America.

Sure, I would see the big castles when driving around the US, but in the last couple of decades I’ve lived mainly in an old neighborhood of a city (Olympia, Washington), in an unusual small town in rural Colorado (Crestone, home of numerous spritual centers of all faiths), and in Mexico.

So I didn’t realize till reading this book the extent to which huge, un-sustainable homes with no ecological features were sprouting up. Now, as Wasik discusses, the mortgages, huge utility bills, high property taxes, and often long commutes that owners of these places must endure are taking their toll. Most Americans probably realize this more than I did in Mexico!

Can these homes be venues for simple green living? It is probably rare now, but there are things that can be done.  Many of them have yards that can have gardens. Their designer kitchens would probably lend themselves well to growing sprouts on the vast countertops. Even if zoning calls for single family living, I would imagine that quite a few people living in them will take in housemates or even quietly remodel to form duplexes.

Things like solar panels require more money and still have a relatively long payback period, so they may not be the best choices at present. But greater insulation, even just insulating curtains on a small section of the house which is heated more than the rest of the place, are quite possible.

If you live in a MacMansion, or know people who do, do you have ideas for how they can be greened?

And click on the image to find out more about the book:

This article came from: The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, by John Wasik at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

What was completely new to me, and quite intriguing, is that evidently the climate of the planet stabilized about 10,000 years ago — but before that, humans were contending with very erratic climate. Using ice core and other data, Burroughs paints a chaotic picture of climate… often very chaotic. A lot of those early migrations must have been to get away from ice or drought.

He comments,

Consider the implications of evolving in a radically different type of climate. If, as seems to be the case, for more than 90 percent of the time that our species has existed on this planet, it has had to grapple with an immeasurably more capricious climate, the consequences for how we evolved are profound.

Indeed, around 70 thousand years ago, we may have come perilously close t being wiped out by the hostile environmental conditions of the time. Our very ability to survive these challenges was a consequence of whatever skills we had then.

Furthermore, the combination of surviving these challenges and the process of natural selection must have ensured that the climate is deeply etched into our genetic make-up. It may also link deep within our psyche.

(pages 16-17)

It’s got me reflecting. Maybe we have some long-buried skills to draw on that we don’t know about. But there is nothing in reading this book that makes me less determined to do my bit for combating human effects on the climate! In fact, reading about the drastic changes makes me all the more interested in living simply and helping others to do so.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This article came from: Climate Change in Prehistory at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt: Hand-Building with Adobe, Papercrete, Paper-Adobe, and More, by Michael Van Hall, is a delight.

This downloadable ebook will take you through the steps to make your own simple dirt structure. He doesn’t go into all the details of how to build a house, as he points out that you can find that information everywhere.

This 100-page ebook focuses on… as you might guess from the cover… dirt. With close to 100 photographs and numerous drawings, the book is a relatively quick and very enjoyable read. It will motivate you even if you already are excited about natural building. And it will give you enough information to pile up the dirt with his special method.

(One quibble: he says you can also do this approach with papercrete and other materials. Kelly and I used papercrete as the exterior covering on our earthbag house in Colorado, and we have several friends who built all-papercrete homes. Don’t do it just before the rains come or during the rainy season, as it needs to really really dry or there can be mould problems. If you want to use papercrete, do a lot more homework on it specifically.)

Okay, back to this ebook. After an upbeat introduction with some history, there is an illustrated section on the traditional way to make adobe bricks, with comments on how much work it it – both to make them and to carry them to the building site. Not to mention the patience required to wait for them to be dry enough to use.

Much better, says Michael, is his Self-Locking Pour-in-Place System (trademarked.) Much of the book describes how to do this, and it looks like a lot of fun. Okay, any play with dirt is still going to be a lot of work, but this sounds like fun work!

I specially enjoyed the chapter where he did everything wrong… at least by traditional standards.

Michael’s website is fun too – click here to see what else the cheap-ass curmudgeon has to say, download some chapters of his ebook at no cost, and buy it if you want to.

This article came from: The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt (Building, That Is) at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Financial strains, housing crisis, credit crunch,climate change, overconsumption, war, and a general malaise plague our  world, but what do they all have in common?

They are a consequence of a modern way of behaving that all too often excludes the simpler ways in life.

• How do we truly feel when we buy extra ‘things’ amidst store crowds in comparison to chatting and watching a sunset with people we love?
• Why are we more willing to spend time buying those lifeless objects instead of receiving a warm free hug?
• Have we been incorrectly programmed in some manner? How much is time sitting in a park listening to the birds really  worth?
• What products are truly life sustaining, and what is causing us stress?
• How have we lost our way and why?

The Audacity of Simplicity tackles these questions and more by revealing some of the very notions that defy a world of turmoil, decay, and unhappiness.

It asks us to walk in strength towards a more hopeful future that redefines progress and success as personal and social well-being, environmental stewardship, relationship-building, non-material growth, inner reflection, and social capital.

It envisions a caring humanity with shared emotions and a common destiny.

Tim Boston, DipSoSc, BA, MES, PhD
Author & Philosopher

Click on the book cover to find out more at Amazon:

How to Live a Simple Life is the subtitle of this timely book.

This article came from: The Audacity of Simplicity, a New Book by Tim Boston at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

I’m making the cover illustration really large so you can get a sense of the range of homes that Kahn discusses and illustrates:

The book is full of amazing and outrageous designs and buildings, but I’m sure that many people have adapted these ideas less dramatically. Whatever your interest in natural building, this is a great book to have around. But watch out – your friends will want to borrow it!

Not long ago, I complied a list of books that are on my husband’s site www.greenhomebuilding.com and had sold the most over the past four years, and then I did a blog post listing the top 25. Why did I choose 25 books? Because this one was #25 and I wanted to include it!

Here are the categories into which Kahn organized all the material:

• Builders
• Homes
• Natural Materials
• Photographers
• Fantasy
• Trips
• On the Road
• Living Lightly
• Barns
• Old Buildings

To see more about the book at Amazon, here’s a link: Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter

This is not Lloyd Kahn’s first massive building book. Shelter came out in the 1970s and I’ve heard it said that the section in that book on straw bale houses was responsible for the existence of today’s straw bale building boom. We are in that book too.. I forget the page number, but Kelly and I had just met and were living in a 30-foot school bus he had converted to a sweet home. It even had a piano in it!

I’m happy that Shelter is still in print.

This article came from: Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter – Great Idea Book for Green Building at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

I think it would also be useful to people trying to get by on less money, as it has so many tips on gardening, cooking, food preservation, raising animals, planting trees, and related topics. Certainly in suburbs and even in cities, people are finding ways to garden. This encyclopedia has always recommended a lot of other books, and the latest edition mentions a number of websites as well.

When I bought myself a new copy not long ago, I noticed that a reviewer at Amazon made the point that The Encyclopedia of Country Living is not the best book available on some of the specific topics it covers. For example, this afternoon I was browsing through the section on raising chickens, which is something I have done and might do again. Yes, there might be a better book on the subject, but it wouldn’t also be good on different ways of preserving food or on eco-safe household cleansing with low-cost ingredients. It’s the wide range of topics that makes this book so valuable. I hope not too many readers will need the short section on giving birth alone!

Carla Emery grew up in Montana and began writing this book during the back-to-the-land era, when she was living in a small town in Idaho with her husband and young children. It’s gone through edition after edition, getting larger and larger… the 10th edition is around 900 pages! She writes in a folksy style and includes many tips, ideas, recipes, and suggestions that other people sent to her.

This is one handy book on my reference shelf. What about you? Find out more at Amazon about:  The Encyclopedia of Country Living.

This article came from: The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery: A Review at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

1.Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series)

2.The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book

3.Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods Earth Plaster * Straw Bale * Cordwood * Cob * Living Roofs

4.Building With Cob: A Step-by-step Guide

5.Earth-Sheltered Houses: How to Build an Affordable…

6.The Stonebuilder’s Primer: A Step-By-Step Guide for Owner-Builders

7.Cordwood Building: The State of the Art (Natural Building Series)

8.Earthship: How to Build Your Own, Vol. 1

9.The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling

10.Adobe: Build It Yourself, Revised Edition

11.The Cob Builders Handbook: You Can Hand-Sculpt Your Own Home

12.The New Ecological Home: A Complete Guide to Green Building Options (Chelsea Green Guides for Homeowners)

13.Small Strawbale: Natural Homes, Projects & Designs

14.More Straw Bale Building: A Complete Guide to Designing and Building with Straw (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)

15.The Good House Book: A Common-Sense Guide to Alternative Homebuilding Solar * Straw Bale * Cob * Adobe * Earth Plaster * & More (A Natural Home Book)

16.Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own

17.Serious Straw Bale: A Home Construction Guide for All Climates (Real Goods Solar Living Book)

18.Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables

19.The Owner-Built Adobe House

20.Adobe and Rammed Earth Buildings: Design and Construction

21.The Fifty Dollar and Up Underground House Book

22.Build Your Own underground Root Cellar

23.The Tire House Book

24.The Rammed Earth House: Revised Edition

25.Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter

This article came from: Our Top 25 Bestselling Books on Green Home Building at SimpleGreenLiving.com..