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The (Almost) Zero-Waste Guide

Melanie Mannarino

Cut back on waste, reduce your carbon footprint, and live more sustainably with these 100 (almost) zero-waste tips

In a perfect world, we would all be able to fit a year’s worth of waste in a mason jar. But for most of us​,​ doing so can be immensely intimidating or simply not feasible.

But even if you can’t be perfectly zero waste, you can still have a profound impact on our environment, climate, and health by making some simple changes to your lifestyle and habits. Author Melanie Mannarino shares 100 simple tips for being less wasteful in a variety of contexts:
-At Home, with advice not only for the kitchen and food, but also for cleaning and home organization
-Travel, from commuting to vacations
-Fashion, including finding sustainable brands and caring for your clothing
-Community, helping you identify ways to make a broader impact beyond your home

Beyond limiting your personal waste, learn about how you can reduce your “unseen” waste by making more eco-friendly choices, such as purchasing clothes with more sustainable fabrics and adopting a “Meatless Monday” regimen to help decrease your carbon footprint.

If you’re someone who wants to reduce waste in your daily life and make a positive impact on the planet ​without​ making​​ drastic changes in your habits, then look no further. This highly accessible and practical guide will have you living a greener, more sustainable life that is (almost) zero waste in no time!

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Backyard Farming

Adams Media

Grow, raise, and store your own food with this simple and easy guide to creating a self-sustaining farm right in your backyard!

These days we are all looking for ways to become more self-sufficient. Now with Backyard Farming you can create your very own micro farm right in your backyard—no matter where you live! Now you can discover ways to grow, raise, and store your own food year round whether you live in an urban environment, in the suburbs, or out in the country. From raising chickens and beekeeping to growing vegetables and planting fruit trees, this guide to homesteading will help you become more self-reliant in no time!

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Ever Green

John W Reid

Clear, provocative, and persuasive, Ever Green is an inspiring call to action to conserve Earth’s irreplaceable wild woods, counteract climate change, and save the planet.

 

Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska’s Bering seacoast to Canada’s Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost the entirety of South America’s bulge; the Congo, occupying parts of six nations in Africa’s wet equatorial middle; and the island forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California.

 

These megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever Green. Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere—the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of global emissions at 2019 levels—and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s most formidable ongoing crisis.

Reid and Lovejoy offer practical solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face, from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous forest stewards, to planning smarter road networks. In gorgeous prose that evokes the majesty of these ancient forests along with the people and animals who inhabit them, Reid and Lovejoy take us on an exhilarating global journey.

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The Container Victory Garden

Maggie Stuckey

Even if all you have is a postage stamp's worth of space on a balcony, patio, or front stoop, The Container Victory Garden equips you to dig into the joys of container gardening, right where you are.

Imagine this: In the morning, you pluck a few mint leaves from your backdoor herb garden and add them to your tea. A few hours later, you step out onto your patio and collect a handful of lettuce leaves for your lunch salad. Just before dinner, you harvest a few basil leaves and cherry tomatoes for a delicious caprese pasta.

In her trademark warm and informative style, bestselling author and expert gardener Maggie Stuckey shares everything you need to know to succeed with container gardening: planning, gearing up, planting, nurturing, and harvesting.

In The Container Victory Garden, you will find:

  • detailed line art drawings that illustrate many gardening techniques and set-ups
  • first-person stories of World War II Victory Gardens and their inspiration for today's gardeners
  • beautiful full-color paintings of diverse people enjoying their container gardens

This is the promise of container gardening: a fresh bounty of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers you can enjoy in every season.

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The Climate Book

Greta Thunberg

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

We still have time to change the world. From climate activist Greta Thunberg, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.


You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope—but only if we listen to the science before it's too late.

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts—geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and Indigenous leaders—to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Throughout, illuminating and often shocking grayscale charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations underscore their research and their arguments. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?

We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

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The Great Displacement

Jake Bittle

The Great Displacement is closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky

The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas.

Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.

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Compost Science for Gardeners

Robert Pavlis

Create your own compost and grow better plants.

With breathtaking clarity, Compost Science for Gardeners demystifies composting practices and helps readers determine the best technique for their unique situation. This comprehensive science-based book is your key to building healthier soil and growing better plants.

Using plain language and easy-to-follow instructions, this essential resource distills and blends the latest scientific research with the author's many decades of knowledge and experience into manageable form, debunking a host of common gardening myths along the way. Learn about:

  • The role of composting in the ecological cycle
  • Compostable materials to incorporate and those to avoid
  • Browns and greens vs the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio
  • The full range of composting methods, including cold and hot composting; composting in piles, bins, and tumblers; and pit and trench composting
  • Keyhole gardening, food digesters, vermicomposting, bokashi, eco-enzyme fermentation, and more
  • The relative merits and impact on the environment of each composting technique
  • Using finished compost to improve soil health

Anyone can compost. Whether you are a balcony or backyard gardener, market gardener, small-scale farmer, or homesteader, or even if you are simply looking for a way to keep organic matter out of the landfill, this book will show you how to do it simply, safely, and sensibly.

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