Books about Environmentalist from Amazon.com

Are you confused by all the advice you hear and see daily on how to "go green"? Do you want to incorporate earth-friendly practices into your life, but you don't know where to start? Don't stress! Green guru Sophie Uliano has sorted through all the eco-info out there and put everything you need to know about living a green lifestyle right at your fingertips.

In Gorgeously Green, Sophie offers a simple eight-step program that is an easy and fun way to begin living an earth-friendly life. Each chapter covers topics from beauty to fitness, shopping to your kitchen—even your transportation. Whether it's finding the right lipstick, making dinner, buying gifts, or picking out a hot new outfit, finally, there is a book that tackles your daily eco-challenges with a take-charge plan. Just consider Sophie your go-to girl with all the eco-solutions. Find out how to:

• Green your entire beauty regime
• Detoxify your home
• Indulge in guilt-free shopping
• Adopt a home fitness routine
• Prepare eco-licious treats
• Give your kitchen a green makeover
• Become more aware of your impact on the earth

The book's dozens and dozens of eco-friendly tips, products, and practices combine to form a treasure trove of practical advice for every possible way to become stylishly green. Your questions about dressing, makeup, eating, shopping, cleaning, travel, and more are all answered right here. Adopting a green lifestyle is among the most positive, forward-thinking, and personally fulfilling choices that anyone can make--and Gorgeously Green shows that it doesn't have to be tedious, time-consuming, or glamourless!

Questions for Sophie Uliano

We had the opportunity to chat with Sophie Uliano over e-mail about Gorgeously Green, her suggestions for saving the Earth, and the very real possibility of becoming a hippie. Here's what Sophie had to say about the economics of eco-consciousness, the allure of non-toxic nail polish, and of course, whether it's truly easy being green.

Amazon.com: I've heard a common complaint that energy-saving light bulbs, organic food and clothing, and other "green" products are not as economical as traditional products. Is that true? Any tips for readers who want to be eco-conscious and budget-conscious too?

Sophie Uliano: I think that going green has a double meaning in that it also is about saving money. There is no way that I would or could go green if it meant that I was going to have to pay much more. If you make the cleaning spray that I suggest in my book, you will save a bunch on cleaning supplies because it's an all-purpose cleaner that I use on almost everything (a great germ-buster too). You will pay a little more upfront for energy-saving light bulbs, but as they last 15 times longer, you will save money in the long run. Food is the only thing that you may have to pay a bit more for, however, I think that your health is an important investment, so I choose to save on boring cleaning supplies and treat my family to food that not only tastes more delicious, but will keep them healthy and vibrant. Remember that if you follow all the energy-saving tips in the book, you are going to save a wad of cash too--so it's a win/win.

Amazon.com: I think many people are interested in making more sustainable choices, but when it comes to the heavy lifting it can be hard to break old habits. We tend to think, "Someone else will ride their bike to work today--I'll drive like I always do." What advice do you have that can help people "walk the talk"?

Uliano: I agree that it is hard to break old habits. My suggestion is to break one habit at a time. Choose the one thing that bothers you most. For me it is using paper towels when I know that I can easily use a rag instead. Make a decision about the change you want to make and tell your friends and family that you have decided to do this one thing and that you want their support. It could be that you are going to cook one organic meal from scratch once a week, or that you are going to air-dry your clothes this summer or simply that you will wash out a barely used zip-lock bag, instead of throwing it away--easy!

Amazon.com: Furthermore, I've heard many people worry that eco-consciousness is the first step toward becoming a granola hippie, to use one of your own phrases from the book. Do you have to be a hippie to go green?

Uliano: You so don't have to become the tree hugger/hippie to live a green way of life. I feel passionately that you can still have the glitz, the glam and the gleaming house because now there are so many eco-friendly companies that offer you safe and healthy choices: nail polishes, organic clothes that are fabulous to name a few.

Amazon.com: Not everyone lives in an area where green options are available and accessible. Can you suggest a few ways that readers can live a greener lifestyle even if they don't have easy access to car-sharing companies, wet dry-cleaners, and other alternatives you mention in your book?

Uliano: If you don't have easy access to some of the green options in my book, it really doesn't matter. No matter where you live, you can make a start. I recently visited my in-laws in Georgia, who have fewer options than we do here in Los Angeles; however, they have embarked on making their own cleaners, composting, growing veggies etc. There's advantages to living in a metropolitan city in that you can buy all the great eco-stuff, but if you live in a more rural setting, it's fantastic too because you may have a yard in which you can grow tomatoes or air-dry your laundry. I'd pick the latter if given the choice!

Amazon.com: Your book is mainly directed toward female readers--what tips do you have for men who are interested in making sustainable lifestyle changes?

Uliano: I wrote my book for women because I realized that as a mom, wife and working girl I could show like-minded women how easy it is to become green, however, men can totally benefit from my book too! My husband doesn't have a huge interest in non-toxic nail polish, but he's fascinated with everything solar and has started biking everywhere. We work together as a team, inspiring each other with our daily green discoveries--it's fun!.
Price: $10.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Situated beautifully at the intersection of Michael Pollan, Ruth Reichl, and Barbara Kingsolver, Heirloom is an inspiring, elegiac, and gorgeously written memoir about rediscovering an older and still vital way of life.

Fourteen years ago, Tim Stark was living in Brooklyn, working days as a management consultant, and writing unpublished short stories by night. One evening, chancing upon a Dumpster full of discarded lumber, he carried the lumber home and built a germination rack for thousands of heirloom tomato seedlings. His crop soon outgrew the brownstone in which it had sprouted, forcing him to cart the seedlings to his family’s farm in Pennsylvania, where they were transplanted into the ground by hand. When favorable weather brought in a bumper crop, Tim hauled his unusual tomatoes to New York City’s Union Square Greenmarket, at a time when the tomato was unanimously red. The rest is history. Today, Eckerton Hill Farm does a booming trade in heirloom tomatoes and obscure chile peppers. Tim’s tomatoes are featured on the menus of New York City’s most demanding chefs and have even made the cover of Gourmet magazine.

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Price: $11.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Permaculture is a verbal marriage of “permanent” and “agriculture.” Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development Key features include:

use of compatible perennials;

non-invasive planting techniques;

emphasis on biodiversity;

specifically adaptable to local climate, landscape, and soil conditions;

highly productive output of edibles.
Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of MonetÂ’s palette, a wash of color, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.
The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you--good olÂ’ homo sapiens--are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.
This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro..
Price: $15.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying..
Price: $8.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are..
Price: $8.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

After reading this intriguing book, a glass of wine will be more than hints of blackberries or truffles on the palate. Written by the author of the popular, award-winning website DrVino.com, Wine Politics exposes a little-known but extremely influential aspect of the wine business--the politics behind it. Tyler Colman systematically explains how politics affects what we can buy, how much it costs, how it tastes, what appears on labels, and more. He offers an insightful comparative view of wine-making in Napa and Bordeaux, tracing the different paths American and French wines take as they travel from vineyard to dining room table. Colman also explores globalization in the wine business and illuminates the role of behind-the-scenes players such as governments, distributors, and prominent critics who wield enormous clout. Throughout, Wine Politics reveals just how deeply politics matters-- right down to the taste of the wine in your glass tonight..
Price: $15.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come..
Price: $8.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Americans are expressing deep concern about US dependence on petroleum, rising energy prices, and the threat of climate change. Unlike the energy crisis of the 1970s, however, there is a lurking fear that now the times are different and the crisis may not easily be resolved.

The Long Descent examines the basis of such fear through three core themes:

• Industrial society is following the same well-worn path that has led other civilizations into decline, a path involving a much slower and more complex transformation than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today.
• The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world. Since problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them, these ways of thinking need to be replaced with others better suited to the needs of our time.
• It is too late for massive programs for top-down change; the change must come from individuals.

Hope exists in actions that range from taking up a handicraft or adopting an "obsolete" technology, through planting an organic vegetable garden, taking charge of your own health care or spirituality, and building community.

Focusing eloquently on constructive adaptation to massive change, this book will have wide appeal.

John Michael Greer is a certified Master Conserver, organic gardener, and scholar of ecological history. The current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), his widely-cited blog, The Archdruid Report (thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com) deals with peak oil, among other issues. He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

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Price: $12.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Amazon.com Guest Reviewer: Michael Crichton
In his many science-themed bestsellers--including The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Prey, and most recently, Next--Michael Crichton has covered everything from genetically engineered dinosaurs to time travel to nantechnology run amok. Having cast his own views on the dangers and hysteria surrounding global warming with State of Fear, he turns his pen toward the often controversial Bjørn Lomborg and his latest book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.

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Bjørn Lomborg is the best-informed and most humane advocate for environmental change in the world today. In contrast to other figures that promote a single issue while ignoring others, Lomborg views the globe as a whole, studies all the problems we face, ranks them, and determines how best, and in what order, we should address them. His first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, established the importance of a fact-based approach. With later books, Global Crises, Global Solutions and How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, this mild-mannered Danish statistician has steadily gained new converts. Not surprisingly, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming will further enhance Lomborg's reputation for global analysis and thoughtful response. For anyone who wants an overview of the global warming debate from an objective source, this brief text is a perfect place to start. Lomborg is only interested in real problems, and he has no patience with media fear-mongering; he begins by dispatching the myth of the endangered polar bears, showing that this Disneyesque cartoon has no relevance to the real world where polar bear populations are in fact increasing. Lomborg considers the issue in detail, citing sources from Al Gore to the World Wildlife Fund, then demonstrating that polar bear populations have actually increased five fold since the 1960s.

Lomborg then works his way through the concerns we hear so much about: higher temperatures, heat deaths, species extinctions, the cost of cutting carbon, the technology to do it. Lomborg believes firmly in climate change--despite his critics, he's no denier--but his fact-based approach, grounded in economic analyses, leads him again and again to a different view. He reviews published estimates of the cost of climate change, and the cost of addressing it, and concludes that "we actually end up paying more for a partial solution than the cost of the entire problem. That is a bad deal."

In some of the most disturbing chapters, Lomborg recounts what leading climate figures have said about anyone who questions the orthodoxy, thus demonstrating the illiberal, antidemocratic tone of the current debate. Lomborg himself takes the larger view, explaining in detail why the tone of hysteria is inappropriate to addressing the problems we face.

In the end, Lomborg's concerns embrace the planet. He contrasts our concern for climate with other concerns such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, and providing clean water to the world. In the end, his ability to put climate in a global perspective is perhaps the book's greatest value. Lomborg and Cool It are our best guides to our shared environmental future.

--Michael Crichton

(photo credit: Jonathan Exley)

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Price: $10.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]