Portland's Better Living Home and Garden Show

Green Books

A collection of titles reflecting a broad range

of "green" topics.

To purchase one of these titles, visit Amazon.com

and type in the title.

The Resilient Gardener

By Carol Deppe

Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields climatology, ecology, anthropology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, and health science. In The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends these principles with detailed information about growing and using five keystone crops that are especially important for anyone seeking greater self-reliance: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.

Giggles the Green Bean

Turns Stinkytown into Greentown

By Lauren Davis

Giggles the Green Bean Turns Stinkytown into Greentown is the first book in the Giggles the Green Bean series. In this fun story the young reader will learn the 5 special secrets Giggles learns in order to turn Stinkytown back into Greentown. Giggles teaches kids important green concepts and skills including recycling, water conservation, healthy eating, and energy conservation using tangible, real-world examples that even the youngest readers will be able to adopt and discuss with family and friends. In keeping with the environmental message, a portion of net proceeds will be donated to the U.S. Forest Service Plant-A-Tree Program.

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

By Maude Barlow

In "Blue Gold," the authors exposed how a handful of corporations is gaining ownership and control of the Earths dwindling water supply. This follow-up describes a powerful response to this trend: the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to have water declared a basic human right.


	The Green Gardener's Guide: Simple, Significant Actions to Protect & Preserve Our Planet By Joe Lamp'l
The first Green book from Cool Springs Press, written by popular television personality, Joe Lampl, known as Joe Gardener. With a platform that encourages earth-friendly gardening, Joe will offer tips that will save water, conserve resources, promote healthy and safe plant growth, and eliminate damage to the earth.

	The Complete Idiot's Guide to Green Careers By Jodi Helmer
The career opportunities of the future of Green careers include jobs in which environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology are implemented to improve the environment and provide sustainable living. A growing number of people, whether right out of college or already well established in the workforce, are looking to market themselves and their environmental convictions. It is a promising path to a larger paycheck and healthier environment. Green-collar jobs are on the rise according to "Businessweek" magazine The Green Jobs Act of 2007 anticipates a growing labor need for thousands of green-collar workers with $125 million in annual funding for training and research.

	The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today's Most Visible Green Brands By Rick Seireeni
In this detailed market report, veteran brand consultant and creative executive Seireeni maps out the network of experts, activists, tastemakers, special interests, consumers and others who guide the fate of rapidly proliferating "green" businesses. Meting their influence online in clusters of similarly-concerned Web sites, these disparate sources of opinion and information-from government organizations to bloggers to green shopping sites-form a "simultaneous source of credibility, endorsement, and echo effect" for an ever-growing audience. In 12 case studies, Seireeni examines the cloud's make-or-break abilities, particularly to reject, fairly or not, claims of eco-utility as "greenwashing"-as happened to the Swiffer disposable mop in 2007, when "people simply weren't buying the trade-off between less water use and more landfill waste." Seireeni's focus is on "exactly how others have built green brands" with loyal followings; among others, he covers Seventh Generation cleaning supplies, Tesla Motors electric cars, Stonyfield Farm dairy, the financial institutes "creating Green Street," and Southwest Windpower. Though textbook-like in style, Seireeni's clear thinking and compelling examples will prove valuable for anyone looking to make hay in the growing green movement.

	When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance,Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency By Matthew Stein and Richard Heinberg
There has never been a better time to be prepared. Matthew Stein's comprehensive primer on sustainable living skills from food and water to shelter and energy to first-aid and crisis-management skills prepares you to embark on the path toward sustainability. But unlike any other book, Stein not only shows you how to live a green in seemingly stable times, but to live in the face of potential disasters, lasting days or years, coming in the form of social upheaval, economic meltdown, or environmental catastrophe. "When Technology Fails" covers the gamut. You will learn how to start a fire and keep warm if you have been left temporarily homeless, as well as the basics of installing a renewable energy system for your home or business. You'll learn how to find and sterilize water in the face of utility failure, as well as practical information for dealing with water-quality issues even when the public tap water is still flowing. You'll learn alternative techniques for healing equally suited to an era of profit-driven malpractice as to situations of social calamity. Each chapter (a survey of the risks to the status quo; supplies and preparation for short- and long-term emergencies; emergency measures for survival; water; food; shelter; clothing; first aid, low-tech medicine, and healing; energy, heat, and power; metalworking; utensils and storage; low-tech chemistry; and engineering, machines, and materials) offers the same approach, describing skills for self-reliance in good times and bad. Fully revised and expanded the first edition was written pre-9/11 and pre-Katrina, when few Americans took the risk of social disruption seriously "When Technology Fails" ends on a positive, proactive note with a new chapter on "Making the Shift to Sustainability," which offers practical suggestions for changing our world on personal, community and global levels.

	Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound By Miyoko Chu, Julia Hargreaves and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology
"Birdscapes" delivers an immersive birding experience never before seen--or heard--in any book. This unique work includes seven elaborately engineered full-color pop-ups portraying dozens of bird species as well as extended recordings of the birds' calls and songs.

	The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook: When It All Comes Together By Jeana Wirtenberg, William G. Russell and David Lipsky
Building an organizations commitment to sustainability is not just a means to enhancing the health, diversity, and strength of the world's ecosystems but a financially and socially sound best practice as well. "The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook" helps readers understand what sustainability means, and how they can implement it in their organization.

	Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World By Diane MacEachern
MacEachern argues that the best way to fight the industries that pollute the planet is to mobilize the most powerful consumer force in the world--women. If women intentionally shift their spending money to commodities that have the greatest environmental benefit, they can create a cleaner, greener world.

	Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America By Thomas L. Friedman
Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.

	The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City By Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
"The Urban Homestead" is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

	The Environmental Equation: 100 Factors That Can Add to or Subtract From Your Carbon Footprint By Alex Shimo and Christopher J Maron
The Environment Equation examines the to[ 100 Factors That Can Add to or Subract from Your Total Carbon Footprint.

	Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life By Ed Begley Jr
Hollywood's it man for all things green offers large and small ways to live a greener, better life. Packed with eco-ideas from standard to quirky to ingenious, this guide also comes with workbook pages to record readers' progress.

	Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style By Christie Matheson
Welcome to the world of GREEN CHIC. Being green-thoughtfully, consciously green-makes a real difference in the fight against & global warming. But did you know that it's also hip, classic, and stylish? Offering up dozens of author-tested, earth-friendly ideas, lifestyle writer Christie Matheson reveals that being chic and saving the planet aren't mutually exclusive. Can living a chic green lifestyle TRULY makes a difference? You bet your organic sheets it can. It's a calmer, more relaxed, more fabulous path that's about quality and quality of life. Embrace the fabulousness of green living. Being green isn't a fad it's timelessly chic.

	Living on Two Wheels: The Complete Guide to Buying, Commuting, and Touring By Dennis L. Coello
This book explains how the average family can live with no car. A bicycle is all you need. Dennis Coello lives that life and he explains how it is done and what you need.

	A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: 20 Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World By Bonnie Tsui
This collection features original essays by 20 young and gifted writers. Brimming with insight and humor, these compositions reward readers with new perspectives on personal identity in relation to nature, and on the impact of landscape and place on everyone's lives.

	The Clean Tech Revolution: Discover the Top Trends, Technologies, and Companies to Watch By Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder
Profits and potential are explored in the definitive book on clean tech: technologies designed to provide superior performance at lower costs, greatly reducing the world's dependence on "dirty" energy such as fossil fuels and other environmentally damaging products.

	Your Green Home: A Guide to Planning a Healthy, Environmentally Friendly New Home By Alex Wilson and Jon Abrams
Written for homeowners planning a new home, this text answers some of the big-picture questions relating to having a home designed and built that is healthy to live in and causes minimal damage to the environment.

	Your Green Abode: A Practical Guide to a Sustainable Home Tara Rae Miner
This sustainable home primer covers ways to green your home from lawn to rooftop, focusing on accessible eco-friendly improvements for any dwelling -- from a cement-walled urban apartment to a turn-of-the-century manse. Your Green Abode is filled with advice on green living, DIY green re-modeling, and green gardening. And any shade of green is better than brown! Author Tara Rae Miner encourages readers to start small, do what interests them, and handle only what they can afford. The process of greening a home is the process of getting to know a home, and Miner guides readers through different areas, distilling research and advice on everything from window and paint options to more effective ways to recycle to the benefits of planting a garden. With chapters on the home-planet connection, saving energy, and setting policies for a "Personal Clean Air Act," she presents important information on reducing energy bills, ways to measure your "carbon houseprint," and how to eliminate toxic chemicals from your life (be gone, vinyl shower curtains!). Your Green Abode is for real people who want easy-to-understand choices that make their homes a little more earth-friendly -- without signing off on a second mortgage. It's about having realistic expectations and goals, and keeping a sense of humor while learning what makes a home tick.

	Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World By Gary Braasch & Bill McKibben
"The power of Gary Braasch's personal witness to the climate crisis makes this essential reading for every citizen." --Al Gore ""Earth under Fire" is an important work documenting climate change. With an accessible text and startling photographs, it takes the reader on a world tour of the human effect on our climate." --Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "Braasch's descriptions and photographs of how climate change is unraveling ecosystems and human lives make real and vivid what for too many remains speculative and abstract. Each deeply researched story--the rising suicide rate in a melting Inuit village, fields of European butterflies killed by a false spring, coastal houses falling into the sea in North Carolina--becomes a memorable character in a rapidly unfolding drama that threatens to engulf us all." --Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute "There are scant books equal to the task of spelling out the greatest challenge in human history-global climate change. Rarer still is an author who can both write and photograph it, seamlessly marrying text and images. Earth under Fire is that rare book." --Paul Hawken, author of "Blessed Unrest" and "The Ecology of Commerce"

	Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees By Roger Deakin
In the late British nature writer's glorious meditation on what he has called the fifth element, or wood--as it exists in nature, in the soul, in culture, and in life--the reader is swept along on a quest through the woods in search of what lies behind humankind's profound and enduring connection with trees.

	The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time By Elizabeth Rogers, Thomas M Kostigen and Cameron Diaz
For anyone who cares about the health of our planet, this invaluable guide offers hundreds of simple, actionable steps readers can take to help save the Earth.

	Water: A Natural History By Alice Outwater
As a civil engineer, author Alice Outwater learned that although industry has stopped dumping toxins into the sewers, a third of our waterways have failed to rebound. Outwater takes readers on an incredible journey from the diaries of western explorers to the insides of modern wastewater treatment plants and argues that healthier, purer waterways can be created using natural, living systems.

	Steve & Me: Life with the Crocodile Hunter By Terri Irwin
From the woman who knew Steve Irwin best comes a loving, moving story of their life together, his astonishing legacy, and the man behind the Crocodile Hunter phenomenon. 16-page full-color photo insert.

	A Good Life By Leo Hickman and Sarah Drinkwater
This is a comprehensive guide on how to live ethically, recognizing the power of the consumer and the myriad ethical choices we face each day -- from the food we purchase to our place of employment, choice of entertainment, energy usage, etc.

	Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens By Douglas W. Tallamy
As this revelatory book eloquently explains, there is an unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife. Indeed, most native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plant species disappear or are replaced by alien exotics, the insects disappear, thus impoverishing the food source of birds and other animals. In many parts of the world, habitat destruction has been so extensive that local wildlife populations are in crisis and may well be headed toward extinction.

	Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills By Abigail R. Gehring
Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills--and enjoy a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle--need look no further than this eminently useful guide that features hundreds of projects and old-fashioned fun. Full-color and b&w photographs throughout.

	Backwoods Ethics: A Guide to Low-Impact Camping and Hiking By Laura Waterman, Guy Waterman and Bill McKibben
This new series highlights low-traffic scenic roads, both dirt and paved, suitable for riding on both mountain and road bikes.

	The Sacred Balance: A Visual Celebration of Our Place in Nature By David T. Suzuki, Amanda McConnell and Maria DeCambra
A moving collection of over 160 photographs and images that explores the web of life, this is a companion to the bestselling "The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature."

	The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity By James Lovelock
The Key Insight of Gaia Theory is that the entire Earth functions as a single living superorganism. But according to James Lovelock, the theory's originator, that organism is now sick.

	Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage By Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston
Based on the authors rich experience with forward-thinking companies around the world, "Green to Gold" demonstrates how corporations create value by building environmental thinking into their overall business strategies.

	Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things By William McDonough & Michael Braungart
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

	Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World By Paul Hawken
One of the world's most influential environmentalists--the author of "Natural Capitalism"--reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity to defend life on Earth.

	Green Christmas: How to Have a Joyous, Eco-Friendly Holiday SeasonBy Jennifer Sander Basye, Peter Sander and Anne Basye
As green awareness spreads over middle America, more and more people want to have a fun, environmentally responsible holiday. This resource shows how to enjoy the Christmas season while leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

	Cut Your Energy Bills Now By Bruce Harley
We have all heard the news: oil prices have exceeded $100 a barrel and natural gas rates have exploded by 74% over the past four years. And these costs will continue to rise. So how can the average homeowner lower their energy bill and still maintain a comfortable, healthy, and green house? The answer is: Bruce Harley's "136 Ways to Cut Your Energy Bills Today," Offering eye-opening incentives and easily achievable methods, Harley's uncluttered and organized approach will not only benefit the environment, it will help anyone reduce their heating, cooling, and electrical expenses. Highlighted by numbered tips and techniques for easy reference, the book presents a treasure trove of simple and inexpensive ways for cutting energy costs by up to 20% -- and even 40% in some cases.

	Climate Solutions: A Citizen's Guide By Peter Barnes and Bill McKibben
In 2006, NASA's top climate scientist warned that we have at most a decade to turn the tide on global warming. After that, James Hansen said, all bets are off. Temperature rises of 3 to 7 degrees Farenheit will "produce a different planet." If Hansen is right--and most scientists think he is--then every year lost is a year closer to the precipice. In more positive terms, we have one last chance--but one chance only--to save the planet. This guide is about that last chance. It's a result of hundreds of how-do-we-do-this-right discussions over many years. Author and entrepreneur Peter Barnes want to share what he's learned in these discussions because the climate crisis must be solved now, and popular understanding is a pre-requisite to getting a solution that actually solves the problem.

	The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities & Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices By Sarah James and Torbjrn Lahti
"The Natural Step for Communities" provides inspiring examples of communities that have made dramatic changes toward sustainability and explains how others can emulate their success.

	The World Without Us By Alan Weisman
Weisman, an award-winning journalist, offers readers a penetrating--and sometimes terrifying--take on how the planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence.

	It's Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living By Crissy Trask
It's Easy Being Green is a handy tool to help you make better choices for the environment. This is what the busy person needs to start making changes today. Get informative, comprehensive and practical information for adopting greener buying habits and identifying earth-friendly products; shopping for green products online; participating in online activism; and learning from over 250 eco-tips for cultivating a sustainable environment. Take the difficulty and guesswork out of greener living by learning the following: Install rain gutters and rain barrels to collect rainwater from your roof to use in the garden. Shift appliance use to off-peak hours. Some utility companies offer off-peak rates! Make your own household cleaners instead of relying on toxic commercial products. Submerge a plastic bottle in your toilet tank to save one quart of water per flush and thousands of gallons a year. This book concurrently presents a plan, tips and an Internet resources list that you can use to follow-through on good intentions. An extensive product labels list is also provided to help interpret how some foods are produced. If you haven't invested in substantially greener behaviors, consumerism and politics because you didn't know how or thought it was difficult, help is here: It's Easy Being Green is a handbook for all those who aspire do more to protect the environment but want it to be simpler. You can make a difference!