Energy-Wise Landscape Design by
Residential consumption represents nearly one quarter of North America’s total energy use and the average homeowner spends thousands of dollars a year on power bills. To help alleviate this problem, Energy-Wise Landscape Design presents hundreds of practical ways everyone can save money, time, and effort while making their landscapes more environmentally healthy, ecologically rich, and energy efficient. Combining general guidelines with tips, techniques, and actions, this fully illustrated guide explains the many opportunities our landscapes provide for conserving energy. Readers will learn how to: Lower a home's heating and cooling costs Minimize fuel used in landscape construction, maintenance, and everyday use Choose landscape products and materials with lower embedded energy costs Make a positive difference without a major investment or change in lifestyle Intended for homeowners, gardeners, landscape professionals, and students, the design ideas in this book will work in every type of setting—large or small, hilly or flat, urban or rural. Written in non-scientific language with clear explanations and an easy conversational style, Energy-Wise Landscape Design is an essential resource for everyone who wants to shrink their energy footprint while enhancing their property and adding value to their home. Sue Reed is a registered landscape architect and a specialist in ecological landscape design who has helped hundreds of homeowners create comfortable, livable, and beautiful landscapes that save energy. She is also an experienced writer and teacher whose work specifically focuses on environmentally sound, energy-efficient, and sustainable landscape design.
The Energy Wise Home by
Jeff Dondero walks you through your home's walls, doors, windows, and roof, room by room and appliance by appliance, breaking them down into simple terms so that you can make the smartest energy and resource choices possible. He even covers gardens and garages, explaining what household items cost to run, how to conserve energy when using them, giving guidance on what's sustainable and what isn't. This encyclopedic manual is very helpful for understanding the machine that is your house, and how to keep it maintained and running well and "green" while saving you money. This guide is a great fit to make sure that you make the best of your home and the resources that power and run it. Conservation in the home is something that you owe to yourself, your family, and your planet.
Feeding the Planet: Environmental Protection through Sustainable Agriculture by
Almost a billion people all over the earth suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Many of them are starving while the world's population continues to grow dramatically. The population in the industrialized nations, whose hunger is still abundantly satisfied, must struggle with the costs of heavily subsidized overproduction of food. Still, the worldwide lack of food will also pose a threatening problem to them.
Gaviotas by
Los Llanos the rain-leached, eastern savannas of war-ravaged Colombia are among the most brutal environments on Earth and an unlikely setting for one of the most hopeful environmental stories ever told. Here, in the late 1960s, a young Colombian development worker named Paolo Lugari wondered if the nearly uninhabited, infertile llanos could be made livable for his country's growing population. He had no idea that nearly four decades later, his experiment would be one of the world's most celebrated examples of sustainable living: a permanent village called Gaviotas.In the absence of infrastructure, the first Gaviotans invented wind turbines to convert mild breezes into energy, hand pumps capable of tapping deep sources of water, and solar collectors efficient enough to heat and even sterilize drinking water under perennially cloudy llano skies. Over time, the Gaviotans' experimentation has even restored an ecosystem: in the shelter of two million Caribbean pines planted as a source of renewable commercial resin, a primordial rain forest that once covered the llanos is unexpectedly reestablishing itself.Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez has called Paolo Lugari "Inventor of the World." Lugari himself has said that Gaviotas is not a utopia: "Utopia literally means 'no place.' We call Gaviotas atopia, because it's real." Relive their story with this special 10th-anniversary edition of Gaviotas, complete with a new afterword by the author describing how Gaviotas has survived and progressed over the past decade. -- Provided by publisher. Tells the story of Gaviotas, an experimental village established in the barren eastern savanna of Colombia by a group of visionaries and technicians in an attempt to prove that it is possible for people to exist, and even thrive, in one of the world's harshest environments.
Sustainability by
Today, the word is nearly ubiquitous: seeming to have come out of nowhere to dominate the discussion, from permaculture to renewable energy to the local food movement, the ideas that underlie and define sustainability can be traced back several centuries. In this illuminating and entertaining history, Jeremy L. Caradonna traces its origins to the emergence of planned yield forestry in the late 17th and 18th centuries, through the challenges of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th, the birth of the environmental movement in the 20th, and finally the emergence of a concrete effort to create a society that is stable, prosperous, ecologically minded, and forward looking. While sustainability draws upon ideas of social justice, ecological economics, and environmental conservation, it is more than the sum of its parts. Caradonna's book broadens our understanding of what the term means, showing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that dominates lifestyle choices, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy.--From publisher description.
Sustainability Made Simple by
Sustainability Made Simple explores the relationship between everyday life and the intricate global environmental issues of today, illustrating how small changes in daily routines and mentalities can add up to a big impact.
Reduce, Reuse, Reimagine by
Ecosystems require balance to survive, and when that balance is compromised, disaster can befall the whole system. To keep a balance in our global ecosystem, we need to use resources efficiently, equitably, and sustainably. In both nature and economics, we observe that when a healthy distribution of resources is achieved, systems can not only function but flourish. The United States recycles roughly 34% of its waste and has been stuck at this level for decades. Recycling brings a balance to our system by managing resources in a loop. When done well, it benefits communities and the environment. Individuals are a key part of connecting this loop because we provide a supply of materials and a demand for new recycled products. But many of us don't know what happens after those items leave our homes. We're confused by inconsistent rules of what we can and can't recycle. Our confusion has huge consequences and is a reason why our recycling is stuck. Throughout Reduce, Reuse, Reimagine, Beth Porter provides answers to clear up that confusion, and shares great resources about recycling, explaining the complexity, guiding individual action, and contextualizing its history. This book reveals how we arrived at this state of dysfunction, and what steps we need to employ to be an active participant in strengthening our recycling system. Nature knows how to recycle itself, decomposing waste back into the soil to continue the circle of growth. We should follow its lead.
Junkyard Planet: travels in the billion-dollar trash trade by
"When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-- veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-- travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar industry that's transforming our economy and environment. Minter takes us from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to recycling factories capable of processing a jumbo jet's worth of trash every day. Along the way, we meet an international cast of characters who have figured out how to squeeze Silicon Valley-scale fortunes from what we all throw away. Junkyard Planet reveals how "going green" usually means making money-- and why that's often the most sustainable choice, even when the recycling methods aren't pretty. With unmatched access to and insight on the waste industry, and the explanatory gifts and an eye for detail worthy of a John McPhee or William Langewiesche, Minter traces the export of America's garbage and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of how the way we consume and discard stuff brings home the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don't. Junkyard Planet reveals that Americans might need to learn a smarter way to take out the trash"
Recycling of waste and industrial by products in concrete : production of green concrete and saving energy by
"Cement manufacturing consumes high energy and emits an intensive amount of Carbon dioxide. Due to the extreme heat required to produce it. And also generates nearly a ton of Carbon dioxide. Environmental problems associated with the disposal of mineral by-products, energy and the high cost of Portland cement demand more efforts to find substitutes. These are called supplementary cementing materials to replace part of the cement in concrete. The artificial pozzolanas are materials obtained by thermal treatment such as silica fume, horma, metakaolin, rice husk ash and diatomite. The unique benefits of such additions need less energy for production, increase the chemical resistance to sulphate attack, impermeability, lowering heat of hydration and thermal expansion of the pozzolanic cement pastes. Concretes using composite cement can have properties that are desirable for particular purposes, such as slower and decreased total heat evolution in massive structures, improved durability or with microsilica, strengths above the normal range."