The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a comprehensive how-to manual that will help you select, design, develop, and manage land for self-reliance and regeneration, and presents a thriving model for productive, durable homesteads and farms in cold climates and beyond. It includes information on the site-design process, site selection, and site management; adapting land to rapid change, including flood mitigation and costs of living; gravity-feed water...

"Biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman-aka "Canopy Meg"-takes us on an adventure into the "eighth continent" of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action"-- As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Lowman sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees, in order to be...

Noted coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey and environmental scientist Linda Pilkey-Jarvis show that the quantitative mathematical models policy makers and government administrators use to form environmental policies are seriously flawed. Based on unrealistic and sometimes false assumptions, these models often yield answers that support unwise policies. Writing for the general, non-mathematician reader and using examples from throughout the environmental...

Explores the amount of waste produced, resources consumed, and how much impact a person has on the Earth in the average lifetime.

"Of all the things humans rely on plants for -- sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber -- surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: people around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. We don't usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and...

"How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the nonhumans, the beasts. And to do that, he tried to be like them, choosing a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer, and a swift. He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a burrow on a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his...