Jan Hunt’s The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart has a basic premise: Trust children. They may be small in size, but they deserve to have their needs taken seriously. She calls it empathic parenting: believing what we know in our heart to be true.

Peggy O’Mara, the publisher of Mothering magazine, writes in the foreword:

Jan tells it like it is. Children and adults are not different. We have the same feelings. Children who are disciplined with love respond lovingly…Children deserve to be treated with respect.

As a parent, we get conflicting messages about child-rearing. Our parents did it one way, child psychologists tell us different, school teachers have their opinion, the latest ideas in parenting are on TV, and they all disagree.

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In A Passion for This Earth, edited by Michelle Benjamin and published by Greystone Books and the David Suzuki Foundation, twenty of the biggest movers and shakers in the fields of writing, science, and social activism come together to explore these questions. At the same time, each writer seeks to continue the multifaceted approach to making positive change begun more than fifty years ago by David Suzuki, Canada’s foremost environmentalist.

The book is very reader-friendly and engaging, and the obligatory instances of fêting Suzuki that pop up are not gratuitous, awkward, or irrelevant. Instead, all of the individual pieces coalesce as the writers express their personal perspective on nature and environmentalism. The book’s title may have you suspecting a mélange of ooey gooey green effusions–you know, the sort of stuff I generally tend to write. But what the book delivers is a truly enlightening anthology addressing four different topics relevant to Suzuki’s legacy: “Falling in Love with the Wild,” “Rise Up and Reclaim,” “Uncompromising Dedication,” and “Travels with David Suzuki.”

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This is the message in Flight of the Hummingbird: A Parable for the Environment by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. The author takes a story from the Quechuan people of South America about Dukdukdiya, a fearless little hummingbird who tries to put out a fire in the Great Forest one drop of water at a time. While the other animals stand at the Forest’s edge, afraid and confused and hopeless, Dukdukiya tirelessly picks up droplets of water in an effort to save her and her companions’ home. Rather than give up like the others, and despite her diminutive physical form, her heart shows its grandness as she does what no one else will. “I am doing what I can,” she says.1

Along with this wonderful, touching folktale, Yahgulanaas provides illustrations in the traditional Haida Manga style. In evocative red and black colors, his depictions of the animals and habitat capture both your eye and the wildness of the animals. Although not true-to-life renderings by any means, Yahgulanaas’s stylized renderings seem to express the “spirit” of the creatures, adding great life and strength to the story itself. This fantastic artwork almost literally comes alive, too, in the animated video on the publisher’s website.

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For much of the later half of the 20th century, there was a divide between American Christians and environmentalists. There were individual Christians who were involved in environmentalism, but the mainstream church in America ignored the subject. Over the past decade that has been changing, and mainstream Christians are beginning to wake up and smell the shade grown, organic coffee. Books like Sleeth’s are much needed in explaining the hows and whys of it all to Christians who are trying to figure out their place in what to many of them is a new green world.

I found Sleeth’s book so engaging because he’s attempting to live the life  that I am attempting to live, too. He and his family have considerably downshifted. They continually purge their lives of stuff, live more simply, grow their own food, and seek new ways to help the planet all while realizing that they have a responsibility to the people on the planet, too.

Early on in the book, Sleeth refutes many of the reasons he hears Christians and others using to not care for the planet - reasons from “God gave us dominion over everything.” (which some use to abuse the earth instead of care for it) to “I bought my SUV because its bigger, weighs more, sits up higher, and is safer in a crash. If I’m going to be in a wreck, I want my family to be safe.” to “Tree huggers worship nature. I don’t want to be involved with them.”

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This scenario of modern Earth minus its most problematic children, us, is the subject of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. In one of the most compelling, meticulously researched cultural thought experiments of recent years, Weisman examines the numerous ways that humanity has stamped its footprint on the Earth’s face and then what would likely happen if we simply went away.

Weisman’s books has received a lot of fanfare and awards, such as being Time magazine’s #1 non-fiction book of 2007 and a New York Times bestseller, so I have been anxious to read it for a while. But any expectations I had, as you may have, of some misanthropic environmentalist’s tirade against humankind quickly get exploded by Weisman’s more nuanced, balanced, intelligent approach. The result is an inspiring, if also at times disheartening, presentation of how life has endured and will endure with or without humans in the mix.

In this respect, Weisman’s final sentence in the Prelude provides a provocative launching point into the book: “Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”1 Having this idea of nature missing us as or after it takes over again keeps the reader wandering what trick Weisman (or nature!) has up his sleeve as he describes all the serious alterations we have made to the natural ecosystem. It also challenges the widely held assumption that Earth would be better off without us–and so likely happy to see us gone!

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“Businesses and politicians have no part whatsoever to play in the solution: it is all about individual ‘non-civilians’.”

-Keith Farnish

The Sust Enable webcast series was spawned in a climax of understanding… years of myriad input and countless bits of information collected over time at once coalesced into one artistic, complex and beautiful vision.  I’ve never experienced anything else quite like it.  This is why I sometimes refer to the project as my “opus”–it artistically expresses and defines who I was before this period.  Who I will be after, too, is forever altered by the work’s creation.  Like giving birth to a living being, the act of creation transcends your own capacity to control it.

I can only imagine that Keith Farnish’s comprehensive A Matter of Scale was a similar labor of love.  One can sense the author’s own expressive burst in the feverish love with which he forms his ideas.

A Matter of Scale is an e-Book only; not yet a typical “print” book.  This could be for a number of reasons.  It could be the author’s environmental concerns of tree-felling for books.  Then, it could be the crux of his whole philosophy of taking personal responsibility for the actions affecting our global ecosystem.  But one thing is certain–A Matter of Scale is unpublished certainly NOT due to its lack of quality insight and urgent information.  For its own modest scale and scope, it packs a wallop.

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Shortcuts can work. Sometimes, they get the better of even the brightest business minds. And, sometimes, they bite us in the posterior as we completely miss the train.

A soundbyte is that modern age, Blackberry-fueled shortcut: a way to stand on the shoulders of giants and give the appearance that we have done our research on complex, science informed concerns like climate change when, in fact, we only Googled the issue’s peripheral details and quotes.

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• Australian solar thermal company Ausra
• Solar thin-film company First Solar
• Greenfuel Technologies, a pioneer in algae biofuels
• AquaEnergy Group, the creator of technology for harnessing wave power

Of course, the technologies under development by the companies profiled in Earth: The Sequel aren’t cheap; in almost every case, major investors, such as Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, have backed these start-ups with significant funding. At one level, some might argue that the market is already working: capital is flowing to promising ideas.

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I’m not the only one who has noticed this overlap, of course. And rarely have I encountered such a thorough examination of the connections between animal welfare and just about every other issue that concerns me than in the book Why Animals Matter by Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello.

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How can you structure your green or mission-driven business, so that you can grow and even possibly sell it one day, without compromising your ideals, beliefs and mission? How can you fund your growth without finding out too late that your new investors are not at all interested in what you are doing for the environment or society, but only in the financial bottom line? While Getting to Scale is not a “how to” guide, it describes a wide variety of case studies that illustrate key findings. It is based on extensive in-depth interviewes with dozens of CEOs and founders of mission driven businesses such Ben & Jerry’s, Stonypoint, American Apparel, and many others.

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But then it has been around with us since just before Earth Day 1990. A lot of water have since passed under the bridge. Save the forests; there is a website and a rave blog too: 50 Simple Things.

Eco-friendly shopping, for instance, may be fashionable, but critics have argued it won’t reduce global warming. What has been the role of the Green Movement in ecological modernization?

Since the early 1980s, green as a political ideology championing ecological and environmental goals, has given the face of the Green movement a newer look, but not without the usual controversies: global warming, biofuels, or “agro-fuels” in more fluent eco-speak, solar-powered future, etc.

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Leadership

• Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values by Fred Kofman

Business Ethics

• The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse by Marianne M. Jennings
• Branded! How the Certification Revolution is Transforming Global Corporations by Michael E. Conroy
• Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy by Hazel Henderson with Simran Sethi

Economics

• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
• The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth by Mark Anielski

Additional categories:

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But where do you buy from? I’m all for promoting local businesses and buying from small stores right in your own town. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you may have little to no options in that category. The easiest thing to do is log on to the internet (and you already have since you are reading this) and partake in the massive variety it has to offer.

After the runaway success with their first thepurplebook: the definitive guide to exceptional online shopping in 2000, authors Hillary Mendelsohn and Ian Anderson have released a number of specialized editions. Hitting book shelves in January 2008, thepurplebook Green: an eco-friendly online shopping guide is the latest of their incarnations.

Whether you’re new to the eco-lifestyle or so sustainably settled that you have a composting toilet and solar panels, thepurplebook Green Edition has something to offer everyone. Though the book is about shopping, it continually reminds readers to reuse what they already have. “The greenest thing you can do is to extend the lifespan of the products you already own,” says Hillary in the book’s introduction. “When it comes to shopping, it’s usually a matter of buying eco-friendly versions of the same products you already use.”

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The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, takes a slightly different tack and explores how altruistically minded people operate a bit differently in the business arena than typical entrepreneurs.

Published by Harvard Business Press, this book reminded me a bit of, Blink and The Tipping Point, both by Malcolm Gladwell as the authors discuss how a small movement can gain momentum until reaching critical mass. Filled with case studies from around the world, ranging from Whole Foods to Band Aid, Elkington and Hartigan demonstrate how compassionate entrepreneurs use market based solutions to tackle problems and opportunities in a variety of situations.

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Even better, YA novels are starting to address environmental issues. Dystopian societies are a staple for YA books: Lois Lowry’s Giver trilogy, Jeanne Duprau’s Books of Ember, and Scott Westerfields Uglies books all tackle the idea of the destruction of society at least partially due to humanity’s interaction with the environment. Now, one of my favorite YA authors, David Klaas, tackles the possibility of dystopia in the first book of his Caretaker Trilogy, Firestorm.

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Freedom from Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Oil Addiction

Despite his political leanings, though, Sandalow’s purpose in Freedom from Oil isn’t to criticize the current administration, or to bemoan the overall lack of progress in lessening American dependence on oil. Rather, he sets a much more daunting challenge for himself: illustrate how the US can overcome its dependence on this resource that’s responsible for environmental damage, security concerns, and economic indebtedness to some of the world’s most unsavory governments. In presenting his ideas, Sandalow deftly illustrates the depth of our oil addiction… and the complex circumstances any administration will have to address in order to set the country on a path towards a low-carbon energy future.

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I had the occasion to stumble upon two uniquely imagined facets of the same future over the past week. The first: The World Without Us, an eerily quiet scenario in which humans disappear from the Earth and nature slowly and persistently takes over. The second: Children of Men, a visually stunning dystopia in the form of a sterile and slowly vanishing human race.

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us uses a rational, scientific approach to describe post-human Earth. Surprisingly, the book reads like a summer page-turner…that really makes you think. The story meanders from the planet’s wildest places - a primeval forest in Belarus and Poland - to areas where human conflict has driven human abandonment and nature has found peace - in Cyprus and Korea.

Weisman’s artistic description of what falls apart, what lasts, and what happens when we’re gone is like candy for the imagination. "In a dream, you walk outside to find your familiar landscape swarming with fantastic beings. Furry rhinoceroses, big hairy elephants, and even bigger sloths-sloths??" He continues, "a dream, or a congenital memory? This was precisely the world that Homo sapiens stepped into as we spread beyond Africa, all the way to America. Had we never appeared, would those now-missing mammals still be here? If we go, will they be back?"

He also describes how man-made structures would fare the conquest of nature. For example, even on a sunny day, the people who keep New York City’s subway system working have to pump 13 million gallons of water away. Without us, Manhattan would soon turn into a system of streams and rivers. Weisman paints a vaguely haunting picture of the future, but at the same time, it’s powerfully peaceful.

Children of Men explores a slightly different future. Faced with mass infertility, our flimsy facade of civilization quickly degenerates into widespread warfare and depravity. We continue to destroy not only our own creations, but also our planet. The cause of human sterility is never explained in the movie, but one cannot help but connect the dots to the many chemicals and plastics that infiltrate our air and water today.

Weisman also explores infertility in The World Without Us - through the eyes of the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Les Knight. His image of a sterile population is much more peaceful: "Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we’d once swapped something alive and lovely. ‘The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden."

How/if we ever go, it will remain true that human action has fundamentally altered the Earth’s climate. The effects will persist for centuries, whether we’re here to feel them or not - but it’s certainly fascinating to imagine the world in a state that we, by definition, could never see: without us.

Your House Without You

The Renewable Energy Handbook

$mart Power

Wiliam Kemp has written two books on renewable power and off-grid systems for homes, $mart Power (2004) and The Renewable Energy Handbook (2005). (Smart Power actually uses a dollar sign for the S in the title.) These two books are largely a first and second edition of the same text, with the second edition being expanded with several new chapters and additional information.

Both of Kemp’s books are comprehensive volumes. He addresses a range of alternate power generating options. There are chapters on photovoltaic (PV), wind, biomass, and micro hydro. More than just discussing the technical aspects of the generating systems, he also covers efficiency, interconection, “Heating and Cooling with Renewable Energy,” “Living with Renewable Energy,” and the other issues surrounding having a home with renewable systems. He also has a section about making biodiesel and another section about eco-pools (naturally-, rather than chemically-filtered swimming pool systems) and solar heated pools and hot tubs.

The Renewable Energy Handbook and $mart Power both go into some depth about renewable energy systems. Kemp shows all aspects of the various systems, dealing with hardware installation, electrical connection, and the range of what is necessary to install any of the systems he discusses. While I would not rely solely on these books for direction about installing a PV system or a wind turbine, it does provide a greater depth of information. A homeowner can get a better sense of the scope of work required for installing a renewable system, and have a better idea about what is involved, and whether or not it is something they want to take on.

The book is copiously illustrated with many black and white photographs. The systems are more clearly understood when there are pictures to show the components, which people may not be familiar with. And seeing how large a battery bank is, or seeing what an inverter panel looks like helps give some potential owners an idea of what they will need to deal with if they install these units in their own homes. There are also many diagrams and tables with useful information for an owner of a renewable energy system.

Kemp provides case studies in The Renewable Energy Handbook. Five homes where various combinations of renewable systems were installed are shown, including the author’s own 3,300 square foot home. Kemp is a Canadian, and at least three of the examples are located in Canada. Though the other two are not explicitly identified, I suspect that all five of them are in Canada. These are good examples to show that renewable energy systems need not be restricted to only choice locations. Renewable systems can be installed anywhere.

A considerable portion of the book is devoted to battery storage, as well as the chargers, inverters, and other components of a power system for a completely off-grid application. With contemporary inverters, grid-tied power systems only supply power when the grid is active. In most cases, grid-tied houses will use net-metering with the grid as the “backup battery.” That way, the issues of battery cost and maintenance can be avoided altogether. However, some kind of backup power (whether that be with batteries or with a backup generator) will be needed. The battery information may not be pertinent to everyone, but Kemp provides enough information for a potential owner to consider whether or not to choose a battery system.

Kemp is an electrical engineer, and he has lived in his own off-grid house for a number of years. He writes from his own experience in much of what he writes about, and many of the photographs illustrating different systems are taken in and around his own home. While he promotes efficiency, he repeatedly points out that a renewable lifestyle does not need to be a spartan one. There are choices and tradeoffs to be made, but the stereo, the big screen television, and the cappucino machine are not prohibited, they just need to be carefully considered and the best available selection needs to be chosen.

The only issue I would like to see these books address more thoroughly is the question of evaluating which systems are appropriate for a particular location. There are a lot of factors to be considered, and every system is not necessarily appropriate for every location. A chapter that discussed how to decide whether to install a wind turbine or photovoltaics would be a valuable addition to a very comprehensive book that packs in a lot of information.

I am going to lend my copy of The Renewable Energy Handbook to my in-laws. They are beginning to plan for building their retirement home, and they have discussed some ideas for renewable energy that they would like to incorporate there. They are very interested in wind power (since they will be building in a windy location close to the Lake Michigan shore). I’ve discussed some of these system with them, but I think this book will give them good information about the scope of what they will need to do if they build their house this way. And I would recommend the book to anyone else in similar circumstances, or who is thinking about adding a renewable energy system to their existing home.