By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Concerned about all those dangerous household chemicals you keep hearing about: BPA, phthalates and pesticides with cryptic names like 2,4-Dioxane?

We’ve found just the book for you.

Slow Death By Rubber Duck:The Secret Danger of Everyday Things (Counterpoint, 2009. U.S. $25) will take you on a chilling, but informative ride through our chemically enhanced consumer product world. Starting with your kid’s Rubber Duck, which contains five chemicals of concern, imagine what the rest of the household contains.

Frankly, I worried that this cleverly titled book about the dangerous additives lurking in our house dust, furniture, hand soaps and Teflon pans would be just that, an inspired title followed by surface information. But I was quickly relieved of that concern. Co-authors Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie are not just scratching the stick-resistant surface here.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Having just read and reviewed Slow Death By Rubber Duck, I had a few questions for co-author Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defence Canada.

And since his book was costing me — some $120 for a new set of stainless steel cookware to replace my stick-free, Teflon-coated set — I thought he owed me some answers.

We chatted earlier this week, while he took advantage of Family Day in Canada, visiting a playground with his young boys, a strong impetus behind his work to educate the public about harmful environmental and household toxic chemicals. The younger generation, he worried, has an even higher ‘body burden’ of chemicals than we adults grew up with.

In the book, he and co-author Bruce Lourie, an environmental consultant, test common toxics to find out how they get from consumer goods and food into our bodies. In fact, they ingest or expose themselves to these chemicals to chart the effects.

The basic idea: Since many of these toxic ingredients have been shown in lab experiments to act as endocrine disruptors and cancer triggers figuring out how to limit or reduce our exposure could have positive health effects, for kids and adults.

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Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants

By Douglas W. Tallamy

This book explains better than any we’ve seen how native plants support a healthy local ecosystem, providing birds and insects with the best foods so that the entire natural chain of wildlife can thrive.

If you’ve ever wondered why some people make such a fuss about native plants, this is a book that will give you a macro, micro and mini-micro look at your backyard and help you see why. Tallamy, chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware is well informed but never preachy. He shows us how we’ve unwittingly turned our yards sterile, inhospitable places for birds, butterflies and wild life by following thoughtless suburban trends. We put in acres of foreign turf grasses that require chemicals to maintain and “decorate” the perimeter with non-contributing flowering bushes. We get what we think we want – a land without insects — but undermine the food chain, creating a system that requires constant care and propping up. Our yards become chemically dependent.

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“I think that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several – where a stick should never be cut for fuel – nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand…a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation” – Henry David Thoreau

America’s most beloved treehugger said it better than anyone more than 150 years ago when he padded around Walden Wood on foot, marveling at the harmony of nature and fretting about its future.

But while Thoreau’s sentiments were lost in the din of industrial progress, they never died.

They are alive in the hearts of many Americans. The Union of Concerned Scientists has brought together some of these modern Thoreaus in an anthology of short essays, Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. These vignettes by regular folks worried about global warming, species loss, pollution and the future of our natural spaces may just move you to action in your own neighborhood.

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By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

The Denim Diet: 16 Simple Habits to Get Into Your Dream Pair of Jeans by Kami Gray claims to be a “no-nonsense guide to a smaller you and a healthier planet”. While I would not go far to say that it is a guide to a healthier planet, it does provide a glimpse into an environmental approach to dieting.

This book would appeal to people who are unfamiliar with the benefits to eating organically, a great source for the newly green.

Gray explains what it takes to be certified as organic by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is also notes that just because food is labeled as “all natural” or “100% natural” does not necessarily mean that it is, because the term “natural” is not yet regulated by the Federal Drug Administration. Anything can be labeled as natural. Go beyond the label to look at the actual ingredients, Gray advises.

Since most people avoid organic food because of the cost, she also provides some money-saving tricks, like buying fruits in season and freezing them and buying store-brand organic foods, which are less expensive.

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The Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

From Green Right Now Reports

This Friday is World Environment Day and the big event will be the global premiere of the environmental film Home. Narrated by Glenn Close and directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the photographer and author of Earth From Above, the film can be seen in movie theaters, on DVD, and for free on television and the Internet.

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By Harriet Blake

A son of Appalachia and its coalfields, Arnold “Bud” Fultz has not forgotten his hometown of Wallins Creek, Kentucky. After 25 years as an airline exec with now-defunct Pan American World Airways, he felt compelled to speak out about what the coal industry was doing to the part of the country he calls home. In his book Fixing the Ungodly Mess: A Pathway to Change (AuthorHouse, 2008), Fultz takes aim at mountaintop removal mining, a technique of withdrawing coal from the mountains by removing up to 1,000 feet of a mountain’s summit.

“My heart never left the area and I still had relatives there.. In July 1999, I was watching Nightline. The camera was panning over my old town. It was a piece about a seventh grade class that was taking on the coal industry. “

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By John DeFore

Published to coincide with the historic moment at which, for the first time, more humans live in cities than in the country — and, as the author notes, “one-third of these urban dwellers — more than one billion people — live in slums,” the exceptional photography book The Places We Live puts a human face on appalling environmental issues without resorting to sentimental clichés.

Photographer Jonas Bendiksen does this by not looking for the button-pushing universal image (the malnourished girl with watery eyes, say) but by meeting individual people, listening to their stories, and visiting their homes: The bulk of the book consists of four-panel spreads in which Bendiksen places his camera in the center of a single-room dwelling and photographs its four walls and the inhabitants who share them; accompanying the layouts are first-person narratives that can dispel myths about poverty (as with Shuresh Chandra, who shares an apparently bed-free room with three other grown men despite having a bachelor’s degree) and caution readers against pitying the subjects (”I don’t know how you see my house,” one man says, “but to me it’s beautiful”).

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By John DeFore
The sudden explosion of stories about food shortages resulting from diversion of crops to biofuels may prod Westerners to think, likely for the first time in years, about just what and how much people typically eat in other parts of the world.
The recent paperback Hungry Planet, then, is timely: Though stuffed with [...]

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By John DeFore
Standing out in the current wave of books about the environment — dire jeremiads, thoughtful analyses, and green-leaning coffee-table books — is a compact but weighty tome that is largely uninterested in conveying to readers any kind of “the time is now!” urgency. Rather, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau released April [...]

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By John DeFore
Tuesday sees the release on DVD of one of the higher-profile entries in the wave of documentaries about the environment, The 11th Hour. Like its big brother An Inconvenient Truth, it lands on retail shelves in slimmed-down packaging — this one replacing the usual bulky plastic case, with a paper sleeve recycled from [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
It’s no surprise that Big Energy gets the role of Goliath in Mat Hames’ and George Sledge’s Fighting Goliath: The Texas Coal Wars, a documentary produced and narrated by Robert Redford and The Redford Center at Sundance Preserve that follows a recent chain of events in which coal companies tried to fast [...]

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