“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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By Barbara Kessler
If timing is everything, then premiering a film that champions biofuels at a time when the news media’s aflame with stories about the problems with biofuels must be a tad discouraging.
But Josh Tickell, creator of Fields of Fuel, does not seem discouraged. Determined, but not discouraged. Tickell, who has been been on [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

Measured against green ideals, a glossy new coffee table book can seem a bit indulgent, even anachronistic. Where’s the soy ink and recycled paper?
Those are valid questions, but in some cases, we’d like to think that the educational and aesthetic powers of a truly fine collection of photographs and words can have [...]

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By John DeFore
Living by the reduce/reuse/recycle mantra can be a challenge, a chore, a karmic satisfaction or tangible improvement in lifestyle. But it’s rarely something one participates in avidly, anticipating it eagerly while at work or singing its praises at parties.
Lately, though, I’ve been obsessed with a novel way of reducing the world’s waste [...]

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