Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingslover

December 2010

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life vowing that for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience

by Rob Hopkins

November and October 2010

We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most people don't want to think about what happens when the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but "The Transition Handbook" shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive effect.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

by Chip Heath

August, 2010

Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems, the rational mind and the emotional mind, that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body, the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work, the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

by Bill McKibben

July 2010

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way.