Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City BY KELLY COYNE & ERIK KNUTZEN This celebrated, essential handbook shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips, and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics. Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. By growing our own food…
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Unsavory Truth
How the Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat. BY MARION NESTLE REVIEWED BY KEN CONDLIFF If you are interested in learning more about our commercial food chain, the Unsavory Truth will be of interest to you. If you want to know more about who is attempting to influence the commercial food chain, this book is a must-read. Too many consumers take for granted that food just appears on a store shelf, has some claims on the front of the packaging (natural, healthy, simple, etc.), and so appears to be healthy – but don’t really understand the backstory behind the product claims. In the book, Marion Nestle has…
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The JUNK FOOD Effect
A new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Homesteading
Today, the western frontier has been settled and most of us live in urban areas, but that doesn’t mean there is no place for the homesteader. Rather than going extinct, the homesteaders of our species have adapted and have re-appeared as the solution to new problems created by urbanization. Thus was born the Urban Homesteader.
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Ready for Anything?
The Latin root of PREPARE means to make ready. I knew that Be Prepared is the motto of the Boy Scouts, but I didn’t know why Robert Baden-Powell chose it so I looked it up. “
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Journey
“So I propose that small cumulative steps do make a difference especially when combined with those of others doing the same thing. Choosing one action to focus on makes it simple. After a while, this becomes a habit and you can move on to the next action.” A few years ago I presented my class “Less is More: Getting to One Can of Garbage a Year” at Northwest Natural Gas over four lunch hours. At the first session, one of the participants said ,“I just don’t know if what I do matters” to which I blurted out, “You’ll feel differently at the end of this class.” Then I thought to myself,…
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Community
“We come to value what we share as much as what we own, what keeps us alive as much as what we exchange.” - Frances Moore Lappé
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Change Yourself Change the World
Sometimes I think, “Wouldn’t it be great to change the way things are?” Well, yes it would, aside from the huge responsibility were it possible.
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Earth Day Reflections
This Earth Day brings back fond memories of our first toe wetting in the Green Living Journal and makes us realize how lucky and grateful we are for this trip so far.
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Why Not Do Something About It?
Do you feel frustrated about what you see on TV, online, and in other media?
