From the category archives:

Book Reviews

Book Review: The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes

January 7, 2005

Straw bales are a renewable resource, and they are becoming a widely used construction material in some parts of the U.S. Many localities have specific codes for strawbale construction, and some banks are willing to lend on this technique. Bale walls can be erected quickly, even by amatuer builders.
This book, The Beauty of Straw Bale [...]

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Book Review: Earthbag Building

January 6, 2005

What is Earthbag Building? Well, plainly enough, it’s a method of building using bags filled with earth.
This newly released book, Earthbag Building, is the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks, and techniques for building with earthbags.
Having been introduced to sandbag construction by the renowned Nader Khalili in 1993, the authors developed this “Flexible [...]

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Using Urine to Grow Plants

January 6, 2005

This book, Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants, by Carol Steinfeld explains how urine can be utilized as a resource! Urine contains most of the nutrients in domestic wastewater and usually carries no disease risk.
Starting with a short history of urine use — from ritual to medicinal to even [...]

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Free Online Books: MotherNature Bookshelf

December 14, 2004

MotherNature.Com, a natural products store, has twenty-one books about healing available for online reading. The books are all searchable and web-enabled in their entirety (through a partnership with Rodale).
We like the search feature so much we’ve reproduced it here:

 

Some of the titles include: The Doctors Book of Home Remedies, The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook and [...]

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The Magic of Tents: Transforming Space

October 17, 2004

Endlessly flexible, nurturing of creativity, cost — and energy-conscious, tented structures are an ideal means to address many concerns of modern architecture — a creative means to not only define space, but also to transform it into something to meet all sorts of design needs, for projects both grand and small.
Recent years have seen an [...]

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Carfree Cities

October 12, 2004

Imagine life in a city free from the noise, stench, and danger of cars, trucks, and buses. Imagine that all basic needs, from groceries to child care, lie within a five-minute walk of every doorstep. Imagine that no commute takes more than 35 minutes from door to door, and that service is provided by a [...]

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Book Review: “Transmaterial”

October 1, 2004

Transmaterial, a book edited by Blaine Brownell, covers “materials, products and processes that are redefining our physical environment.” The book is filled with surveys of metaeffective materials. The chapters include: ultraperforming materials, multidimensional, recombinant and transformational materials. The entire book is available as a PDF File (11MB).
See this review from World Changing for more [...]

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Book Review: Portable Houses

August 30, 2004

When some people vacation, they take their homes with them.
Those are the people Irene Rawlings and Mary Abel write about in Portable Houses, a book devoted to all sorts of movable shelters and the people who created or renovated them. The examples featured in the book range in elaborateness from a canvas miner’s tent to [...]

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Hyper-Optimal: Create an Oasis with Greywater

July 28, 2004

The book “Create an Oasis with Greywater” by Art Ludwig is packed with information about how to reuse greywater by diverting it into your garden. What is greywater? It’s all the “waste” water produced in a house besides sewage — e.g. water from showers, sinks and washing machines.
This is a key meta-efficient technique because, when [...]

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Book Review: “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”

July 28, 2004

The ideas in this book are refreshing and optimistic.
The authors, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, propose that factories,
homes and consumer products can be redesigned so that they are actually beneficial
to the world. This is in contrast to the approach of attempting to regulate
industries and minimize environmental damage. Instead of trying to cause "less
harm" the authors [...]

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