Planetsave

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

Are you hungry for solutions that will relieve you from the guilt and challenge of living a stylish yet environmentally conscious life? Then The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget by cable TV personality Josh Dorfman (aka, The Lazy Environmentalist) by Stewart Tabori & Chang is a must-read. Realizing that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Dorfman has written a terrific book with the overarching goal of helping us all make a positive impact on our world without having to compromise too much.

And contrary to what many people think, Dorfman explains how it can be affordable and easy to lead a greener life.  In fact, The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget provides readers with solutions that don’t require much effort or financial commitment, but yield significant green payback. He covers everything from ways to reduce/reuse/recycle and conserve energy and water, to less obvious practices like greening your transport, eco-remodeling and finding non-toxic cleaning supplies. The resources include everything from denim repair to ways to borrow stuff from your neighbors to which stores have the best deals on affordable eco-furnishings, sustainable beauty products and budget-friendly organic cotton baby goods.

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In this day and age of highly processed, artificial ingredient-infested “food products”, fermentation offers a beautifully simple, healthy, and delicious alternative to preserving some of our favorite foods. Fermentation is a natural food preservation process typically requiring nothing more than very simple ingredients and time. Many popular, everyday foods would not exist without magical fermentation processes: sauerkraut, cheese, yogurt, miso, soy sauce, beer, and wine, just to name a few.

Fermentation not only preserves food, it makes food more nutritious and digestible, and the practice has spanned thousands of years. (Just one example: over 1000 years ago, Icelandic Vikings transformed milk cultured with rennet into skyr, a kind of thick yogurt-like cheese for later consumption.) It is a transformation made possible by bacteria and fungi. (I like to call it “controlled rotting”). For example: Salt some cabbage and throw it in a crock in the corner of your kitchen, and within a few weeks you’ll have delicious, aromatic sauerkraut, the result of a magical lactic acid fermentation.

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Did Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us get your mind spinning about what our planet would look like if we just suddenly disappeared? Well, get ready to spin some more, courtesy of a new book by University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz.

Titled The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, Zalasiewicz’s book explores what an alien geologist might be able to learn about our species from the geological record. And, like The World Without Us, it sounds like a fascinating — and sobering — read.

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