LiveGaia - Holistic Living, Sustainable Life

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The sustainable paradigm can’t be, and isn’t, just moving to renewable energy and non-polluting cars.  The nature of industry, production, design, packaging, commerce, economics and all aspects of our lives will move away from the industrial revolution model of exploiting and disregarding nature, toward a holistic and integrated relationship.
As a reader of this blog you probably know that you don’t want to continue polluting the air, land and waters of our world. It isn’t enough to know what we don’t want, we must also continually educate ourselves in what we do want, and how what we want is possible. Here is my best shot at your reading list for a sustainable future. They are all 5 star rated, chosen to be inter complementary.
Please feel free to let me know if there are books you know of that you feel should be included in this library for surviving the 21st century.

Books 1 - 4

Here is the perfect place to start a library for the 21st Century. This book is such a radical departure from most eco thinking that if you haven’t read it you have no idea how good things can be. While most ‘green’s’ are banging the drum of the 4R’s – reduce, re-use, recycle and regulate, the authors lay out a vision for a whole new paradigm. They dismiss eco-friendly as a poor compromise and eco-efficient as a slow death while pretending everything will be ok. They propose eco- effectiveness. Eco –effectiveness is cradle to cradle design where a product is designed with component parts that can be ‘up-cycled’ or productively used as ‘nutrient’ in some capacity. This is starkly contrasted with our current status quo of cradle to grave design where even the meagre recyclables actually just down-cycled until their inevitable burial.

Cradle to Cradle goes beyond the notion of having recycling as the final step in a process flow, and instead builds on the idea that waste need not exist at all. We can design our lives and products around the notion of nourishment – from the way we live to how we design and produce goods. The natural world provides the template for what the authors suggest, from the regenerative world of the insect, to the cherry tree, to the use of natural nutrients such as solar and wind power. They suggest that the key to working within, rather than against, nature is to respect biodiversity, respect the elegance and abundance of what is around us, and begin our design process with the notion of there is no such thing as waste. And these guys practice what they preach this book so deep-green it is manufactured out of fully recyclable plastic resins.

We are all familiar to some degree with the major challenges of this time, population growth, climate change, environmental degradation, poverty and so on. In this book Michael Schacker unravels, like a detective novel a largely ignored crisis that will have calamatous consequences if unchecked. The mystery of the disappearing bees and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. Very little accurate reporting or in fact reporting of this at all has occurred in America. Like me you may have heard something about mites and viruses, and like the best dis-information there is some truth in these stories. They do not however have anything to do with CCD. This book delves deep into the dark side of agrochemical farming and it’s revolving door friendliness with the EPA and how it all relates to CCD. Like me you may have no idea how utterly dependant America is to an industry of pollinators who drive millions of bees round the country to pollinate one third of American crops worth tens of billions of dollars. There may soon not be enough bees to do this job and Michael Schacker reveals why. The looming crisis of the bees is more immediate and more easily remedied than any other and an informed citizenry can demand this solution.

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson, Edward O. Wilson, and Linda Lear
Silent Spring was published in 1962 and is still completely relevant today and a great example of the power of information in the right hands. Some say this book was the catalyst for the modern environmental movement and indeed time has proved that Rachel Carson was not an alarmist and voiced legitimate concerns about the mass spraying of pesticides and their effects not only on human health but widespread destruction in the ecological system
After a long and bitter struggle, DDT, which was a focus in the book was subsequently banned. The chemists were of course soon hard at work and it has simply been replaced with pesticides with equally untested consequences to DDT. In the mean time the chemical companies that produce and sell them are even more powerful and wealthy. This is why this book is still relevant today.

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature  - Janine M. Benyus
The basic premise of this book is that nature is the ultimate self-regulating design genius, and we would do well to learn from her. Why is this book important? Our current model of relating with the world we live on is at destructive odds with nature’s genius. The industrial revolution and supporting philosophy sees nature as something wild to be conquered, tamed and controlled and we have been going at it ever since. The paradigm shift we are living in is away from this world view and into alignment with, and learning from the genius of nature. For some, parts of this book may prove overly technical, but on the whole the tangible love and reverence for  nature of Janine Benyus carries you through the book. What also comes over strongly is her clear understanding of interconnectedness and the necessity of a holistic understanding of natural systems. If you are like me, and want there to be a sustainable way of producing what we use, this book is a must read.

Tomorrow Part 2 Books 5-8

Part 3 Books 9 - 12