Part green building primer, part architectural photo essay, this is an essential resource for professionals and homeowners interested in the leading edge of environmental building. Imhoff traveled extensively to document and photograph beautiful and novel alternatives to wood intensive-building. Building with Vision is the first book to link residential building with forest impacts. Nearly 1.5 million new houses are built in the United States each year, 90 percent framed with wood, and the average house consuming an acre's worth of trees. But as Building with Vision shows, from framing and siding to new building systems and finish materials, there are many ways architects, contractors, and homeowners can make high-quality, resourceful, long-lasting and beautiful decisions. Details include building techniques as well as materials, including Styrofoam, steel, concrete, straw bales, rammed earth, adobe and much more.

Building with Vision: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood (Wood Reduction Trilogy)

Science & Math

Imhoff, Daniel

Biological Sciences

Watershed Media

The Farm Bill is perhaps the single most significant land use legislation enacted in the United States, yet many citizens remain unaware of its power and scope. With subsidies ballooning toward $25 billion dollars per year, the Farm Bill largely dictates who grows what crops, on what acreage, and under what conditions—all with major impacts on the country's rural economies, health and nutrition, national security, and biodiversity. As debate and wrangling over the 2007 Farm Bill intensifies, Food Fight offers a highly informative and visually engaging overview of legislation that literally shapes our food system, our bodies, and our future.

Food Fight: A Citizen's Guide to a Food And Farm Bill

Business & Money

Daniel Imhoff

Industries

Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature addresses an urgent and complex issue facing communities and cultures throughout the world: the need for heightened land stewardship and conservation in an era of diminishing natural resources. Agricultural lands in rural areas are being purchased for development. Water scarcities are pitting urban and development expansion against agriculture and conservation needs. The farming population is ageing and retiring, while those who remain struggle against low commodity prices, international competition, rising production costs, and the threat of disappearing subsidies. We are living amidst a major extinction crisis—much of it driven by agriculture—as well as an increasing shift toward a global urban populace. The modern diet, driven by a grain-fed livestock industry, is no longer connected with the ecosystems that support it. In international circles, experts are arguing that further intensification of agriculture (through industrialization and genetic modification) will be necessary to both feed an exploding human population and to save what is left of wild biodiversity. This book takes up where its predecessor, the award-winning Farming with the Wild, left off. Featuring a wide range of in-depth essays, articles, and other materials by such authors as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Fred Kirschenmann, and Daniel Imhoff, this book persuasively demonstrates that farm and ranch operations which coexist with wild nature are necessary to sustain biodiversity and beauty on the landscape. In fact, as this invaluable educational resource demonstrates, they are essential in the challenge of building sane, healthy, and hopeful human societies.

Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature: Essays on Conservation-based Agriculture

Earth Sciences

An inspirational and practical exploration of bringing "eco consciousness" to K-12 education. Smart by Nature shows how schools and districts across the country are orienting their activities around environmental responsibility and wisdom: in gardens and cafeterias, on campuses, with nature-based curriculums, and in the communities that surround their schools.

Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (Contemporary Issues (Watershed Media))

Education & Teaching

Stone, Michael K.

Schools & Teaching

The CAFO Reader is possibly the most powerful indictment of factory farming ever compiled, with essays from 30 of the world's leading experts. It also offers a vision for a food system that leaves behind the horrific 20th century model of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. The CAFO Reader brings the tragic world of industrial food production into sharp focus with essays on every facet of factory farming: health, environment, animal welfare, labor, politics, economics, and so on. This affordable reader is a companion book to the larger photo-essay volume, CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. It is sure to become a relied-upon resource for activists, food policy makers, academics, the media and the general public for many years. This project is a follow-up to the highly successful project Fatal Harvest, published in 2002. It is being supported by an extensive outreach campaign with events around the country.

The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Contemporary Issues)

Nature & Ecology

In the 20th century, cheap and abundant energy brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, and technology, and fed an explosion in population and consumption. But this growth came at an incredible cost. Climate change, peak oil, freshwater depletion, species extinction, and a host of economic and social problems now challenge us as never before. The Post Carbon Reader features articles by some of the world's most provocative thinkers on the key drivers shaping this new century, from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and systems resilience. This unprecedented collection takes a hard-nosed look at the interconnected threats of our global sustainability quandary--as well as the most promising responses. The Post Carbon Reader is a valuable resource for policymakers, college classrooms, and concerned citizens. WINNER MAY 2011: GOLD MEDAL Independent Publisher Book Award in Environment/Ecology/Nature category.

The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises

Economics

Every five years, the U.S. Congress passes a little understood piece of legislation called the Farm Bill. Primarily accountable for setting the budgets and work plans for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Farm Bill is anything but bureaucratic trivia. It is an essential economic and policy engine that drives the food and farming system and provides nutritional assistance to tens of millions of Americans--many of them children. In recent years, more and more citizens are realizing just how much is at stake in this political chess game. Originally published in 2007, Food Fight was Daniel Imhoff's highly acclaimed primer on the 2008 Farm Bill. Now in a newly updated and expanded edition, packed with helpful charts and illustrations, Imhoff looks ahead at this important issue, as the debate for 2012 is already underway. With the legislation due to be reauthorized in late 2012, Food Fight offers a critical resource that can help all who live in the U.S. to deconstruct this challenging bill, organize in their communities to gain a seat at the bargaining table, and ultimately vote with their forks. Includes a foreword by Michael Pollan and introduction by Fred Kirschenmann.

Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill

ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth takes an unflinching look at the environmental devastation created by our thirst for energyincluding supposedly clean” renewable sources. From oil spills, nuclear accidents, and mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms and desert-destroying solar power plants, virtually every region of the globe is now experiencing the consequences of out-of-control energy development. Essentially no place is sacred, no landscape safe from the relentless search for energy resources to continue powering a culture based on perpetual growth. Precious wildlands, fragile ecosystems, even our own communities and children’s health are at risk. In a large-format, photo-driven narrative (including 195 color photos), ENERGY features the writings of more than thirty leading thinkers on energy, society, and ecology. Collectively, they lift the veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of all our energy options. Ultimately, the book offers not only a deep critique of the current system that is toxic to nature and people but a hopeful vision for a future energy economyin which resilience, health, beauty, biodiversity, and durability, not incessant growth, are the organizing principles.

Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

The Energy Reader takes an unflinching look at the environmental devastation created by our thirst for energyincluding supposedly clean” renewable sources. From oil spills, nuclear accidents, and mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms and desert-destroying solar power plants, virtually every region of the globe is now experiencing the consequences of out-of-control energy development. Essentially no place is sacred, no landscape safe from the relentless search for energy resources to continue powering a culture based on perpetual growth. Precious wildlands, fragile ecosystems, even our own communities and children’s health are at risk. Featuring essays by more than thirty of the most brilliant minds in the fields of energy, society, and ecology, The Energy Reader lifts the veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of all our energy options. Contributors include Wes Jackson, Bill McKibben, Sandra B. Lubarsky, Richard Heinberg, Philip Cafaro, Wendell Berry, Juan Pablo Orrego. Collectively, they offer a wake-up call about the future of energy and what each of us can do to change course. Ultimately, the book offers not only a deep critique of the current system that is toxic to nature and people, but also a hopeful vision for a future energy economyin which resilience, health, beauty, biodiversity, and durability, not incessant growth, are the organizing principles.

The Energy Reader

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

The deceptively simple supermarket choice echoed in the title symbolizes the dilemma of a society on a collision course with the planet's life-support systems. About one-third of America's municipal solid waste is packaging--at least 300 pounds per person each year--and the "upstream" costs in energy and resources used to make packaging are even more alarming. In this fascinating and timely book, author Daniel Imhoff unwraps the packaging problem and gives consumers, product designers, and policymakers the information they need to take steps toward a more sustainable future.

Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World (Watershed Media Books)

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