Monday, October 27, 2008

Newly Published Books on Sustainability Topics


Like to read? Then check out some of these recently released books (below are the promotional descriptions of the books).

The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (by Van Jones) debuted at number 12 on the New York Times best sellers list. Provocative, personal, and inspirational, New York Times best-seller The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country--the failing economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable.

SustainAble: A Handbook of Materials and Applications for Graphic Designers and Their Clients (by Aaris Sherin) has just been released. The book explores eco-friendly print and paper production and highlights companies who are making innovative products. The work of both established and emerging designers from around the world is featured. Projects are traced from concept through to practical considerations of production. The book itself is an example of sustainable design. It is printed with vegetable-based inks on Mohawk 100 percent post-consumer-waste paper. In addition, no two covers are alike as they reused the printing leftovers that would otherwise have been wasted.

Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One (by Sramana Mitra). Venture capitalists are chasing hot areas with planet-scale problems: energy, water, global warming. Industry legends, including John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, have become prominent spokesmen for the issues, pumping huge sums of capital into these eco-markets. In our enthusiasm for green, however, there's a forgotten industry segment that remains woefully unaddressed – education. With the advent of social media, and with the revival of entrepreneurship and investments in consumer Internet services, technology-enabled education looks like a huge opportunity for wealth creation.

Greening Your Business: The Hands-on Guide to Creating a Successful and Sustainable Business (by Daniel Sitarz) helps create green standards by providing a step-by-step approach to analyzing business operations and developing detailed plans to make those operations much more energy and resource efficient. Greening Your Business provides small and medium business owners with a comprehensive guide to saving energy, saving materials, and saving money by reducing their businesses’ impact on the Earth. Every element of a business’ impact on the environment is examined in this book from energy and water use, waste generation, transportation, computing and office equipment, supply chains and purchasing, building practices to product and service design. Each copy of the book comes with a CD which contains dozens of computer templates and worksheets for developing a complete business environmental plan, along with Excel® spreadsheet programs that calculate a business’ carbon footprint. The CD also includes additional green business strategies and over 1,500 pages of business environmental publications.

And don't forget to browse the USGBC's Green Book Club. Books are categorized by Global Systems, Natural Systems, Human Systems (including Business & Economics), and Built Environment.

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