Even though I do it for a living, I am not intending to lecture you (really, I'm not). I am finding this to be an outlet to document the things that I am doing to try and address my passion (well, one of them, anyway). We need to be innovative and determined in our stewardship of the environment. After all, there is only one Earth, right? Assuming that you all agree, here is my second lesson;
Read about the issues, and the most pressing one right now is climate change; the photo above shows a few good ones. If you are going to have one book on your shelf that provides you with examples of things that you can do to protect the planet,
this is a great one. But one of the best is
George Monbiot's Heat, which I blogged about on
my other site. Once you have a handle on the basics behind the carbon cycle and how climate change basically works, then move on to some reading on how to address it, such as
How to Live a Low Carbon Life by Chris Goodall. Right...you say. No time to read full length books; life is busy as it is. You can skim the boring bits and get to the meat of the issues or find magazine articles that will sum up the issues for you. There are loads of great web sites as well.
Check
this one regularly for a map of signs of global warming.
This is a good overview of climate change and has a lot of good content for Americans.
This one provides lots of great examples of things that individuals can do.
This one is full of great links and articles as well as examples of current impacts.
Well, and while I'm at it ; here's
one more.
The point here is to get informed. Because then when the media or a politician or anyone for that matter, tells us something about the issues, we can see through the misinformation. If the people in Europe during WWII had books that would have told them how to end the war, but didn't read them, how absurd would that have been?
I would love for you to tell me what great books you have come across. Maybe I can make a contest out of this; the best recommendation gets one of the bracelets in the photo!
10:30 PM
Lovely to see you have our Australian of the Years book :o)
Dr Tim Flannery is certainly a marvel!