Monday Roundup

It's Monday. It's nearly October. It's nearly that time of year when the harvest is done. The furious, festering days standing over a boiling canner are nearly over. The winter garden seedlings will soon be planted. Then I'll find more time for reading, doing puzzles, trying to knit something . . . anything.

For now, I'm thumbing through The Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture after being blown away listening to it's editor, Andrew Kimbrell, speak on a Slow Food Nation panel. The book is monstrous in size and comprised of essays from Wendell Barry and other vibrant thinkers. It is also packed with photos - industrial agriculture juxtaposed with agrarian agriculture. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I'd say the book is worth borrowing from your local library for the pictures alone. They will make clear which is the better way to grow food.

What are you reading? Are you finding time in this busy harvest season to read? Are you planning your harvest of winter books?

Farewell My Subaru

Today we have a guest review coming to us from Maya at The Gamble Life. She has several other interesting reviews on her site through using the tool GoodReads. Maya gave us permission to reprint:

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living by Doug Fine

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Doug Fine moves to New Mexico and sets up his home trying to live entirely locally--this turns out primarily to mean going off the electric grid and growing a garden. It's a great goal and a great idea for a book, but this book is very, very light. He seems to approach the issues seriously in his actions, but his writing is more focused on being light-hearted and funny.

I thought the best part of the book was the Afterword where he lists his suggestions, but he calls them conclusions, of the most important steps to take to reduce one's carbon footprint.It did make me want to raise chickens. My family raised chickens when I was a kid and I have great memories of them running around in the backyard and of eating their eggs! I think raising chickens is going on my list of things I want to do when we get back to Austin.

I think this would be good for someone who is afraid of getting a depressing book on the environment. Although he does include related facts in little offset blurbs every few pages. I found them sort of annoying and wish they'd been worked into the text instead of just stuck in between different paragraphs.

I've been thinking a lot about what I can do to rely less on oil and I was hoping for a more serious book about what one person did. Instead it's a collection of mostly funny stories about setting up solar panels, biofuel, the hazards of coyotes on chickens, and how weeds can actually help a garden sometimes.

Thanks for letting us repost Maya! It is nice to bring different voices to The Blogging Bookworm.

Diet for a New America

Diet for a New America was a book that I read straight through, animatedly discussing various points of the book with my husband. In 1987 John Robbins published a landmark book that was a harsh look at the realities of agra-business and how it dramatically affects our health, our nation and our well being. I held my husband hostage on a road trip as I flung facts from the books and subjected him to some horrible pictures of tortured animals we call lunch.

The full title is Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth. Robbins, and yes the name rings a bell as he is the son of THE Robbins from Baskin and Robbins. He split from his family to live a simplistic lifestyle both in the acquisition of material goods and food selection. Much of his work is now considered a foundation for eco-conscious food decisions.

It is also interesting to note that this book predates much of our debate about climate change and the role of meat production and the implications of such on our global welfare. Robbins speaks of the environmental impact in that:

-Excessive amount of water is used in the production of meat
-The methane and by products of animal farming are of great detriment to our earth
-The sheer amount of food used to “raise” food is an incredible waste

Many of his conclusions laid a foundation for ideas that are firmly in the green conscious dialogue, but yet one of the first scathing looks at the business of food. The food impact, the health impact, and the environmental impact are realms that I feel Robbins really broke new ground and gave us a book that we can all read and digest.

I found Robbins’ discussion of food combinations and nutrition requirements extremely interesting. I didn’t agree with everything that he said, but he made a valid case for a dramatically different look at our nutritional requirements. He feels that we’re created this great big protein myth, when much of our nutrition requirements are easily obtained through food combinations, beans, leafy greens and more. I know, it seems pretty logical to most of us.

Robbins makes a gut wrenching case against our modern concept of animal farming. He exposes the inhumanity of standard practices such as chicken caging, animal prods and pig farms to name a few. The pictures are not for the faint of heart, but really and truly……I think it is something that we all need to look at. He discusses our meat packing practices, and the cruelty involved in getting the animals there. He takes us back into the thought that we aren’t just eating something nice and neatly wrapped in a styro dish, but we should realize exactly what it is and where it came from.

I first read Diet for a New America years ago when I was a veggie for six years, and then went vegan for two years. Years later I was off the wagon and eating meat far too regularly in my opinion, as part of the general suburban diet that I just became rather desensitized to. I wasn’t really considering the environmental impact, nor the impact to my health. When I started implementing a greener lifestyle I re-read Diet, and was rejuvenated in efforts to consider my impact in day-to-day choices. We’ve upped the veggies, given up beef and pork (except when my husband does the shopping), buy cage free organic eggs and have implemented a healthier diet for this American. I’m still not back to veggie, but I’d say we try to think much more wisely about our food and where it comes from.

Robbins reworked some of his figures concerning food production in later work. Even conservative figures still put one pound of beef as needing 450 gallons of water to produce, a figure that those concerned about water shortages should certainly take a valuable look at. While he might not win everybody over on his emotional appeal, he does make many serious points on the environmental impact.

It isn’t a nicely packaged “green read” book of modern day, (laugh that we think 1987 is old) but it lays a good foundation for understanding how “green” and “food” and “business” all intersect in our modern day. I’d recommend it with 4 out of 5 for light green readers. It’s a good start into better eating , and different choices.

Three Pandas Planting

Three Pandas Planting by Megan Halsey is a simple introduction to eco-conscious actions that will be appropriate for preschool and up. The clear illustrations feature animals engaged in a variety of activities including:

-Carpooling
-Water conservation efforts
-Hiking
-Collecting litter
-Using recyclable batteries

The book is brilliant in that counting, animal and “Green” efforts all mesh together. Your little one will delight in the simple illustrations and light tone, and parents will enjoy seeing their eco efforts reinforced in literature.

Monday Roundup

Hello Bookworm readers! Are you reading anything exciting? Would you like to be a guest reviewer this week? Please leave us information in the comments section so that your fellow bookworms can explore what is on your bookshelf.

Stay tuned this week for a mix of adult and children's titles, and please feel free to give us feedback on any review in the comments section.

I also didn't have a fancy picture like the rest of my team (wink) so I just picked one as my roundup logo. The trees were rustling, the wind was blowing, the crickets were singing and the sky was doing marvelous things. Rather screams that it may be a good picture for nature reads to me.

Book Review: Living Like Ed

I read "Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life" by Ed Begley, Jr. After reading about it from a fellow bookworm (sorry, I don’t remember who you were). Full disclosure: Before reading the book I had no idea who Ed was. I rarely watch TV and we don’t have cable, so I’ve never seen his show. Therefore, there’s no celebrity worship going on here to help me love this book.

Divided into six parts (home, transportation, recycling, energy, garden & kitchen, and clothing & personal care products), "Living Like Ed" is a manual for making environmentally positive changes in how we live. It reads like an annotated "to-do" list. The ideas in it are great. He covers everything, and his wife adds interesting sidebar comments that give a different perspective. There are handy checklists in the back of the book to help you keep track of changes you have made and the results of those changes. It’s all good stuff.

Reading the book, though, I was disappointed that I didn’t end up with any information that was personally useful to me. We’re already doing most of the easy stuff. We’ve already done some of the big stuff, too, such as living in a well-insulated house and buying some energy-saving appliances. Others of Ed’s ideas were too expensive (solar panels), not practical at this stage of our lives (with an untrained preschooler, I'm not doing all the wash in cold water!) or not applicable to our situation (we can’t ditch the gas-powered lawn mower – we don’t have one because we don’t have a lawn!).

There’s another category of changes which we haven’t made because we don’t want to (use a rain-barrel to collect water), but most of these ideas I already knew about. One thing stuck, though. I think if I spent enough time listening to Ed, he’d convince me our next vehicle should be an electric car! He makes a good case for using natural personal care products, too.

Ed makes a big deal about how his changes can save money, but again I was disappointed. The relevant ideas that we are not currently implementing may save a great deal of money, but the payback time is significant, too. Also, I was baffled to see that with everything he is doing to be energy efficient at his own home, we use less electricity than he does, and we’re all electric as opposed to using some natural gas like he does. Maybe the most energy efficient thing a person can do is to move to a part of the country where there is no need for air conditioning.

It’s a little hard for me to rate this book. I thought Ed’s ideas were great, but I got bored reading because there was so little new (to me) material. If someone were just beginning to make eco-changes, the book would be very educational. I’ll give it 3.5 out of 5 stars, for light green to medium green readers.

Book Review: Mountains Beyond Mountains

Our guest reviewer today comes from the midwestern United States. Joyce works on staff in the music ministry at her church in Savoy, Illinois. She read "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World" on my recommendation, and I read it on kale for sale’s! With Haiti so much in the news recently, I thought it was a really appropriate book to review. Joyce reports that the president of the University of Illinois recently gave a copy of this book to every incoming freshman. Here's what Joyce thought of it.

While I was on vacation, I read "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder. This is a very thought provoking piece of non-fiction about a physician and anthropologist, Paul Farmer who is one of the founding members of Partners In Health, an organization which directs attention, money, and service toward the very poorest people on earth.

Farmer says there are two kinds of poverty: relative poverty, which we see primarily in the developed countries such as our own; and abject poverty, which is found in underdeveloped countries. The former is exemplified by those who are certainly restricted from higher education, full-service medical care, excellent nutrition, and comfortable housing by inadequate income and education. However, there is still a safety net in the form of food stamps, subsidized housing, universal primary education, and emergency medical treatment. When we think of the kind of poverty that was revealed by Hurricane Katrina, it was this kind of relative poverty. Certainly these people live in very trying circumstances, and feel marginalized in our affluent culture.

The latter, who are the focus of Farmer and his organization, have no safely net. They lack shoes, potable water, access to even basic education and medical care, their housing is totally inadequate (i.e., dirt floors, leaking roofs, no insect screens, no furniture, etc.), they are landless and often disenfranchised by completely dysfunctional governmental and cultural systems. For Farmer, the people of Haiti best exemplify this kind of poverty, and that country has been his primary focus.

Farmer had a very non-traditional upbringing, and, as an adult, practices Christianity in a non-traditional, though Biblically driven way. Many Christians would struggle with his salty language and some other eccentricities of his life-style. However, it would be hard to argue against the fact that he is one of the few who is absolutely focused on living out the teachings of Matthew 25- "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."- meaning that he focuses on serving those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, or in prison. He has used his education and the connections formed by his time at Duke and Harvard to bring attention and help to these afflicted people.

While others in Partners In Health chose to work with the big picture by bringing their needs to the attention of the World Health Organization or the Gates Foundation, Farmer has always been known for his personal attention to the individuals he treats. He argues that healing someone, then sending them back to the very conditions that caused their illness in the first place (malnutrition, impure drinking water, constant exposure to malarial mosquitoes, etc.) is a fool's errand. He takes a holistic approach to medical intervention. While he has long been one of the top experts on TB, he has also taken his methodology into the AIDS epidemic, including the explosion of cases of both diseases in the prison system of the former Soviet countries. He sees prisoners as humans in need of healing, no matter how monstrous their crimes, and is unique in his ability to rally a staid international medical establishment to tackle issues that most would not care to think about.

I found this book, and Farmer himself, inspiring. He will challenge you on every level to think about your prejudices, phobias, and political philosophies. You will, perhaps for the first time, realize what one individual can do to make a difference of global significance. You will wonder what you could be doing yourself. Your eyes will be opened, your comfort afflicted by what you read. I recommend it to everyone. 5 out of 5 stars.