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The Ultimate Guide to Simple, Eco-Friendly Choices for You and Your Home

We are what we eat, but we also are what we use to clean our homes, pamper our skin, and decorate our rooms, according to Renée Loux, accomplished raw food chef, award-winning author, and host of Fine Living TV's Easy Being Green. In her new book, Easy Green Living, she applies her whole-foods philosophy to home, garden, and beauty routines.

Renée Loux demonstrates that being green at home is easy, affordable, and better in every sense of the word. She discusses the daily choices we face that can keep the home, personal care, and beauty routines free of toxins. She exposes the dirt on cleaning products and common hazardous ingredients and reveals her recommendations for greener options, including her "Green Thumb Guides" for choosing non-toxic, eco-smart, and human-friendly products. Peppered with compelling and inspiring facts, Easy Green Living is full of "5 Step" lists, products and recipes for green cleaning, helpful charts, safer choices for every room, and inspirational advice so we can save the planet--one cleaning spritz at a time.

As recent special issues of Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, and other major publications have demonstrated, going green is an idea whose time has come. Whether addressing big-picture topics like renewable energy, or offering simple suggestions for everyday living, this complete lifestyle guide shows that healthier choices don't mean a radical or complicated life change--it is, after all, easy to be green.

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Activists striving for any type of social change often find themselves operating on the fringes of legal and social norms. Many experience difficulties when their innovative ideas run afoul of antiquated laws and regulations that favor a big business, energy- and material-intensive approach. Tales from the Sustainable Underground is packed with the stories of just some of these pioneers – who care more for the planet than the rules – whether they're engaged in natural building, permaculture, community development, or ecologically based art. Ride along and meet courageous and inspiring individuals such as:

• Solar guru Ed Eaton
• Radical urban permaculturalists Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew
• Artist, eco-architect and intuitive builder Matt Bua.

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The need to make our communities sustainable is more urgent than ever before. Toward Sustainable Communities remains the single most useful resource for creating vibrant, healthy, equitable, economically viable places. This comprehensive update of the classic text presents a leading-edge overview of sustainability in a new fully-illustrated, full-color format.

Compelling new case studies and expanded treatment of sustainability in rural as well as urban settings are complemented by contributions from a range of experts around the world, demonstrating how "community capital" can be leveraged to meet the needs of cities and towns for:

• Energy efficiency, waste reduction and recycling
• Water, sewage, transportation and housing
• Climate change and air quality
• Land use and urban planning.

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Just how high will gas prices go? Nobody knows, but you can save money on gas now and find the right fuel-efficient vehicle for your needs via our new Guide to Green Cars. With reviews of more than 50 cars that get 35-plus mpg, proven tips for maximizing mpg, and the latest on hybrid, electric, clean diesel and flex-fuel vehicles, this 100-page special issue will be an invaluable resource whether you need a new ride now or down the road.

Articles in this guide include:

• Buying a Green Car
• Living with a Plug-In Hybrid
• Fuel from Plants! The Basics of Biofuels
• The Truth About Electric Car Safety
• How to Calculate Gas Mileage
• Best Green Large Vehicles
• And many more!

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Nature’s Way Market and Café sells healthy foods and natural cures for what ails you. But there is no cure for murder. . . .

Even naturopathic doctors need a little stress relief—that’s why Willow McQuade, ND, takes a break to visit her Aunt Claire, owner of Nature’s Way Market and Café, on Long Island’s North Fork. But Willow’s serenity is shattered when she finds her aunt’s lifeless body on the market floor, a bottle of Mimulus lying nearby. Taken to calm one’s fear of misfortune, the flower essence clearly failed Aunt Claire . . . for her death was no accident.

But who would want to kill her? The police soon zero in on Willow herself, who stands to inherit Claire’s business and the rights to a breakthrough anti-aging cream. Desperate to prove her innocence, Willow turns to former police officer Jackson Spade for help. Together they unearth a slew of suspects, each with something to gain by Claire’s unnatural demise. But as Willow gets closer to the truth, a killer waits to administer one final dose of death.

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28 projects seamlessly merge stitching, sustainability, and resourcefulness with simple, clean design

Advancements in technology have increased the pace of our lives. As a response, a vibrant Do It Yourself movement has risen to reclaim age old traditions that reconnect us to slower and simpler times. A sewing renaissance has been set in motion at a time in history when economic instability and an awareness of the importance of using sustainable resources is peaking.

With this in mind, award-winning blogger Maya Donenfeld offers a guide to working with her favorite recycled materials. You’ll find linen, burlap, wool and more with details on their history, deconstruction techniques, sewing tips, and information about their environmental impact.

Reinventing everyday materials into extraordinary items of beauty and utility for the modern home and family will excite new and experienced sewers alike. To add an element of personalization, Maya draws on her experience leading print workshops to share easy methods for transforming gently-used fabric with paint and ink. Stenciling templates and thorough instructions are provided, as well as encouragement to invent your own designs. Stories, a favorite recipe, and nature activity are tucked between and around the projects to offer the reader an invitation to slow down, and create with intention.

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Bird-Friendly Nest Boxes and Feeders features 12 simple and classic designs for building traditional birdhouses and feeders, plus valuable insights on creating the perfect backyard bird environment. More than just a set of plans, it covers how to attract the right kinds of birds and ensure that they will keep coming back.

This book includes complete plans for making basic, practical bird-welcoming structures, accompanied by patterns, illustrations and full color photographs. Each project is perfect for individuals striving to create the most natural bird environment possible. Woodworkers from beginner to expert will find projects appropriate for their skill level.

This book provides pages of valuable information for keeping feathered visitors happy. From understanding the proper dimensions for a birdhouse, to choosing the right seed for attracting desired species, to learning how to keep squirrels away, the tips and tricks found here will help guide bird lovers to create a backyard oasis. Readers will get valuable instructions on mounting techniques, types of paint to use, and cleaning tips, plus environmental insights and interesting avian trivia. This book stands out from ordinary birdhouse titles with technical detail on subjects like cavity size, proper hole size, and the ideal distance from hole to cavity floor.

The twelve plans in this book ordinarily sell for $12.99 each online, a $130 value. Each birdhouse project has been shop-tested by the author's customers, and has proven habitable by the many birds around his Minnesota home.

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Hundreds of Ideas for Healthy, Happy and Fabulously Frugal Homekeeping

Bursting with ways to downshift, simplify, preserve resources, and honor the planet, Lemons and Lavender will give you tools to reclaim a purer, tastier, healthier and less expensive way of life. Sharp shares her radical common sense and revolutionary "freeconomics" approach to budgeting in this step-by-step guide to the good life.

Creative ideas inside Lemons and Lavender:

• Garden-to-table recipes for every meal
• Eco-deco ideas for furnishing your home
• Recipes for nontoxic cleaners, house paint and more
• Start a seed sharing garden with your neighbors
• Easy-to-make gifts with handcrafted gift wrap
• Grow your own cup of delicious herbal tea
• Learn to use organic sea salts, skin scrubs and detox bath therapies

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On May 4, 2007, an EF5 tornado destroyed the town of Greensburg in south central Kansas. In the desperate days immediately after the catastrophe, town leaders-including the ex-cop mayor, the city manager, and an environmentalist from Colorado - launched a program to rebuild Greensburg green. Just like the name of the town. Before the tornado, Greensburg was slowly dying, a village about to be buried in the Great Plains. Now it is a mecca for eco-tourists. Author Robert Fraga taught math for 20 years in Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Later he taught at Ripon College in Wisconsin and Baker University in Kansas. His two books on mathematics are entitled Calculus Problems for a New Century and War Stories from Applied Math. He and his wife Jean Grant, parents of two grown children, live in Lawrence, Kan., and the Dordogne region of France.