Blog Action Day - Recommendations on 10 books on sustainable food

Today is Blog Action Day and this year it coincides with World Food Day, a time that focuses the world’s attention on food, so it is dedicated to food.

Why food? The Blog Action Day's team explains:

There is so much to say about food.

We use food to mark times of celebration and sorrow. Lack of access to food causes devastating famines, whilst too much is causing a generation of new health problems. It can cost the world, or be too cheap for farmers to make a living.

The way we companies produce food and drinks can provide important jobs for communities or be completely destructive to habitats and local food producers. Food can give us energy to get through the day or contain ingredients that gives us allergic reactions.

Food can cooked by highly skilled chefs with inventive flair, or mass produced and delivered with speed at the side of road. It can be incredibly healthy or complete junk and bad for your health. It can taste delicious or be a locals only delicacy.

Food is important to our culture, identity and daily sustenance and the team at Blog Action invite you to join us to talk about food.

Our contribution to this conversation are recommendations on 10 books on sustainable food topics, which we believe are important to understand the issues we're dealing with. Most of them are also personal stories so they provide great inspiration for anyone interested in making this part in their life more sustainable.

To find more posts on food visit Blog Action Day, or check #BAD11 tag on twitter.

The links of these books are mostly connected to ebook format on Amazon.com (we're taking part in Amazon's affiliate program and therefore will receive a small percentage of every purchase made using these links. We hope you don't mind!), but you can also find them in paper formats, as well as in the most eco-friendly format there is - in your local public library!

The recommended books are:

1. The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball

2. Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Oran Hesterman

3. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

4. Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty by Mark Winne

5. The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove by Cathy Erway

6. Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

7. The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt

8. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch

9. Food Matters by Mark Bittman

10. Farmer Jane by Temra Costa

Happy Blog Action Day,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a Tree for Every Book You Read!

Blog Action Day 2008: fighting poverty and deforestation at the same time

This year's Blog Action Day is dedicated to poverty and to ways we can and should fight it. This is a great opportunity to give big kudos to our planting partners, who are dedicated not only to fight deforestation in developing countries, but also to fight poverty in these areas.

In many cases, deforestation and poverty goes together. I would like to quote from a letter of Florence Reed, founder and president of Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) few months ago that explains this connection:

"More than 158 million acres of forest were destroyed in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1990 to 2005, the United Nations reports. Slash-and-burn farming devastates communities and the fragile ecosystems where they live... I recently returned from Nicaragua, where I saw smoldering stretches of land where I had seen lush tropical forest only a few years ago. Ancient trees are being cleared to make way for cattle pasture and African palm plantations or simply burnt for charcoal. The cycle of slash-and-burn depletes nutrients from the soil so that farmers are no longer able to grow their crops. Families are forced to abandon homesteads and seek new areas of forest to burn, or travel to urban areas in search of a better life that they rarely find there. The families burning these stretches of land are living in extreme poverty. They are desperate to learn ways to provide food for their children without destroying the forest.

Sustainable Harvest International is the solution to this vicious cycle of poverty and deforestation. Our local staff provide training in simple techniques that enable families to increase their yields, market their crops, improve their health and restore the environment."

This is only one example of the great work done by SHI, as well as the Alliance for International Reforestation (AIR) in Guatemala and RIPPLE Africa in Malawi. We are proud to collaborate with them and thank them for their efforts to fight both deforestation and poverty.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Plant a tree for every book you read!

* The photo is courtesy of Sustainable Harvest international (SHI)

Blog Action Day - the day after

It seems that the Blog Action Day went really well yesterday. Thousands of bloggers wrote green posts and for one day it seemed like everybody is talking only about the environment (at least on the blogosphere..).

Some of the bloggers wrote their environmental post yesterday on Eco-Libris, and I would like to thank all of them for presenting Eco-Libris to their readers. You are welcome to check their websites as well:

1. Em's bookshelf - Blog Action Day and Eco-Libris
2. Makeup Minute - Plant A Tree With Every Makeup Book Read With Eco-Libris
3. Mommy talks, Wife Stories, Girl Speak - Today is Blog Action Day!
4. Linuxchic.net - Blog Action Day: Read, recycle, replant
5. Classroom 2.0 - Read a book! Plant a tree!
6. A side of cartoons..Please - Adaptations (and thank you Robbay for the great cartoon!)
7. A Writer's Words, An Editor's Eye - Blog Action Day: Publishing and the Environment

So, thank you all of you for taking the time and writing on us. We will continue to work hard to move everyone towards sustainable reading!

Yours,
Raz

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Paying developing countries to protect their forests - Blog Action Day

Greetings for all the blogs that are participating today in the Blog Action Day! This is a very important day and I hope it will generate a powerful green voice that will help us all move in the right direction. I would like to contribute to this day a post on very good news I read during the weekend on Planet Ark. They published a story from Reuters on a new fund initiated by the World Bank that is aimed to pay developing countries for protecting and replanting their forests.

The idea is very simple - paying developing countries money for protecting their forests will give them an economic incentive to preserve them and fight deforestation. If you make conservation more worthwhile than logging to the governments and the local communities in these areas, it should keep these precious trees alive. Less deforestation = les greenhouse gas emissions.

The logic is also very clear - deforestation contributes 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, which is, as they remind in the article, more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and airplanes together! And as the world bank sees it - less deforestation = less greenhouse gas emissions.

The development of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), as the new fund is called will depends on the global agreement that will take effect after Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012. In the meantime, the article reports that there will be some testing of the concept in 3-5 countries to check how well it works in real life.

I think that all in all it's a good idea and with no economic value to the forests, it will be very difficult to save them from logging. It's also important to make sure that this funding will be spent wisely and that the governments will collaborate and share it with local communities that live in these areas. Their participation and support is critical to the success of this mechanism.

In any case, we still have to remember that this is only a temporary solution. A sustainable solution will have to include also the demand side and ensure that consumers in the developed world will consume alternatives for logging products. For example, recycled paper instead of virgin paper. Only then, when demand will fall, we'll be able to secure the future of the forests and the future of this planet.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Less than a week to Blog Action Day

Just a quick reminder on Blog Action Day that will take place next Monday, October 15:



Already more than 7,500 bloggers have signed (including Eco-Libris blog of course) with many, many, more signing up daily!

Beside the opportunity to spread the word about important environmental issues, I think that this day try to promote the concept that small actions (in this case, posting on your blog) have the power to make a big impact. They write on the action blog "What would happen if every blog published posts on the same topic, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices." Well, let's hope for a powerful eco-friendly voice on October 15th that will help us all to move to the right direction. Eco-Libris will definitely contribute its share.

You are welcome to check their website and learn more on Blog Action Day. If you are a blogger, you can register your blog, although this isn't mandatory. The important thing is that on October 15th, you will participate by posting at your blog on one environmental issue (and tag it 'blog action day').

Yours,
Raz

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!