Don't miss the Green Festival in Chicago this weekend

What are you doing this weekend? if you're in the Chicago area, I've got one recommendation: go to the Green Festival!

Yes, the green festival is taking place in Chicago on Saturday (5/17) and Sunday (5/18). The festival's website explains what you can expect there:

The green festival showcases more than 350 diverse local and national green businesses displaying and selling eco-friendly, fair trade and sustainable products. More than 150 visionary speakers appear for standing-room-only panel discussions, presentations and main stage speaking events.You’ll also enjoy great how-to workshops, green films, a fair trade pavilion, yoga and movement classes, kids’ zone, delicious organic beer, wine and cuisine, and live music.

The green festival is always a great event. This is the second time the festival is taking place in Chicago (it also takes place in Washington D.C., Seattle and San Francisco) and it's packed with many interesting events and discussions. You can find the full schedule of the festival right here - http://www.greenfestivals.org/content/blogcategory/110/207/.

Here are some more details:

Show Hours
Saturday 10AM- 8PM, Sunday 11AM- 6PM

Venue and Address
Navy Pier - 600 E Grand Avenue, Chicago

Public Transit
Via bus: 2, 66, 121 express, 124 & 129

Price
$15 Festival Pass (per person). Entry to all activities for one day or the entire weekend. Better World Books and Green Festival are partnering to offer $5 off Green Festival admission to attendees who bring in 3 or more books. Your donated books will be sold on BetterWorld.com to help fund girls’ scholarships in developing countries in Asia through Room to Read.

And if you're getting there, don't forget to say hello to some of our partners that will exhibit in the festival including Kedzie Press, Chapter One Organics/The Green Eaters and Barefoot Books.

Enjoy!
Raz @ Eco-Libris

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

New research from Australia: agroforestry and reforestation are an important carbon sink

There is an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of trees planting operations as a tool mitigate global warming. A new research from Australia adds more input into it, showing that agroforestry and reforestation are an important carbon sink.

The research, as reported on The Age, was conducted by researchers from Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence, and Queensland Department of Primary Industries & Fisheries. It was presented to an agriculture, greenhouse gases and emissions trading conference on the Gold Coast.

Dr. Beverley Henry from MLA, who presented the research, showed that different forms of land management had a variety of effects on soil carbon. She said, according to the article, that researchers, analysing data from 74 publications on land-use changes, had made several conclusions:

A change from native forest to crops decreased soil carbon by 42%; pasture to crop (59% decrease); native forest or pasture to broad-leaved plantation (no big change); native forest or pasture to pine plantation (12-15% decrease); native forest to pasture (8% increase); crop to pasture (18% increase); crop to secondary forest (53% increase); and crop to pasture (19% increase).

Some of the conclusions of the research presented by Dr Henry were:

• Introducing cropping into uncleared land or pasture in good condition decreased soil carbon.
  
• There was thus potential to sequester carbon in soils if cropping lands were converted to pasture or forest.


• Conservation tillage practices might retain up to 25% more carbon in soils than conventional tillage.


• Removing grazing pressure would in theory be expected to improve below-ground carbon stocks. However, under low disturbance regimes, grasses may become moribund, producing less root biomass.

This is only one research out of many researches that focus on this important issue, but it definitely gives some interesting input to think about when coming to plan how to fight global warming most effectively.

In any case, we have to remember that the value of tree planting operations, such as the the UNEP planting campaign, which as we reported set a goal of having 7 billion trees planted by the end of 2009, is not just because of carbon sequestering. Trees are one of the most important natural resources we have and have many other significant benefits, such as decreasing the chances for natural disasters such as floods, protection of important water resources, reduction of soil erosion, etc.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

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

Picture Courtesy of Sustainable Harvest international

Think Green! - Green Children's Book Review & Giveaway

Anna Hackman of Green-Talk has recently reviewed Think Green! by by author Jeanine Behr Getz and illustrator Jenny Nightingale, and thinks it's a wonderful tool to teach children how simple actions can ensure that the Planet remains safe for all creations that inhabit it. Greener choices that reduces kids' impact on our world, are illustrated throughout the book.

She is also giving away a copy of the book to one lucky reader that will tell her one lesson he or she would like to teach a child (green or otherwise.) Good Luck to everyone. The contest will run until Friday, May 16 at 6PM eastern time. So hurry up!

New goal for UNEP: Seven billion trees by the end of 2009

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced yesterday that its Billion Tree Campaign to Grow into the Seven Billion Tree Campaign.

This is great news. The Billion Tree Campaign was initiated in 2006 and in just 18 months catalyzed the planting of two billion trees, double its original target (as of today, the exact number of trees planted is 2,074,829,162).

The campaign was unveiled in 2006 as one response to the threat of global warming. The idea was inspired by Professor Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 2004 and founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, which has planted more than 30 million trees in 12 African countries since 1977.

Why planting trees? UNEP explain the logic: "safeguarding and planting forests were among the most cost-effective ways to slow climate change, blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars. Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when burnt or when they rot. Deforestation accounts for over 20 percent of the carbon dioxide humans generate. The advantages of planting trees are well known, as well as to the wider sustainability challenges from water supplies to biodiversity loss." ('World tree planting drive sets goal of 7 billion', Reuters, 5.13.08).

UNEP were surprised with the overwhelming response of governments, businesses, organizations and people to the challenge and decided it's time to raise the bar. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, told Reuters: "In 2006 we wondered if a billion tree target was too ambitious; it was not. The goal of two billion trees has also proven to be an underestimate. The goal of planting seven billion trees, equivalent to just over a tree per person alive on the planet, must therefore also be do-able."

We truly hope that he is right. We also believe in the need to conserve natural resources and in the plenty of benefits that trees provide us with (btw - check out tomorrow's blog with a new research on the value of reforestation efforts in the fight against global warming).

Eco-Libris see itself as part of the campaign's global effort (we were featured in the past on UNEP's Billion Tree Campaign website - http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign/CampaignNews/Eco-Libris.asp) and we will do our best to plant as much trees as possible with our planting partners, contributing both to the planet and to making reading more sustainable.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

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

Green Options - Book Review: Off the Grid Homes - Case Studies for Sustainable Living

As part of Eco-Libris' ongoing content partnership with Green Options Media, we feature a post that was originally published by Philip Proefrock on May 10 on Green Building Elements. Today's post is about a new book that presents the new look and perception of off the grid homes.

Off the Grid Homes combines beautiful images with technical information for sustainable homes.

The book by architect Lori Ryker is less of a manual for systems to be used in off the grid homes (though it does include good information about the systems and strategies that are used in sustainable off the grid living) and more of a showcase of state of the art homes at the intersection of appealing architecture and high sustainability.

For many, the phrase "off the grid home" brings associations of a rudimentary, hand-built, rustic cabin. It usually suggests a rough hewn character and images of anything other than refinement and elegance. But that image is far from the case in examples presented in this book.

Monday's Green Books: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

Monday's Green Books series welcomes Jennifer Mabe-Israely as our new Eco-Libris reviewer. The book is available nationwide, and is also distributed in Canada by our partners Raincoast Books, and was part of their "Buy a Book, Plant a Tree" campaign last month in over 80 Canadian Bookstores.

I generally consider myself an information sponge, the kind of person who can happily watch just about anything on "The National Geographic Channel", so I was more than happy to swipe The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization by Brian Fagan from the other reviewers before they could get his hands on it.

Why you should read this book

The basic thesis of the book is that between about A.D. 800 to 1200 there was a period that is commonly called the Medieval Warm Period that was characterized by milder, warmer temperatures in Europe. The warming allowed for increased exploration -- there is a persuasive argument made that the Norse explorers would not have made it as far in their travels if the temperature had been slightly cooler, for example -- but the same climatic forces that created the warming period created cooler, dryer conditions elsewhere in the world. In addition to examining the effects of all kinds of climatic forces on civilizations during the Medieval Warm Period, the author paints a picture of the interrelated, interacting forces all over the world, giving the impression of a web in which a tug in one direction affects every other part of the network.

The varied nature of this text is one of its most striking qualities. Discussions of science, biology, geology, and climatology are punctuated by vivid descriptions of life in our distant past from the perspectives of villagers and subsistence farmers.

Global warming advocates will be happy to note that Fagan is very careful to differentiate the Medieval Warm Period, the "Great Warming" of the book's title, from the anthropogenic warming of the last 60 years. Some opponents of global warming theories have tried to use evidence from this period to suggest the current warming is a natural cycle, and this book makes it clear that the earlier warming is very different from what we see today. Further, it gives convincing evidence that even minor periods of warm, cold, wet, or dry climate conditions have had serious impact on the development of civilizations as far back as we can record, but especially during this Medieval Warm Period, around A.D. 800 to 1200. Cultures from the Maya to the Chinese have taken dramatic up or down turns due to droughts or floods or anything in between.

I was most impressed by the handling of potentially sensitive cultural topics – say, descriptions of rituals involving human sacrifice. This is the kind of thing that can generate a lot of judgment and westernized perspectives in the name of "impartial" science, but Fagan doesn't stoop to that and instead uses a clear voice to present the information and allow us to make our own moral value calculations. We are given enough information to appreciate cultures and cultural practices vastly divergent from our own to be able to appreciate their rituals and behaviors in context.

But it can't be all good...

My biggest criticism of the book by far is its lack of illustrations, graphs, charts, maps and the like, when the subject matter is quite plainly crying out for them. On pretty much every single page is some discussion of curves or statistics or zones or any number of other things that could have been illustrated better. The few times a graph is included made me wonder why, the author chose this particular statistical analysis to illustrate and not some of the more important data. Additional figures and illustrations would make this rather dense text a lot more accessible to readers who are less familiar with all the terminology and science. I would love to see a second edition of this book with a lot more sidebars breaking up the text.

One other complaint is with the writing's quality – most of the time it's first-rate, with a handful of passages musical enough that I marked them in the book with a pencil. But especially towards the end of the book there were several passages that made me cringe, and a higher than normal incidence of typos and punctuation errors that cries out for another round of editing.

The final verdict

The Great Warming is a great introduction to the science of climate change as it applies to human history. In addition to educating the reader on climatology we get a grasp of anthropology, history, biology, and geology as it relates to the subject matter. I liked the book and I hope to see an updated and expanded second edition sometime soon with about 200 more illustrations and charts.

Title: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization

Author: Brian Fagan

Publisher: Bloommsbury Press

Publication Date: March 4th, 2008

Pages: 304

Want a free copy of 'The Green Parent'? teensygreen has a giveaway!

teensygreen has great giveaways of green books and this week it offers you the chance to win a free copy of 'The Green Parent' by Jenn Savedge.

'The Green Parent' is an extensive guide for parents who would like to green up their family's life style and teach their children about living green.

This is an offer you cannot refuse: all you have to do is to leave a comment on this post with an answer to this question - what do you think is the most important eco-tip to share with your children (or grandchildren, nieces and nephews, etc.)? and that's it - you're in the contest. Kedzie Press generously gave away 10 copies of the book so don't miss this chance to win this wonderful book.

We're also taking part in the giveaway - firstly, 'The Green Parent' is the first book on the Kedzie Million Tree-A-Thon, where we plant a tree for every book published by Kedzie Press with the goal of planting a million trees by the end of 2009 (our logo will also appear on all titles published by Kedzie Press). We will match each copy given on this giveaway with another new tree, so altogether 20 trees will be planted for the ten copies given on this giveaway.

You can find more details on teensygreen at http://www.teensygreen.com/2008/05/11/505/. This contest will be open until midnight, PST on Friday, May 16th.

Enjoy!
Raz @ Eco-Libris

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