Ocean Book of the Month
Each month in 2008, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
For August, The Ocean Project recommends two...
Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn
Edited by Fritz Haeg
Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community
by Heather Coburn Flores
August is beach season in much of the northern hemisphere and a good time for reading by the heater in the far southern hemisphere. For either case, we provide two related books to help the ocean by helping yourself and your yard. Read one, the other, or both to find motivation and advice for turning your bland, water-hungry lawn into a garden that can put food on your table.
Fritz Haeg started the Edible Estates Project to educate fellow activists in re-designing domestic front-lawns into highly efficient edible landscapes - a green no-brainer for many of us who understand the cost and potential waste of transporting food from far away. But, visually, a garden in the front yard of your home might stick out as eclectic in many neighborhoods used to a more monotonous green. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn is the kind of picture book that can inspire you to participate in a worldwide movement of beautiful curbside food gardens - inspiring others in your locale to mimic your actions. The book contains chapters by region in the US, with photographs, essays, interviews, tips, and design templates that suggest replication abroad.
Heather Coburn Flores takes more of a manifesto tone as a proponent of permaculture - a sustainable way of landscaping inspired by natural eco-systems. Her book presents a nine-step plan to transform the typical flat yard turf into a productive, environmentally friendly garden bursting with edible fruits and vegetables. In Food Not Lawns Flores suggests, "The average American lawn, could produce several hundred pounds of food a year." After working to prepare and present meals for others, she decided that she could make a greater contribution by teaching others about the wasteful mindlessness of the typical suburban lawn.
Food Not Lawns documents how the world has become enslaved by a global, fossil fuel-based food chain and a semi-automatic popular consumer culture. But if our energy struggles are speeding towards us from the future, we may want to revisit our industrialized food system and wasteful way of life to consider its sustainability. Flores suggests that those who know how to grow food in the post-petroleum era may become the true popular neighbors who will live a satisfied life of helping others as she does.
Publishers Weekly reviews Food Not Lawns and reminds that...
"...most gardening books do not encourage guerilla gardening after describing the basics of garden planning and pruning. More advanced topics range from integrating barnyard birds into a garden to getting more mileage out of the home water cycle to the benefits of a balanced insect population. The illustrations are amusing as well as helpful, and though the index is not extensive, the book, overall, is a much better read than the average gardening book, both in terms of range and entertainment value."
Though these books may change the way we look at our home and how we acquire food and satisfy our diets, each provides a different, yet complementary, approach to helping us rip up our lawn and redesign what we grow for ourselves and others.
These books motivate and inspire us to personal action.
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Find out how you can help do your part at the Seas the Day action pages.
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If you are interested in reading this book but also want to be a conscious consumer, please visit your local library and check it out.
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If you're interested in purchasing this book, and then perhaps passing it along to a friend to spread the word, we encourage you to buy locally and from an independent bookseller. Please click on one of the two logos below to purchase a good read and help The Ocean Project.
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