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.
 Ignition: What You Can Do To Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement
Edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage
From the book publisher:
"For anyone who feels compelled to do more [about climate change] than change their light bulbs or occasionally carpool, Ignition is an essential guide. Combining incisive essays with success stories and web resources, the book helps readers answer the most important question we all face: What can I do?"
Why not start the New Year by getting inspired for ocean conservation by helping to tackle climate change? Climate change is one of the major threats facing the health of the ocean, and society. The atmosphere and the ocean are constantly connected, with the ocean playing a huge role in the planet's climate. If you help protect our shared climate, you'll also be helping to protect our shared ocean.
Ignition is based on the premise that we can't wait for Washington and global politicians to take the lead on climate change - we the masses have to force the issue and the necessary policy actions, just as concerned citizens did with the Civil Rights movement and other historic grassroots social movements around the world.
Ignition puts the tools in the hands of blue collar, white collar, and green collar citizens to spark a barrage of initiatives that together will create a national and global campaign, what the publisher calls "the ultimate green revolution" to end the climate change catastrophe. In the words of Eban Goodstein, one of the book's contributors, "Ignition tells you how to find your voice, find your allies, get organized, and get results."
The chapters are filled with practical guidelines on how to effectively communicate about climate change, how to frame the climate change issue to reach different audiences, how to deeply inspire activists, how to make grassroots social movements successful, how to spur climate-friendly changes in your workplace, how to break through political deadlocks, and more. The book opens with a testament to the power of individual will to effect change: Bill McKibben's story of how his modest plan to do something to protest climate change in his home state of Vermont evolved into the largest national demonstration on climate change.
The power of Ignition is in the diversity of approaches put forward to take social action - from building coalitions to win political battles to rallying shareholders to change corporate behavior - and the strong draw on direct experience in grassroots organization, education, law, and social leadership. This power is afforded by the impressive assortment of leading thinkers and advocates that contributed to Ignition. Among them are editors Jonathan Isham, Luce Professor of International Environmental Economics at Middlebury College in Vermont and well known climate change activist, and Sissel Waage, an independent consultant who works on environmental and social aspects of sustainability issues in North America, Europe and Africa, and former leader in the sustainable business world.
Despite the long list and diversity of contributors, the LA Times praised Ignition for maintaining "a stylistic coherence one usually doesn't see in books on climate change." The LA Times also commended the authors' ability to frame climate change as something more than an environmental issue saying Ignition vastly enlarges the ark. The authors contend that climate change, what McKibben once called Ôthe mother of all environmental challenges,' is not just an environmental issue. It is all about community."
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Visit Ignition's website.
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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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