It's Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living by Crissy Trask

From the Publisher

It's Easy Being Green is a handy tool to help you make better choices for the environment. This is what the busy person needs to start making changes today. Get informative, comprehensive and practical information for adopting greener buying habits and identifying earth-friendly products; shopping for green products online; participating in online activism; and learning from over 250 eco-tips for cultivating a sustainable environment.

Take the difficulty and guesswork out of greener living by learning the following:

Install rain gutters and rain barrels to collect rainwater from your roof to use in the garden.

Shift appliance use to off-peak hours. Some utility companies offer off-peak rates!

Make your own household cleaners instead of relying on toxic commercial products.

Submerge a plastic bottle in your toilet tank to save one quart of water per flush and thousands of gallons a year.

This book concurrently presents a plan, tips and an Internet resources list that you can use to follow-through on good intentions. An extensive product labels list is also provided to help interpret how some foods are produced. If you haven't invested in substantially greener behaviors, consumerism and politics because you didn't know how or thought it was difficult, help is here: It's Easy Being Green is a handbook for all those who aspire do more to protect the environment but want it to be simpler. You can make a difference!

Children's Literature

We take it for granted that people know how to be “green” nowadays, but as Trask says, that “ain’t necessarily so.” Perhaps we need to reconsider the assumption that children and adults know how to conserve energy, shop earth-wisely, and buy sustainably. The focus of this book is on giving the reader quick and easy ways to participate in living sustainably without asking them to accept great personal sacrifice. For each of the hundreds or earth-friendly actions, three levels of participation are defined. There are ways to get involved, as well as tips for green shopping, driving less, consuming less, eating less meat, buying less, and living better. The day-to-day hands-on tips could easily help readers save energy, conserve water, reduce their use of toxics of all kinds, reduce waste, buy recycled, avoid plastic, and save on wood consumption. Echoing Al Gore and others, the author sounds the alarm on recycling, sharing facts and figures of unprecedented land and resource misuse by Americans. The sheer bulk of facts about water pollution, unhealthy air, and alternative earth-kind solutions provides motivation; the book provides practical ways to do it. The author’s website (www.greenmatters.com) suggests even more ideas and supportive actions that readers can adopt. This book is printed on recycled paper. Reviewer: Gwynne Spencer

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 158685772X
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Pub. Date: January 2006
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: 2006 Paperback Good Some wear on edges and corners of covers, but fine reading condition. General Mass Market.

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Many Americans agree with the goals of the environmental movement. Yet, nearly as many Americans admit to doing little more than recycling when it comes to acting on that disposition. Both the number of people expressing support for environmental protection and their acknowledged lack of more meaningful efforts to back it up got me thinking, "Why is their such a great divide between environmental sentiment in this country and individual actions?" Clues to the answer came from my own inadequacies in the area of meaningful environmental stewardship. I was consumed by a career, my sensibilities weren't tuned to recognize opportunities for improvement, and I was unaware of simple, practical suggestions on which I could follow through. If other people were anything like me, a busy lifestyle, some unknowingness as to their role in the problems and solutions of today and a lack of guidance on what to do and how to do it was rendering many other "eco-minded" people predominantly "un-eco."

Everyone is leading busy lives and is therefore, to some extent, wrestling with how to balance better environmental stewardship with modern pressures and reliances. I became convinced that the way to increase the ranks of practicing environmentalists was to take the difficulty and guesswork out of greener living by adjusting expectations, stressing learning as a motivator and enabler, and above all else, providing constructive tips and resources to prepare the eco-inclined for action on terms they could live with. It made sense that if busy people were going to start doing more, they would need a lot more help.