When it comes to clean and sustainable living, it’s often not as simple as presented on TV or commercials. Becoming a vegetarian or sorting your trash before taking it to the dumpster is one thing, but you have to invest a lot more effort in order to reduce your damaging effects on nature and environment.
Fortunately we live in a world where information is easily accessible and now you can learn how to develop a green lifestyle in the most efficient way.
With no further ado, here is our guide on the top 10 books you need to read when adopting a green lifestyle:
As the title might suggest, this book explains how an organic farm can be built and run on a quarter acre, or even less. It’s all about organizing space, knowing what and when to plant and how to maximize your harvest while reducing your overall carbon footprint. The kind of farms presented in this book are able to produce most of the products required in a family’s yearly diet. More than that, with half the time invested in a regular office job, it’s suggested you can produce enough to secure a yearly income of about $10.000.
This title is a classic. It’s actually at its 40th anniversary, and even today it’s a great read.
Some of the content is a little outdated: the niche of organic farming has boomed and now we have more efficient methods and technologies available for sustainable green farming than the ones available when this book was written.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living is also known as The Original Manual of Living off the Land & Doing It Yourself – whichever you pick up you will soon find yourself in ‘farmer mode’. It presents the approach a man or woman should have towards the land and it’s a great motivational literature for starting to live your dream of a green life.
The third book on our list is another farming guide which explains how to develop a farm when the land is an issue. However, the approaches used in this book can also be put in practice on bigger farms with more land at their disposal. The Backyard Homestead will teach you how to store, preserve, organize and cook the things you produce in your farm on a larger scale than Mini-Farming mentioned above.
Generation Green covers the issues touched on in our first three books, but takes it on from the perspective of a teenager. It’s not the type of book that you can pass to a teenager and it convince them of the merits of green living; it’s a book to supplement an existing green mindset in our teens. If you’re just starting in the green world, this a great intro for anybody.
Have you ever thought about what happens with the water of your bathroom sink after you wash your hands? Maybe you know that it goes down the drain and then into the local sewage plant that makes it clean again. However, there are some things that can’t be taken out from the water before releasing it back into a nearby river or lake. Things like the chemicals we use every day as skin care creams, make-up, bath-salts and other toileting products. The Green Beauty Guide is here to help you reduce the chemicals you release into the nature, by teaching you how and from where you can buy organic beauty and self-care products that can be reabsorbed into the nature.
Another title that can point out how much toxic waste you can produce is Clean House, Clean Planet. This book is a guide on how to remove the cleaning and household maintenance products that are a disaster for the environment once flushed, drained or sprayed. Learn household hacks that are both more efficient and cheaper, so that you can save nature while also saving money and getting your house cleaned up.
If you want to start buying smart and green, but you don’t know where to start, there’s a book for that too. You can’t switch from a consumer’s life to a green lifestyle overnight, since you don’t even know you’re a consumer. The accidental lifestyle is so deepened in our society that we consider it normal – in order to change to an environmental-friendly life, you need to give up your consumeristic habits. Read Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, to realize how much useless stuff you are buying every month, how much money you are losing and what a huge impact this has over our planet.
There are hundreds of books available on the topic of green business the main reason is that green businesses are viewed as more caring by the public.
However 99% of the books on the market on this topic, are mostly discussing the issues and the green living and business ideology. The Green to Gold Business Playbook is one of the few guides that’s actually going to teach you something about how to run a green business.
It has tips on how to run different departments of your company (logistics, retail, accounting, manufactory and so on) in order to make them both more efficient and more eco-friendly.
The Urban Homestead talks about the alternative of living a self-sustainable and organic life in the middle of the city. The book presents step by step projects, which will help you set-up an “organic oasis in a concrete jungle” (from the book). From growing spices and vegetables on the balcony to raising chicken and converting solar energy, The Urban Homestead is the ultimate survival guide for those of you who want a farm life in the city.
The last book on our top is offering a little info on each subtopic of green living. This book will help you change many little things in your life in order to reduce your impact on nature. It’s appropriate for anyone who wants to make a slow and steady transition to an organic lifestyle, but doesn’t have the time or ways to do it over-night.
Conclusion
So there we go! We have picked out books that were written by passionate people, who are living what they preach and who can inspire you to become a 21st century green citizen. Have you read any of the books above? Would you recommend any others?
This is a guest post by Steve Stretton, a writer from a green social media blog, socialwatch.co. Get in touch for any social media queries regarding your business, we’d be happy to help.
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