Book Review

Don't judge a book by it's cover, especially when the cover is this bad. Fortunately the book 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air' by David JC MacKay is a much better book than its wrapping suggests. Professor McKay makes a case for, of all things, a fact and number-based energy policy. The idea that rational decision-making should drive energy policy shouldn't be a radical idea, but strangely enough it is.

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Those were the simple directions at the end of The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a straightforward and direct answer to the question "What should people eat?" Yet somehow, that wasn't clear enough for a lot of people. What is food? How much is too much? What kind of plants? Etcetera and so on. So, Michael Pollan wrote In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

If you live in the suburbs, like I do, the yard around your home is the closest you come to the natural environment on a day to day basis. This begs the question - Is your yard a natural environment? Author Douglas Tallamy suggests that the average suburban yard is an artificial collection of exotic plants which creates an unnatural zone unsuitable to native wildlife. In his book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens Mr.