While traveling at the weekend I had two interesting book experiences.
Firstly, I had a good old sticker shock experience. I was browsing around one of those newsagent bookstores looking for a good book to read. To my dismay, and surprise, the average paperback book price was $14.95. Since when did that become the average paperback price? I must have been living in a time-warp! Maybe it’s just that I mainly shop for children’s books – interestingly enough the average children’s book paperback price in the same store was $8.95.
Secondly, I was seeking a book about how to do my bit for the environment. I picked up a good number of books and took a peek inside. Disappointingly, each one contained almost exactly the same stuff: use compact fluorescents, take your own bags to the store, compost your scraps and yard waste… It’s not exactly news and I’m already doing most of that! Thankfully I discovered 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. Not only does this book contain lots of ideas, funnily enough 50 of them, but it also costs less than $14.95. I was sold! If you care about the planet I highly recommend taking a look at this book.
Basically the premise of this book is that people have been recycling and doing many of the regular earth saving things since the 1990’s. Yet we are really no further forward than we were in terms of preserving and saving the Earth. Admittedly not a very large proportion of people have been participating and much can still be achieved through changing some of our daily habits. I do like though that 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth suggests that we each focus on one specific thing we care about. Maybe you feel really strongly about mountain top removal, electric car technology, or saving endangered species. Each of the 50 suggestions is backed up by information on what to do to support the cause you’d like to adopt and which organization will help you figure out the steps to take. You don’t even have to be an activist to take up one of these causes and you don’t have to make it a part-time job. I’m sure every little helps.
If you want to know more about this book here are a couple of links:
- The 50SimpleThings companion website.
- The 50SimpleThings blog. Unfortunately the blog does not appear to be currently active and the most recent post has a ton of junk comments. If you want something related, the Sierra Club has a number of active blogs which could be worth checking out.
50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth at Amazon.com.
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