Book Request

If anybody reading this blog has a spare copy of Money Well Spent by Paul Brest and Hal Harvey that they would like to donate, we would be very greatful. We have had a patron request for it.

New Books - from SF Ocean Film Festival

The San Francisco Ocean Film Festival donated several books about the seas and marine conservation to the library this week, including:

David Helvarg's 50 Ways to Save the Ocean - a practical guide to the daily choices we can make to help restore and preserve the seas,

Jon Bowermaster's Descending the Dragon - his account of his 800-mile sea kayak expedition along the northern coast of Vietnam, and

Douglas Whynott's Giant Bluefin - an account of the New England bluefin tuna harpoon fishery, a fish greatly prized in Japan for sushi and sashimi.

Also: Stephen Harrigan's Water and Light, David Mercy's Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat, Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers, and John Long's The Big Drop.

Be sure to check out their website for information about their film festival coming up this February 19 to 22 with over 35 documentary, fictional, and animated films from around the world. Thank you SF Ocean Film Festival.

Your Donations Bring New Books to the Library

Thanks to generous donations through our Giving Tree program over the past six weeks, we have been able to purchase a number of books to add to the library. Your support helps to keep our collection current, comprehensive, and relevant. We are going to keep the tree up, so if you would like to make a small donation you can bring it to the library during regular hours, or you can contact Bruce DeMartini. Thank you, and here are the new books for the Library:

Michael Mann & Lee R. Kump. Dire Predictions - Understanding Global Warming: The extensively illustrated and highly accessible guide to the findings of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

James Lovelock. The Revenge of Gaia - Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity: A perspective on climate change from the originator of the Gaia theory, which sees the Earth as a single, self-regulating entity subject to disturbance by human activity.

Tim Flannerty. The Weather Makers - How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth: The influential overview of climate science that helped bring the topic of global warming to national prominence.

Thomas L. Friedman. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How it Can Renew America: Influential and controversial New York Times columnist looks at the global environmental crisis and calls for a renewal of United States leadership.

William McDonough & Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle - Remaking the Way We Make Things: "Waste equals food" is the guiding principle behind this revolutionary reexamination of the way we design and manufacture almost everything.

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring: The fortieth anniversary edition of the classic that launched the environmental movement; with and introduction by Linda Lear and an afterword by Edward O. Wilson.

Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There: Special commemorative edition of the landmark work of nature writing and environmental ethics.

Paul Hawken. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being: A chronicle of the worldwide social movements today confronting issues like the destruction of the environment, the abuses of free-market fundamentalism, social justice, and the loss of indigenous cultures.

Book Discussion - Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Wednesday, February 25^th
In the library 12:30 to 1:30

Come join your friends and co-workers to share your thoughts on the host of environmental challenges facing the world today and on one perspective in particular. The Whole Earth Library will be hosting a discussion of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How it Can Renew America by controversial and influential New York Times columnist Thomas L.Friedman. Extending his discussion of globalization into the realm of global warming, Friedman follows the connections between the environment, the economy, energy, and national security in what he terms the coming "Energy-Climate Era." In the face of environmental crisis, he sees hope in renewed American political and moral leadership as well as in transformational innovation unleashed by the American marketplace.

Please let us know at library@thoreau.org if you are interested in attending and/or if you need help finding a copy.

Note: If you’re interested in the subject matter and don’t have time to read the book, please feel free to join the discussion.

From the publisher's description of the book:

Thomas L. Friedman's no. 1 bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy—both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

Friedman proposes that an ambitious national strategy—which he calls "Geo-Greenism"—is not only what we need to save the planet from overheating; it is what we need to make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.

As in The World Is Flat, he explains a new era—the Energy-Climate era—through an illuminating account of recent events. He shows how 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the flattening of the world by the Internet (which brought 3 billion new consumers onto the world stage) have combined to bring climate and energy issues to Main Street. But they have not gone very far down Main Street; the much-touted "green revolution" has hardly begun. With all that in mind, Friedman sets out the clean-technology breakthroughs we, and the world, will need; he shows that the ET (Energy Technology) revolution will be both transformative and disruptive; and he explains why America must lead this revolution—with the first Green President and a Green New Deal, spurred by the Greenest Generation.

Subject Guide: Polar Regions

Largely on the periphery of human concerns, most of the world has long thought of the polar regions as remote, barren, and fatally inhospitable. Human populations have adapted to live and thrive there, however, and two centuries of exploration, scientific and otherwise, have begun to unlock the regions' secrets. For the past century, the growing human presence has also meant a growth in the exploitation of natural resources and increased direct pressure on their fragile ecologies and native cultures. Indirectly, distant human activity threatens the regions with pollution and climate change. Average winter temperatures in the interior of Alaska have risen seven degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, a change that has seen shrinking glaciers, earlier springs, increasing precipitation, animal populations under stress, and entire villages relocated because of rising water levels. The amount of summer ice at the North Pole has steadily declined since 1979 and recent scientific studies show that the Arctic Ocean is losing sea ice up to thirty years ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions. New predictions now hold that summer sea ice could completely disappear between 2013 and 2040 – something that has not occurred in more than a million years. WWF research shows also that levels of global warming predicted over the next forty years will lead to winter sea-ice coverage around Antarctica declining by up to thirty per cent in some key areas. These changes endanger the populations adapted to live there and raise new political and commercial issues as countries scramble for newly opened up Arctic mineral riches, the possibility opens up for oil drilling in Antarctica, and the Northwest Passage begins to develop into a major shipping route. These books look at the nature, history, and cultures of the polar regions as they face this uncertain future.

Kieran Mulvaney. At the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Polar Regions. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the natural and human history of the Arctic and Antarctic, the two similar yet very distinct polar regions. Following cycles of exploration and exploitation, it covers human interaction with the areas from the earliest legends of prehistory, through eighteenth and nineteenth century European exploration, to more recent issues of oil and gas drilling, commercial whaling and sealing, pollution, tourism, ozone depletion, and global warming. Seemingly remote, Mulvaney shows how they have been affected and shaped directly by human activity as well as indirectly by events and trends thousands of miles away.

Charles Wohlforth. The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. New York: North Point Press, 2004.

Alaskan journalist Charles Wohlforth focuses on how two cultures are responding to the dramatic changes brought by global warming to the Arctic: the Inupiat Eskimos who live and hunt on the Arctic Ocean coast and the Western scientists who have come to conduct climate and ecological research. Both a portrait of life in an isolated part of the world and a clearly written account of ongoing scientific endeavor, it illuminates two different ways of seeing and comprehending the natural world. Finding points of interaction between the two groups,Wohlforth demonstrates some unexpected commonalities and suggests that elements of both ways of knowing about the environment will be needed to understand and deal with climate change.

Marla Cone. Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic. New York: Grove Press, 2005.

While the Arctic is widely thought to be isolated and the last great unspoiled territory on Earth, it is in reality the location of some of the most contaminated people and animals on the planet as chemicals and pesticides from thousands of miles away in North America, Europe, and Asia travel there by wind and water and are concentrated through the food web. Awarded a grant to conduct an exhaustive study of its deteriorating environment by the Pew Charitable Trusts, Los Angeles Times environmental journalist Marla Cone traveled across the region, from Greenland to the Aleutian Islands, interacting with scientists and the native peoples. She reports on the implications of this foreign pollution for the survival of entire species and cultures.

Sebastian Copeland. Antarctica: The Global Warning. San Rafael, CA: Earth Aware, 2007.

Temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula over the last sixty years have increased by a rate of up to five times the global average. Sebastian Copeland, an award-winning photographer and environmental activist, journeyed to Antarctica on the icebreaker The Ice Lady Patagonia in 2006 and 2007 for Global Green USA and Green Cross International to document the peninsula's changing landscape and threatened wildlife. His collection of over a hundred color photographs is accompanied by scientific data and personal insights about climate change including the question of why the polar regions are melting at an increasingly rapid pace.

Kieran Mulvaney. The Whaling Season: An Inside Account of the Struggle to Stop Commercial Whaling. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003.

Founding director of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, science and environmental writer Kieran Mulvaney recounts his involvement leading four expeditions in Greenpeace's campaign to end commercial whaling in the waters surrounding Antarctica. An examination of how the unpopular activity of whaling manages to survive today, Mulvaney places the expeditions in the context of the history of whaling, Antarctic exploration, Greenpeace, and scientific and political efforts at marine conservation.

Terrie M. Williams. The Hunter's Breath: On Expedition with the Weddell Seals of the Antarctic. New York: M. Evans and Co., 2004.

The Weddell seal is the only mammal able to survive year-round in the harsh Antarctic environment, and it is capable of venturing to deep ice caves beyond the reach of human divers. Biologist Terrie Williams and seven other scientists spent six years studying these mysterious creatures, and her account reveals their discoveries and provides a vivid portrait of the challenges and excitement of conducting research in the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on the planet.

Richard E. Byrd. Alone. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003.

Famed for having made the first flights over the North and South Poles and for his exploration of the Antarctic, Richard Byrd led his second expedition of the polar continent in 1934. As part of that effort, he spent five winter months isolated and alone operating the Bolling Advance Weather Base and almost failed to survive the ordeal after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective stove. A bestseller first published in 1938, this book is his personal account of his struggle and rescue.

New Book - The Accidental American

New to the collection is The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization by Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh from Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco. From the publisher's site:

The Accidental American advocates a bold new approach to immigration: a free international flow of labor to match globalization’s free flow of capital. After all, corporations are encouraged to move anywhere in the world they can maximize their earnings. People shouldn’t have to risk exploitation, abuse, even imprisonment when they try to do the same.

Activist, journalist, and immigration expert Rinku Sen and organizer Fekkak Mamdouh examine the consequences of this injustice through Mamdouh’s own story. Born in Morocco, he was a waiter and union leader at Windows on the World, a restaurant in the World Trade Center, on September 11th. In the aftermath, facing a rising tide of anti-immigrant bias, Mamdouh and others formed the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York to help their colleagues fight for decent jobs and fair treatment.

The experiences of Mamdouh and his coworkers vividly demonstrate the human cost of our flawed immigration policies. Since September 11th, immigrants have increasingly been treated as presumptive criminals. As a counterpoint to these regressive, fundamentally un-American practices, Sen forcefully advocates more humane policies, coupled with proposals for reforming globalization so that all countries can more equitably benefit from a mobile labor force.

Whole Earth Library Giving Tree

Share Books. Save Trees.

Visit the Giving Tree at Whole Earth Library at Thoreau

Each year thirty million trees are cut down to print books in the United States alone. One way to reduce this growing number is to share books by visiting the Whole Earth Library. They typical library in the United States prevents 250 tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, because a library book has only a fraction of the economic and ecological cost of a book purchased from a store.

The unique collection of sustainability-focused books and resources at the Whole Earth Library gives you the incredible opportunity to learn about the latest in environmental stewardship while practicing it. This holiday season you can demonstrate your support for our local library at the Giving Tree. By making a small donation of ten dollars or more you can help to make the collection grow and to keep it current in these rapidly changing fields of knowledge it covers. Each donor will receive a bookmark “leaf” to hang from the tree. Donations can be brought directly to the library during regular hours, or contact Bruce DeMartini at bruce@thoreau.org. While you are there, check out a book for your holiday travels, or recycle your previously-read books at the Book Swap Cart.

Visit us in the back of Presidio Building 1016, at Lincoln Blvd. Torney Ave.

The week of December 15, we will be open every day from 11:00am to 2:00pm