In my previous blog post I reviewed the book, Building a Better World in your Backyard Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys, by Paul Wheaton and Shawn Klassen-Koop. As part of that review I noted that I thought this would be an excellent selection for book discussion groups. It is relatively short, easy, and entertaining to read. The authors prime intended audience are those with little to no experience with ecological/environmental matters though I feel it would of useful interest to those more versed in the subject too. This should help make it appropriate for all that might be a part of such book groups. The material covers a wide range of subject matter offering many ways for everyone to connect to it. I would anticipate lively conversations sparked by the book.
Continue reading “Book Group Discussion Questions for Building a Better World in your Backyard Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys”Category: books
Posts related to books.
Building a Better World in Your Backyard Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys – Book Review
Sometime in my childhood I seem to have taken on an environmentalist bent. I’m not sure quite when or why. It just seemed like the right thing to do and support, and still does. Thus, in my time I’ve read a lot of books, and watched hours upon hours of movies relating to this general genre. Despite all this information that has been out in the public sphere these past decades I’ve also watched things continue to decline. Who remembers the days when any sort of serious car trip involved stopping occasionally to scrape bug guts off the windshield so you could see out? When was the last time you REALLY needed to do that, and what does that say about the health of insect populations? If you’ve got enough years under your belt I imagine you can think of plenty of other similar examples yourself. So it would seem that all these past books and materials promoting environmental ideas haven’t been effective enough to overcome the increasing tides of destruction. Now here I am looking to review another book. Is yet one more going to be any different?
Continue reading “Building a Better World in Your Backyard Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys – Book Review”AC2 – Your Real Hourly Wage
Continuing to transfer from my davidhuang.org website, with updated notes, my old financial management articles written for the art business magazine, Art Calendar, here is the second one focusing on your real hourly wage. I feel like this is a very powerful conceptual tool for getting a handle on ones finances while also gaining a deeper understanding of yourself and what you value.
Continue reading “AC2 – Your Real Hourly Wage”AC1 – Making a Living
Very soon I am going to be moving my davidhuang.org website to a new platform and hosting server. It’s not that I really want to do this. It’s more that the software it is running on is SO old, out of date, and no longer supported that it’s going to break as soon as the server gets the update that should have happened many months ago. So I will be rebuilding that site from scratch in WordPress here on the account that is hosting this blog. Unfortunately what that also means is that most of what I’ve built up on the davidhuang.org site over the many years will simply go away and be lost. There is no easy way to transfer it all. I do hope to reconstruct some of the more popular sections as time permits.
Continue reading “AC1 – Making a Living”Autumnberry: A delicious fruit you may have never heard about
All the right elements seemed to combine this year to make it a bumper crop year around me for autumnberries. (These are sometimes also known as autumn-olive, with the scientific name of Elaeagnus umbellata.) It’s probably not a fruit you’re going to see in grocery stores. In fact, you may have never heard of it before, despite the fact that it’s said to be the most common wild fruit across large regions of North America. I only learned about it a few years ago and went hunting to try and find a bush. Eventually I found some along an old railroad line converted into a hiking/biking trail where I find a lot of wild foods. After positively identifying it in the field I was chagrined to discover a hearty sized specimen growing at the end of my driveway! Doh! It was growing right under my nose for years, with me walking by it everyday as I went to check the mail. I find this is so often how it is with wild edible foods. Until we become educated about them they remain a seemingly invisible part of the landscape. Put another way, the more I learn about wild edibles the more vibrant the natural world around me becomes!
Continue reading “Autumnberry: A delicious fruit you may have never heard about”Trigger Point Therapy: a surprisingly effective, cheap, easy, drug free way to deal with most pain
Twenty some years ago, not too long after I bought my little homestead I was fully engaged in a project to raise the roof on what was the first metals studio here, now known as the old metals studio and becoming known as the wood shed. I had a rust bucket contraption of a mini pick up truck and was loading asphalt shingles into the back of it at the home improvement store. With just a few more packages left on the cart to transfer over one of those bend, lift, twist movements resulted in crippling back pain. “Is this what people mean when they throw their back out,” I wondered? It seemed to take a herculean effort to stand up fully and then still somehow manage to get the remaining shingles in the truck and drive home.
Continue reading “Trigger Point Therapy: a surprisingly effective, cheap, easy, drug free way to deal with most pain”Mind the Gap – It’s where the magic happens
I’m challenging myself to reach a bare bones level of wealth needed for me to retire early within the next three years. Naturally that has me considering the nature of wealth, security, and money. With regards to money I tend to fall into two different mental habits, neither of which really serve me fully. The first is to focus on increasing my income. I realized the other day this is almost completely irrelevant on its own. The other habit of mine is to focus on cutting expenses. Again this is almost as irrelevant as increasing income. Reducing expenses does tend to reduce consumption of energy and resources, thus reducing my ecological footprint, but with regards to wealth and security unless I can sustainably reduce it to zero this too is completely irrelevant on its own.
Continue reading “Mind the Gap – It’s where the magic happens”Harvesting from the greenhouse
It’s been a long day of chasing work on the vessel you’ll see in today’s Studio Snippet. I’d like to call it a day, but I promised I would try to get a short post out each day and I want to keep that promise until the end of the week at least. So this evening I’m going to share a few things I’ve been harvesting already from the greenhouse.
Continue reading “Harvesting from the greenhouse”Building a Better World in your Backyard instead of being angry at bad guys
Final Update (I think). The book is now done and available in print, ebook, and as an audiobook. If you are interested in purchasing a copy you can do so here.
Update. The campaign just ended with phenomenal success! A total of 2768 people supported it with $153,983.05! Thanks to all of you who joined me in helping make it all happen. If you missed out I’ll be sure to make one more update to this post when the book has gone through the final editing processes, been printed, and is available for anyone to purchase. Odds are good I’ll do another blog post too reviewing the book after I’ve got my copy and read the whole thing.
So I’ve known the Kickstarter campaign to get this book printed was coming up for months now. I’m excited to see it finally happen! Paul Wheaton and Shawn Klassen-Koop have been working on this for over a year. I’ve read a few sections they’ve shared in various threads on the Permies.com forums and it looks like it should be an excellent book that is essentially right along the lines of what I’m aiming to do with this blog.
Continue reading “Building a Better World in your Backyard instead of being angry at bad guys”A Trick to Reduce Heat Loss Through Windows
I’m going to be traveling off to teach a couple workshops soon. When I’m away from home I also drop out of the cyber world, so don’t expect much to be happening in the blog for a little bit. Still, before I leave I wanted to cover one other winter themed item. My wildly optimistic hope is that by the time I’ve returned March will have made its shift to spring like weather! Yeah, I know, we’ll probably all be laughing about this under several feet of snow at the end of the month, but a guy can dream.
Continue reading “A Trick to Reduce Heat Loss Through Windows”