Greening Libraries Wins Award in the 2013 Green Books Festival

Via Library Juice Press. Congratulations to my fellow co-authors and to our editors.

The 2013 Green Book Festival awarded its top honor in the category of Best Business Book to Greening Libraries, edited by Monika Antonelli and Mark McCullough and published by Library Juice Press.

Greening Libraries provides library professionals with a collection of articles and papers that serve as a portal to understanding a wide range of green and sustainable practices within libraries and the library profession. The book’s articles come from a variety of perspectives on a range of topics related to green practices, sustainability and the library profession. Aspects of the growing “green library movement” covered include green buildings, alternative energy resources, conservation, green library services and practices, operations, programming, and outreach.

The Green Book Festival gives awards in a number of categories, as well as overall best and honorable mention awards, which makes it a useful collection development tool for librarians.

 

Joel Makower talks to Bill McDonough about ‘The Upcycle’

Read the full story at GreenBiz. Read an excerpt of McDonough’s new book here.

This week marks the publication of The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability — Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. It’s their first book since their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a bestseller that helped change the conversation about designing and manufacturing, envisioning a closed-loop system where every material was returned to the soil, or back into the manufacturing process with no harm or loss of quality.

The Upcycle takes the next step, envisioning what’s possible through a series of “evocations,” as McDonough calls them. (You can read an excerpt here.) The book ties together the impressive contributions McDonough and Braungart have made over the past quarter century, individually and together, toward the goal of re-envisioning commerce.

I took the opportunity of the book’s publication to catch up with McDonough, a longtime colleague and friend, to hear more about this next-gen view of the world of business. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

 

Science writing: how do you make complex issues accessible and readable?

Read the full interview at Our Daily Read.

As London’s Royal Society prepared to award its annual book prize, we asked five top writers to debate what makes good science writing in a technically minded age.

 

What business can learn from the ‘eco-doom’ books

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

What do you get from reviewing four books on the same sustainability topic, instead of relying on one?

Most book reviews are published to alert the reader to a book they might be interested in reading, and offer the reader just enough information to judge for themselves. Publications on sustainability or green business regularly review new books, but they do not follow a standard practice in many disciplines of comparing and contrasting books on the same topic. We wanted to explore what those engaged in “sustainability” can learn from that. To do so, we have chosen important works for a general audience about what many consider to be the focal point of planetary sustainability: understanding, and reducing or coping with, climate change brought on by global warming.

The GreenBiz article is a summary of a longer review posted on the Institute for Environmental Entrepreneurship blog.

 

Can we move beyond incrementalism to the pursuit of zero?

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

“The time has come to tear down the old order and begin to create the new.”

John Elkington sounds like a Wall Street occupier, or a Bolshevik. He is neither. He is, instead, a 63-year-old consultant who has advised executives of global corporations, including Ford, Shell, BP, Toyota, HP, Nike, Nestle and Bayer, over the course of a long career at the crossroads of business and the environment. Along with such thinkers as Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, Elkington all but invented the discipline of corporate sustainability. He’s got a new book out called The Zeronauts, so I paid him a visit a week or so ago when I was in London.

 

Nine Novel Ways to Re-Use a Novel (or Any Other Book)

Read the full post at Networx.

If you’re the type of person who could never imagine taking apart a book – removing its pages, cutting off its cover, etc – then please stop reading now. This article is not for you. And I totally understand! Some people have such emotional attachments to books; the thought of repurposing them is simply horrific. (For all of you, Atlanta painter and decorating expert Kass Wilson wrote a tutorial on how to make bookshelves the focal point of a room.)

But for the rest of you, here’s a few awesome ideas (other than creating a decorative library) for upcycling the used books you’ve got lying around:

 

Two new LibGuides: Environmental Novels and Environmental Films

Just published two new LibGuides, Environmental Novels and Environmental Films. Both guides were compiled by Charlotte Roh, a Master’s Degree candidate at the University of Illinois’ Graduate School for Library and Information Science (GSLIS). The Environmental Novels guide is an update of an annotated bibliography compiled by Lauren Bordson Dodge, who did the work while earning her M.S. LIS from GSLIS a number of years ago.

If you have suggestions for things we missed, please submit a suggestion. There is a form on the front page of each guide in the box on the top left . Click the green plus sign next to the word Submit to display the form.

 

New Book: Greening Libraries

I contributed a chapter to this book and know several of the authors. The writers are a diverse group of librarians with a wide variety of sustainability experience. For more information or to order your own copy visit Library Juice Press.

 

Rethink, respect water and there will be plenty, author says

Read the full post at Great Lakes Echo.

Author Charles Fishman remembers when bottled water was sold only for use in steam irons.

“When I was young, they sold a gallon of water in the laundry aisle … that’s it,” said Fishman, who is 51 years old. “And it was covered in dust and no one ever bought it.”

Things have changed. Bottled water has lined store shelves and checkout counters for decades now.

But it was an exotic, upscale brand that caught Fishman’s attention about five years ago – Fiji Water.

Fishman traveled to Fiji – the water is actually from Fiji – to the bottled water maker for an article he was writing for Fast Company magazine. He also went to San Pellegrino. And Poland Springs.

The trips became the impetus for his new book, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, which goes beyond bottled water and examines humans’ relationship to the resource.

 

Sustainability and Self-Interest

Read the full story in Stanford Social Innovation Review.

John Elkington is an optimist. In his new book, Elkington, an authority on corporate responsibility and coiner of the term “triple bottom line,” argues that a new set of entrepreneurs in business, government, and universities are stepping up and taking actions that will help us to reinvent capitalism, combat climate change, and reduce our exposure to toxics.