California and the West: Geography, History, and Investigative Reporting

• California Rare-Earth News Blog
• State of Denial (Excellent Investigative Journalism from the Sacramento Bee)
• Wikileaks.org
• Historic Topographic Maps of Los Angeles (circa 1900)
• California Demographics
• California Geographical Survey
• CensusScope
• High Country News (periodical)
• Arax, Mark and Wartzman, Rick; "The King of California"
• Brechin, Gray; "Imperial San Francisco"
• Brewer, William; "Up and Down California in 1860-1864"
• Carle, Dave; "Drowning the Dream: California's Water Choices at the Millenium"
• Childs, Craig; "The Secret Knowledge of Water"
• Clifford, Hal; "Downhill Slide" This book is to the ski industry what Cadillac Desert is to the dam-builders: it exposes all of their dirty laundry.
• Dawson, Robert and Brechin, Gray; "Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream"
• Egan, Ferol; "Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation"
• Guerrero, Vladimir; "The Anza Trail and the Settling of California;" Heyday Books
• Gumprecht, Blake; "The Los Angeles River: It's Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth"
• Paddison, Joshua; "A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush"
• Preston, William L.; "Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin"
• Reisner, Mark; "Cadillac Desert"
• Robinson, W.W.; "Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads"
• Storer, Tracy I. and Tevis, Lloyd P. Jr., "California Grizzly," 1955, UC Press.
• Saum, Steven Boyd Ed.; "Each a Mighty Voice: A Century of Speeches from The Commonwealth Club of California," 2004, Heyday Books.
• Vernal Pools

Sustainability

General

• Solving the Public Health Crisis with Smarter City Planning
• Planning Healthy Places
• iLoveMountains.org
• Eat like a locavore
• Green Health Care
• Rocky Mountain Institute
• The Corporation (documentary and book--required reading)
• Solving Inequality in America (long but important)
• Millenium Ecosystem Assessment
• Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
• The Center for Rural Affairs is working to maintain sustainable rural communities and farms.
• "Recovering America," by Malcolm Wells
• "Earth and the American Dream," 77 minute video by Bill Couturie with many famous actors and actresses narrating. A truly balanced film showing the "development" of the nation's natural resources and the impacts.
• "The Unsettling of America," and "Essays by Wendell Berry," by Wendell Berry
• The dangers of vinyl / Movie: Blue Vinyl

Decision-making Aides

• Seventh Generation - product labeling guide
• USDA Organics
• The Green Life: making informed decisions
• Food Alliance Certified - Sustainable Agriculture
• Environmentally Enlightened Seafood Choices
• Gotmercury.org (Seafood mercury calculator)
• Brilliant Earth Buy recycled gold to avoid poisoning ourselves - Nevada gold mines emit 3.5% of the nation's mercury emissions, down from 21,000 lbs (10%) in 1998; compared to 44 metric tons from wildfires; 50 tons from coal fired power plants. At 240 lbs/plant that means Nevada gold mines emit more mercury than 30 coal-fired power plants--in fact one source says 12 NV gold mines emit more mercury than 150 coal-fired power plants.
• Ethical Metalsmiths
• An Inconceivable Truth: The dangers of plastics
• Safer plastic drinkware: Water Bottles / For Kids
• Clear Creek Compostables

Solar Power

• Go Solar California!
• Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (at HSU)
• Practice Guerilla Solar and Guerilla Efficiency -- try this at home!
• Sierra Solar -- installed my solar-electric grid-intertie system!
• Home Power (periodical)
• State-by-state power generation totals

Nuclear Power

• "Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else," by Helen Caldicott
• Nuclear Power is the Problem, Not a Solution
• Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility (Amory Lovins Interview)
• Uranium Mining and the Inuit
• Uranium Mining, Native Resistance, and the Greener Path

 

Peak Oil and Greenhouse Effect

• Apollo Alliance
• Carbon offsets - Native Wind
• The Long Emergency
• Peak Oil .org
• U.S. Report Acknowledges Peak Oil Threat
• Peak Oil: Life After the Crash
• Surviving Peak Oil
• Energy Bulletin
• The Community Solution

 

Restoration

• Ban lead bullets - Save the California Condor!
• Visit Tulare Lake: let's restore it, grizzly bears, wolves, and all! Like the Buffalo Commons in the Great Plains, we could have a Grizzly Bear Commons in Central California!
• Support the Mono Lake Committee: protecting Mono Lake by pursuing a sustainable water future for California!
• Support the Glen Canyon Institute: 2 for the price of 1--restore Glen Canyon and the Colorado River Delta!
• Support Friends of the River: their admirable work will protect our rivers for our future.
• "The Abstract Wild" by Jack Turner
• The works of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Abbey
• Aldo Leopold's very wisdom-dense essays, "Conservation Esthetic" and "Wildlife in American Culture"
• "The Riverkeepers", by Robert Kennedy Jr. and John Cronin.
• Protect Aquatic Ecosystems
• Deadly towers in migratory bird paths

Automobile Alternatives

What you can do today

• Boycott Nissan and GM!
• Ecomodder
• How to Increase Your Gas Mileage by Over 20%
• Better World Club - a green Auto Club!

Plug-in Cars
100 years ago, electric cars were more common than gas cars.

• Diesel cars are often more efficient than electric ones (due to old dirty 33% efficient power plants and an electricity grid that loses 7% of the energy generated). As always, the details matter: where does your electricity come from?
• Distributed Generation reduces grid losses.
• Who Killed the Electric Car? Documentary narrated by Martin Sheen
• Plug-in America
• Plug-in Hybrids: Our best bet for the near future
• Plug-in Hybrids National Campaign
• Electric Vehicles
• Electric Auto Association
• Convert your car to electric! For $17,000-30,000.
• Tango Electric Mini-cars (park like a motorcycle for half the cost per mile of a car)
• Tesla S 300 mile range on a charge, coming out by 2012 for $50-60K
• 1,902 mpg --sorry, not street legal (LA Times)
• Chevy Volt -- plug-in hybrid coming in November 2011 with a 40 mile battery range and 600+ mile full range (but expensive - batteries alone are $16K)
• Webster Electric Vehicles in West Sacramento
• Davis Electric Cars
• Triac - selling for $20K at two locations in the Bay Area
• Aptera - looks about as practical as a motorcycle. Reservable now.

Alternative Fuels and Vehicles

• Boycott Corn and Ethanol!
  Amory Lovins on how easy it is to end US oil dependence
• How to grow enough biodiesel to power far more of U.S. transportation
• 80-mpg cars are available! ...in Europe.
• Dodge ESX3 gets 72 mpg! ...available in 3 years.
• Corbin Motors--efficient 3-wheeled vehicles!
• "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank" by Joshua Tickell (Tickell Energy Consultants; 3rd edition 2000, ISBN 0970722702)

Bikes

• It isn't so much what you drive, but what you eat: "In fact a vegan driving a hummer would be contributing less greenhouse gas carbon emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle."
• "The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power" by Travis Hugh Culley (Villard Books, 2001, ISBN 0-375-50428-1)

General

• "Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back" by Jane Holtz Kay (UC Press; 1997, ISBN 0-520-21620-2)

Other

• World Clock
• Over 2 million acres of Colombia have been aerially sprayed with Roundup in a failed drug war. It is destroying Colombian crops and lives and ecosystems and has had zero effect on cocaine use in the US. This has cost us $5 billion since 2001. That $5 billion could have been spent here at home on drug treatment and would have actually made a difference. Click here to do something about it.
• The Situation in New Orleans
• Owens Valley Committee
• Butte-Sutter Area Groundwater Users
• Russell Bell
• "Take Your Time: Slowing Down in a Hurried World," by Eknath Easwaran
• "The Power of Myth," by Joseph Campbell
• The immigration history of my ancestors
• Patterns: 15 properties of life ; The Building Blocks of Wholeness

Politics

• Solving Inequality in America
• Center for Investigative Reporting
• "...all new buildings be carbon neutral by 2030, is indeed technically achievable. The authors acknowledge, however, that “significant work is required in the area of policy and program development in order to make changes actually happen.”"
• Bush Greenwatch: Tracking the Bush Administration's Environmental Misdeeds
• Media Found Guilty of Deception in Iraq by World Tribunal
• Unprecedented: 2000 Presidential Election - A very very important documentary exposes the high level criminal activities of the powerful Bush operatives that stole the 2000 election
• Uncovered: The whole truth about the Iraq war - A well-researched documentary on how our appointed president lied his way into Iraq, killing hundreds of our service men and women.
• Why We Fight - excellent documentary film about the military-industrial-congressional complex and why wars are so lucrative for business we won't stop fighting them until things change in Washington.
• "Conservatives Without Conscience" and "Broken Government" by John Dean
• "Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them" by Al Franken
• By Michael Moore: "Dude, Where's My Country", "Stupid White Men", "Bowling for Columbine".
• Mother Jones (periodical)
• Funny Times (periodical)

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