Our Projects : Sustainability Book Club

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Consider Joining the Sustainability Book Club Discussions at Pages Bookstore in Kensington!

Join facilitators from Sustainable Calgary, Arusha and EcoLiving Events to discuss themes and issues affecting the city and world today.

When:  Wednesday evenings, once a month from 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Where: Pages Books 6:00–7:30 pm
1135 Kensington Road NW
403-283-6655

 
The Sustainability Book Club ... Now in its Fifth year!

It is free and Everyone is Welcome - even if you have not read the book!

Please join us for a free and lively discussion of important issues facing us today. The goal of the Sustainability Book Club is to share books and discussions that help us understand the world and our place in it in a different way.  This can change the way we experience the world and the way we act in our day-to-day lives, opening new possibilities for environmental sustainability, social justice and peace.

Feel free to join us and drop in - even if you have not read the book. It is the issues and themes that spark the discussion.  Everyone is welcome to join in for one session or all of them. It is your opinion on the issues that builds an interesting discussion

The Book Club is sponsored by  Pages Books, Sustainable Calgary, Arusha and Eco-Living Events.

2012 Book List & Schedule:

Topic: Sociology     
Title/Author: The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy by Chris Turner
Meeting Date: January 11, 2012
The revolutionary follow-up to Calgarian Chris Turner's Governor General's Literary Award and National Business Book Award nominee, The Geography of Hope.

The most vital project of the twenty-first century is a shift from our unsustainable way of life to a sustainable one--a great lateral leap from a track headed for economic and ecological disaster to one bound for renewed prosperity. In The Leap, Chris Turner presents a field guide to making that jump, drawing on recent breakthroughs in state-of-the-art renewable energy, cleantech and urban design. From the solar towers of sunny Spain to the bike paths and pedestrianized avenues of the world's most livable city--Copenhagen, Denmark--to the nascent "green-collar" economies rejuvenating the former East Germany and the American Rust Belt, he paints a vivid portrait of a new, sustainable world order already up and running.
        
Topic: Design
Title/Author: Green Metropolis by David Owen
Meeting Date: February 8, 2012
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers,      Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan- the most densely populated place in North America -rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.
   Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside.    The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

Topic: Sociology
Title/Author: Trouble with Billionares by Linda McQuaig
Meeting Date: March 14, 2012
The glittering lives of billionaires may seem like a harmless source of entertainment. But such concentrated economic power reverberates throughout society, threatening the quality of life and the very functioning of democracy. It's no accident that the United States claims the most billionaires--but suffers among the highest rates of infant mortality and crime, the shortest life expectancy, as well as the lowest rates of social mobility and electoral political participation in the developed world.

Our society tends to regard large fortunes as evidence of great talent or accomplishment. Yet the vast new wealth isn't due to an increase in talent or effort at the top, but rather to changing social attitudes legitimizing greed and government policy changes that favour the new elite. Authoritative and eye-opening, The Trouble with Billionaires will spark debate about the kind of society we want.

Topic: Food
Title/Author: Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry
Meeting Date: April 11, 2012
Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry's caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. Long before organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Berry was farming with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing.
    Drawn from more than thirty years of work, this collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?
     A progenitor of the Slow Food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. "Eating is an agricultural act," he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy.

Topic: Design
Title/Author: Agile City:Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change
by James Russell
Meeting Date: May 9, 2012
In a very short time America has realized that global warming poses real challenges to the nation's future. The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it?
Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming-and blunt its effects-by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly.

Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally.