Building a Better World in Your Backyard: Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys

by Paul Wheaton, Shawn Klassen-Koop

Overview

Luxuriant Environmentalism

Make a huge, positive, global difference from your own home! Prioritize comfort over sacrifice while saving thousands of dollars. Explore dozens of solutions and their impacts on carbon footprint, petroleum footprint, toxic footprint, and other environmental issues.

If 20% of the population implemented half the solutions in this book, it would solve the biggest global problems. All without writing to politicians, joining protests, signing petitions, or being angry at the people that are causing the problems.

Good solutions are often different from conventional environmental wisdom. The average American adult has a carbon footprint of 30 tons per year. Replacing a petroleum car with an electric car will cut 2 tons. But if you live in a cold climate and you switch from electric heat to a rocket mass heater, you will cut 27 tons!

Join Paul and Shawn on a journey featuring simple alternatives that you may have never heard of — alternatives which are about building a more symbiotic relationship with nature so we can all be even lazier.



Nurture nature and nature nurtures us all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781999171407
Publisher:	Shawn Klassen-Koop
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Paul is a giant doofus in Montana who is bonkers about permaculture. He won't shut up about permaculture. On and on, every day...it's annoying. He has gone so far as to make a 3-DVD set that is just about the earthworks for permaculture gardening. And not only did he make a 4-DVD set about rocket mass heaters, but he made ANOTHER 4-DVD set about rocket mass heaters. Why on earth do people need 8 DVDs about something so simple? If you think that is ridiculous, take a look at his 177 hours of video of a full Permaculture Design Course and Appropriate Technology Course. Then there are the cards. Okay, the permaculture playing cards are pretty cool.

Before all of that, Paul created hundreds of podcasts, YouTube videos, articles and other bits and bobs about permaculture. That should have been the first sign, right there, that health professionals should have stopped all this. That, or his 26,000 forum posts at permies.com. And he has at least that many at his other site, CodeRanch.com. Oh yeah, he used to be a software engineer before all this permaculture stuff.

Shawn's passion for building a better world grew from many years of working at a summer camp. This time inspired awe and wonder for the natural world through many hours camping in the woods, paddling on a lake, or sleeping under the stars. Seeking to solve world problems with clever thinking, Shawn decided to pursue computer engineering as a career, where he learned the importance of good design and strong critical thinking. In time, he felt like modern technology was causing more problems than it was solving, and he started looking for a better way. It was then that he stumbled upon and fell in love with permaculture as a way to use his design skills to work with nature rather than against nature. Shawn was preparing to start his own homestead when he was faced with serious health challenges that prevented him from doing any physical work. It was during this time that the opportunity to work on Building a Better World in Your Backyard came up. Shawn jumped on it, wanting to do whatever he could to share these ideas with others.

Table of Contents

Part 0: Introduction

• Chapter 1: A Different Approach to Solving World Problems

Part 1: The Problems

• Chapter 2: Environmentalist vs “Environmentalist”
• Chapter 3: The Wicked Lies About Light Bulbs
• Chapter 4: Carbon Footprint
• Chapter 5: Petroleum Footprint
• Chapter 6: Toxic Footprint

Part 2: General Strategies

• Chapter 7: The Wheaton Eco Scale
• Chapter 8: Moving Way Beyond Recycling
• Chapter 9: Vote with Your Wallet
• Chapter 10: Radically Deviant Financial Strategies
• Chapter 11: Organic vs Local
• Chapter 12: Vegan vs Omnivore vs Junk Food

Part 3: Within the Walls of Your Home

• Chapter 13: REALLY Reducing Home Energy Usage
• Chapter 14: More People Living Under One Roof Without Stabbing Each Other
• Chapter 15: Toxic Gick vs 20 Years of Your Life

Part 4: More Than Half of Each Footprint Can Be Resolved in a Backyard

• Chapter 16: The Huge Link Between Food and Global Footprints (Vegans Too!)
• Chapter 17: Double the Food with One Tenth of the Effort
• Chapter 18: The Dark Side of Native Plant Enthusiasm
• Chapter 19: 20 Things to Do with the Twigs That Fall in Your Yard
• Chapter 20: Not Composting
• Chapter 21: Better Than Solar Panels: A Solar Food Dehydrator
• Chapter 22: Breaking the Toxic Water Cycle with Greywater Recycling
• Chapter 23: Harvesting Electricity in Your Backyard
• Chapter 24: The Conventional Lawn vs a Mowable Meadow

Part 5: Counter the Footprint of 20 People on a Homestead

• Chapter 25: How Vegans Bene t from Caring for Cattle, Chickens, Hogs, Etc.
• Chapter 26: Replacing Petroleum with People
• Chapter 27: Wrestling with Poop Beasts and Peeing in the Garden
• Chapter 28: The Solutions to Colony Collapse Disorder Are Embarrassingly Simple
• Chapter 29: Destroy Your Orchard to Make a Food Forest
• Chapter 30: A Building Design That Solves Almost Everything
• Chapter 31: Natural Swimming Pools

Part 6: Conclusion

• Chapter 32: Hey! You Know What Would be Cool?

Appendices

• Appendix A: World Domination
• Appendix B: Tabular Summary of Solutions
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

2020-03-21
A grassroots do-it-yourself guide to environmentally friendly living.

“How do you, dear reader, find out if you really are an eco warrior or an unwitting eco poser?” asks popular YouTuber Paul Wheaton and co-author Klassen-Koop in their lively and engaging debut. Wheaton is a practiced communicator who relays lessons about the environment in clear, simple terms, and he acknowledges that a great many people react to dire world news by getting angry at the people they perceive as the bad guys in any situation when they’d feel better if they took positive action themselves. “For nearly every global problem,” he writes, “there are solutions we can implement in our backyard that save us money and help us live more luxuriant lives.” Wheaton hopes to counteract companies’ “greenwashing” of gullible consumers who want to do the right thing. Toward that end he lays out in great detail all kinds of ways people can drastically reduce waste that harms the environment while actually improving the quality of their day-to-day life. His suggestions include thought-provoking ideas about being a vegan versus an omnivore and about recycling, easily the most immediately pragmatic advice for general readers, including a tip on what do to with pizza boxes: “use the cardboard as a fire starter.” Heating costs, which Wheaton sees as the most important element of his plan, will present readers with challenges they might be unwilling to take up. For instance, Wheaton advocates keeping a home cold in winter except for discrete spots that people are using at the moment, and he also strenuously recommends a device called a “rocket mass heater” that he claims is much more effective than a wood-burning stove. But even if readers don’t buy into all of his solutions, they’ll find an enormous amount of useful information about living a greener and simpler life, generously illustrated with black-and-white artwork.

A guide to living a life kinder to the environment offers solutions to everyday challenges.

Kirkus Reviews