Green Drinks Singapore – Jan 2010
| January 28, 2010 | ||
| 8:15 pm | to | 9:30 pm |
From Green Drinks Singapore:
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Venue: Naive, 99 East Coast Road
This month, we are gathering all the green groups, societies, businesses and individuals with green values to talk about their plans for 2010, and explore ways we can all work together.
In particular, we are targetting to have ECO (Singapore), SEC, Nature Society (Singapore), Vegetarian Society (Singapore), Social Innovation Park, Food for All, green societies from the various tertiary institutions, various businesses, and individuals already well known in the green sphere. As always, everyone is welcome!
Let us have a meaningful greater conversation about what we can do together! Do spread the word, and we hope to see you there!
Foodwise, Naive has kindly put together a special three-course menu at the price of $18+ for those wishing to dine there.
How to get there: By bus- 10, 12, 14, 32, 40; By car- parking is available at Katong Mall and Katong Village
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(We are selling Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice, at Green Drinks to raise fund for the Haiti Earthquake relief operations. Have 40 copies of the book to sell at $50 each. 100% of profits will go to the Singapore Red Cross who will channel it to the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Societies.)
Conversations with Green Gurus: The Collective Wisdom of Environmental Movers and Shakers – Laura Mazur and Louella Miles
January 12, 2010 by Bookman
Filed under New Books, People and Education
Conversations with Green Gurus introduces various environmental pioneers from different sectors, including business, government, academics and non-governmental organisations:
- Ray Anderson (Founder of Interface, Inc)
- James Cameron (Founder, Executive Director and Vice-Chairman of Climate Change Capital)
- Paul Dickinson (CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project)
- John Elkington (Founding Partner and Director of Volans)
- John Grant (Author of The Green Marketing Manifesto)
- Denis Hayes (President and CEO of The Bullitt Foundation)
- Gary Hirshberg (President and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm)
- Tony Juniper (Former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth, England, Wales and Northern Ireland)
- Professor Sir David King (Former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government)
- Amory B. Lovins (Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute)
- Professor Wangari Maathai (Founder of the Green Belt Movement and Nobel Peace Prize Winner)
- Ricardo Navarro (Founder and Director of the Salvadoran Centre for Appropriate Technology)
- Dr Vandana Shiva (Physicist, Environmental Activist and Author)
- Jeffrey Swartz (President and CEO of Timberland)
- Sir Crispin Tickell (Diplomat, Academic and Environmentalist)
These leaders share insights on their professional and personal lives, and their current views on sustainability. The book gives a concise overview of how these green gurus started their green journey, and their wish to see a more sustainable world.
Here’s some thoughts from the gurus:
Well, it’s easiest to start with the first principle of natural capitalism: radical resource efficiency. Just look for muda, that wonderful Japanese word that means waste, purposeless and futility. Look for any measurable input that produces no customer value, and set a goal of reducing it to zero. – Amory B. Lovins
So sustainability really can and should be at the core of what companies are now planning, in terms of, for example, where markets will go and what will be some of the future risk factors. At that fundamental level sustainability, for a company, is about being able to continue in business. – Tony Juniper
The beautiful thing about business is that it doesn’t have any ideology except to make money. If you can demonstrate that you make more money by saving the world, then businesses will save the world really quickly. And so all we have to do is wake up the consumer to stop putting money into their own endangerment. And that shouldn’t be very difficult. – Paul Dickinson
I think the biggest problem, which I must admit I’m still dealing with, is the fact that very many people do not see the environment as something that is integral to our daily lives. It tends to be seen as an outside issue, often associated with scientists and academics, but in fact it is very, very central to our lives. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat – all these things that we cannot live without. – Professor Wangari Maathai
Related Info
Watch this short introduction video of the book:
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The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth – E. O. Wilson
December 23, 2009 by Bookman
Filed under People and Education, Science and Nature
A sincere plea by Edward O. Wilson for an alliance between science and religion to save Earth’s biodiversity.
From Amazon
The Creation is E. O. Wilson’s most important work since the publications of Sociobiology and Biophilia. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, it is a book about the fate of the earth and the survival of our planet. Yet while Carson was specifically concerned with insecticides and the ecological destruction of our natural resources, Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, attempts his new social revolution by bridging the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of fundamentalism and science. Like Carson, Wilson passionately concerned about the state of the world, draws on his own personal experiences and expertise as an entomologist, and prophesies that half the species of plants and animals on Earth could either have gone or at least are fated for early extinction by the end of our present century.
Astonishingly, The Creation is not a bitter, predictable rant against fundamentalist Christians or deniers of Darwin. Rather, Wilson, a leading “secular humanist,” draws upon his own rich background as a boy in Alabama who “took the waters,” and seeks not to condemn this new generations of Christians but to address them on their own terms. Conceiving the book as an extended letter to a southern Baptist minister, Wilson, in stirring language that can evoke Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” tells this everyman minister how, in fact, the world really came to be. He pleads with these men of the cloth to understand the cataclysmic damage that is destroying our planet and asks for their help in preventing the destruction of our Earth before it is too late. Never a pessimist, Wilson avers that there are solutions that may yet save the planet, and believes that the vision that he presents in The Creation is one that both scientists and pastors can accept, and work on together in spite of their fundamental ideological differences.
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The World Without Us – Alan Weisman
December 22, 2009 by Bookman
Filed under Cities and Buildings, People and Education
A fascinating look at a world without humans.
From Amazon
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us.
Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dali Lama, and paleontologists—who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths—Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn’t depend on our demise. In posing a provocative concept with gravity in a highly readable presentation, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.
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Green Future Solutions Launches Bookchanging – Singapore’s First Website for Green Books
Green Future Solutions launched its latest website, Bookchanging, on 17 December 2009. This new website is the sixth in Green Future Solutions’ network of websites, which includes AsiaIsGreen, Green Business Times, Zero Waste Singapore, Low Carbon Singapore, and TEDxGreen.
Bookchanging is an online community for book readers to find, enjoy, share, discuss and buy green books. You can read environmental books to gain more knowledge, work towards a sustainable future and change the world.
Under the New Books category, you can find the latest books on the environment, including Al Gore’s Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man: Saving the Planet One Family at a Time.
Under the Recommended Books category, you can check out our book recommendations, which includes Alex Steffen’s Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, and Janine M. Benyus’s Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.
You can also choose to buy the book in Singapore from Bookchanging or buy the book overseas from Amazon. Visit http://www.bookchanging.com to check out our books.
Images
Download the Bookchanging logo:
Download the Bookchanging badges here.
Contacts
Eugene Tay
Founder of Bookchanging
Email: eugene@greenfuture.sg
Social Media: LinkedIn | Facebook
About Green Future Solutions
Green Future Solutions is a Singapore-based business that promotes environmental awareness and action for a green future, through its network of green websites, events, presentations, publications and consultancy. For more information, visit http://www.greenfuture.sg.
