The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen Process, 2008, 330 pages, $16.95 Go to your local bookstore or buy online.

The Northwest Green Home Primer by Kathleen O'Brien and Kathleen Smith Timber Press, 2008, 304 pages, $24.95 Go to your local bookstore or buy online.

by Pamela O'Malley Chang

I once thought that being an architect would give me the knowledge and experience to make good design decisions. As my career progressed, I found that involved clients—who studied their options and looked for something better—inspired me to find more creative solutions. Clients who barely took the time to understand the basics never motivated me to produce anything beyond “bland.”

Over time, I came to believe that as a society, we had become bad clients. How many of us had time to earn a living and educate ourselves to make informed decisions about our homes and neighborhoods? We had abdicated our responsibility for the built environment and ended up with sprawl, indistinguishable tract houses, sick building syndrome, and oversized homes that wasted land, energy, and materials.

Green construction is the opposite of not-my-responsibility architecture—it recognizes the importance of individual choices. When a green designer selects, say, a particular slope and orientation for a roof, she knows that choice affects how well the building withstands wind, rain, sun, or snow. She considers what type of roofing materials will be appropriate and where windows may be placed to brighten dark interiors or avoid late afternoon glare. She knows that cumulatively, thousands of similar decisions can raise or lower a city’s temperature, replenish or deplete its water supply, and speed or slow the rate at which construction waste is sent to landfill. Green design is the expression of a mature society’s desire to live as if each of these decisions matters.

The Northwest Green Home Primer is a comprehensive text for anyone who chooses green design for home construction or renovation. While the Primer focuses on the Northwest (emphasizing that effective green solutions are always specific to their local environment), the book’s overall approach is adaptable to any region.

The authors, building consultant Kathleen O’Brien and architect Kathleen Smith, are specialists in sustainable design. Both live in green homes that they helped plan. Their credentials are impeccable, and their research thorough.

Readers who like dense technical details may enjoy this text cover-to-cover. Others can learn a lot just by grazing. The book has well-organized checklists and is full of helpful illustrations and case studies. You can glance at a diagram to understand how a heat pump provides summer cooling and winter heating by circulating fluid from your house to deep in the ground where temperatures are stable. Or you can look at photographs showing examples of temporary ponds, which you could construct in your yard to help replenish your local aquifer.

O’Brien also draws on insight from her own home design process and tells how it saved her money and energy in the long-term: “We set our sights on exceeding [the] rigorous … [state] energy code. … As a result, we insulated ourselves somewhat from rising energy prices. … We built our home in 1998, at … roughly one to two percent more than what it would have cost to build … conventionally.”

I wish this book had been available when I did my own green renovation. More importantly, I hope that homeowners, buyers, and builders will use this book to acquire the knowledge to challenge architects to build green.

In a lighter but arguably deeper-green vein, The Urban Homestead is a good-natured (in all senses) guide for urbanites who want to live off the land without leaving the city limits, by such means as greening their homes and growing, preserving, and composting their own vegetables. The authors offer Homestead as “an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life.”

“We bake our own bread because it is better than what we can buy,” they write. “We raise our own hens because we like chickens and we think their eggs are worth the trouble … There’s mead brewing in our guest bedroom because you can’t buy mead … and because fermentation is the closest thing to magic that we know.”

If such activities appeal to you, you’ll find yourself reading this book the way gardeners read seed catalogs in mid-January. Along the way, you’ll encounter instructions for cooking acorn meal (see above), building a self-watering plant container, and making clay-and-seed balls for lobbing wildflowers into fenced vacant lots. You’ll learn how to be an urban forager—from fruit-picking to dumpster-diving—and how to harvest gray water from your laundry or shower.

The authors, a husband and wife team, do their urban farming in Los Angeles. They dispense opinionated tips and useful resources. Despite numerous typos, Homestead is a book I’ll want to give to my frugal-foodie relatives.

Ten years ago when I completed my own home renovation, I concluded that green design would hardly make a drop of difference unless it became ordinary and accessible. The Northwest Green Home Primer and The Urban Homestead bring complex choices about homes and food within almost anyone’s grasp. Together, these books give me hope that ordinary people can reclaim decision making from the “experts” and inspire us all to live more creatively and responsibly.

Pamela O'Malley Chang wrote this article as part of YES! Magazine's In Review column. Read more Book Reviews from YES! Magazine.

Which organic milk companies are really clean? What practices are guaranteed by the organic label, and what aren't?

USDA organic standards forbid all growth hormones and hormones that increase the production of milk, such as rBST or rBGH. The use of antibiotics, either for growth or illness, is also restricted. Organic milk cows are fed 100% vegetarian, organic diets. Access to pasture is a requirement for cows and chickens in the organic meat, dairy, and egg industry, though the length of time is not specified.    

According to the Cornucopia Institute, “the vast majority of all name-brand organic dairy products are produced from milk from farms that follow accepted legal and ethical standards”. However, with large corporations taking over an increasing share of the organic milk market, tracking the origin of your milk is becoming more difficult. This is why in 2006, the Cornucopia Institute investigated dairy producers on site, and then rated major organic dairy producers according to their compliance with the USDA laws. The report found that “nearly 20% of the name-brands now available on grocery shelves scored a substandard rating.”  Among these are Dean Foods, supplier of Horizon milk and  Silk and White Wave “organic” soy products; and Aurora, which supplies Costco's “Kirkland Signature,” Safeway's “O,” Publix's “High Meadows,” Giant's “Nature's Promise,” and Wild Oats' organic milk. The rankings published by the Cornucopia Institute are available here. The best way to get fresh, organic milk is to buy from local family farms. A great farm locator is at www.newfarm.org

Catherine Bailey and Margit Christenson wrote this article as part of YES! Magazine's "YES! But How?" column where we answer your questions on how to live a more sustainable life. To read more"YES! But How?", click here.

We asked our art director and most seasoned bike commuter for tips to keep you on your wheels and smiling through the winter:

• Use hotel shower caps for covering the seat when the bike is parked.
• Shimano makes an inexpensive generator hub. No more battery issues. Use them along with the little white blinkie lights in the front and as many red blinkie lights as you can find places for on the back.
• Thermos makes an insulated thermos that fits into a bike water bottle cage. And Soma makes a tall coffee mug that attaches to your front handle bars with a mount from Cat Eye (in the evening you can replace it with a headlight). Saves on a paper cup, and you can take your latte to go.
• Thin Windstopper ski gloves are great for biking. They're not waterproof, but they'll keep your hands warm and they dry quickly.

Catherine Bailey and Margit Christenson wrote this article as part of YES! Magazine's "Yes! But How?" column. To read advice on how to live a sustainable lifestyle, click here.

A worm bin in a friend’s kitchen helped Princeton student Tom Szaky recognize an opportunity to keep garbage out of landfills and create a successful business.

In 2001, he co-founded Terracycle, the first company to make all of its products and packaging out of waste. The business sells plant food made from worm poop and packaged in reused plastic bottles. It ships its products in misprinted boxes that other companies discard.

Terracycle has achieved success over the last seven years and expanded beyond plant food.

Recently, the company started a program called “sponsored waste,” in which schools and community groups collect and send in discarded food containers. The business plans to make the containers into new products, and compensate the groups with donations to the nonprofit of their choice.

In 2006, Szaky was named “No. 1 CEO under 30” by Inc. Magazine, beating out Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

This article is part of YES! Magazine's Summer 2008 "People We Love" column. To read about more people we love, click here.

 Lots of people like the idea of biking, but bad knees, disabilities, or poor health deter many of them. Others are turned off by the thought of showing up to work (or a date, or a party, or church...) with their shirt stuck to their back with sweat. For those who need a little help joining the two-wheel revolution, electric bikes can be the answer.

Electric bikes give you the benefits of cycling: no gas costs, free parking, no traffic jams, and lots of fresh air. At the same time, they let you choose how much to exert yourself. They have a range of 12 to 30 miles, which makes them perfect for trips to the grocery store or park, as well as short commutes.

Deciding which electric bike to buy can be intimidating given the huge range of options. To get you started, we’ve broken things down to a few key considerations.

Kit or Bicycle? You can buy a complete new electric bike or a kit to retrofit your own bike. Full bikes range from $400 to $4,500. Kits start at $450 and go up to $2,000, and require some assembly skill. But they give you more freedom in picking a bike and battery pack that fit your needs.

Which Battery? There are four types of batteries for electric bikes, ranging from the low-end sealed lead acid to the high-end lithium ion, with the NiCD and NiMH in between. The more you spend, the lighter and longer-lasting the battery will be. Battery capacity (measured in “watt hours”), determines the range of the bike between charges.

How Much Power? The power of electric bike motors is measured in watts, ranging from 250 to 750. Anything between 350 and 450 is enough for most riders to reach a good speed and have no problems getting up hills.

How Expensive? This depends on your answers to the questions above. No matter what price range you’re looking at, make sure the manufacturer has been around for a while and check out some reviews online (do a search for “reviews of electric bikes”).

—Noah Grant

This article is part of the YES! But how? column. To read more, click here.