Renewing America's Food Traditions:
Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods
Edited by Gary Nabhan 2008, 350pp., $35

Renewing America’s Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.

Nourishing Traditions:
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition & Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon (1999 2nd Edition) 672pp. $27

Recalling the culinary customs of our ancestors and looking ahead to a future of robust good health for young and old, this book offers modern families a fascinating guide to wise food choices and preparation techniques. Unites the wisdom of the ancients with the latest independent and accurate scientific research.

New! The Art of Fermentation
by Sandor Ellix Katz, $40, 2012, 528pp.

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.
While Katz expertly contextualizes fermentation in terms of biological and cultural evolution, health and nutrition, and even economics, this is primarily a compendium of practical information-how the processes work; parameters for safety; techniques for effective preservation; troubleshooting; and more.

Wild Fermentation:
A Do-It-Yourself Guide To Cultural Manipulation
by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2001, 187pp, $25

Elegantly written and tested introduction to basic ferments of food and drink, drawing on world culinary traditions. Eat live food! Use friendly microbes to preserve food, enrich diet, and enhance nutrition. With 99 recipes.

Wild Fermentation Booklet:
A Do-It-Yourself Guide To Cultural Manipulation
by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2002, 33pp, $7

This is a much abbreviated version of the above book featuring 16 recipes for sauerkraut, miso, amazake, sourdough, injira, honey wine, vinegar, yogurt, kefir, and more.

First of a 3-volume work, this book lays out an integrated approach to capturing water in landscape: swales, pits, diversion drains, urban runoff, and roofwater. Essential for drylands, useful everywhere.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Vol 2: Water Harvesting Earthworks
by Brad Lancaster 2007, 336pp, $33

Earthworks are one of the easiest, least expensive, and most effective ways of passively harvesting and conserving multiple sources of water in the soil. Associated vegetation then pumps the harvested water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, and passive heating and cooling strategies, while controlling erosion, increasing soil fertility, reducing downstream flooding, and improving water and air quality.

Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape
by Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden 2007, 188pp, $35
(Read Review - PDF)

Rain gardens encompass all possible elements that can be used to capture, channel, divert and make the most of the rain and snow that fall on a property. Using the innovative and attractive approaches described here, it is possible to enhance outdoor spaces and minimize the damaging effects of drought, stormwater runoff, and other environmental challenges.

Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds
by Art Ludwig    2005, $20, 125 pp.

Covers water system design and construction of storage both in and above ground. Comprehensive, concise information about water quality, potential difficulties, and how to avoid them while creating your own supply for domestic use or fire control. With instructions for making ferrocement tanks.

Dam Nation:
Dispatches from the Water Underground
by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (Editor), July Oskar Cole (Editor), Laura Allen (Editor), Annie Danger (Illustrator) 2007, 321pp., $20 $12

This essay anthology looks at water issues worldwide and throughout history, including science, history and investigative reporting, as well as personal stories and profiles. Among other concerns, writers collected here-mostly activists, but also sociologists, educators and reporters-address untreated sewage dumping and the disease outbreaks it causes; the destructive power of upstream dams; and the sediment-starved Mississippi Delta, its attendant erosion, and the horrific storm damage that's resulted.

A short, frank multi-millennial history of urban sewage disposal illustrates well the dangers of water supplies contaminated by sewage-cholera, typhus, typhoid, etc.-and is equally forthright about the problems with current municipal sewage treatment practices. The authors maintain a tongue-in-cheek style that, for the most part, keeps tedium at bay; if readers find Part One too polemical, Parts Two and Three offer principles and proper construction techniques for practical, at-home solutions, including home watergardens, home-scale greywater systems and composting toilets.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edited by the coauthors of the notorious zine The Guerrilla Graywater Girls Guide to Water, this collection of original essays, drawings, and photographs is part radical history of water and part DIY guide to disengaging one's home, school, or workplace from the wasteful water grid. The pieces are arranged in three sections: "Water Wars" focuses on the history and politics of dams and water infrastructure; "The Water Grid" chronicles the rise of energy-intensive, polluting sewage treatment plants, and points out alternative systems; and "Watershed" examines the often destructive relationship between human settlements and nature, but finds hope in the experiences of those involved in watershed restoration.

Creating an Oasis with Greywater:
Choosing, Building & Using Greywater Systems (5th edition)
by Art Ludwig     2006, $21, 144 pp.

Thoroughly revised primer detailing 20 systems that work and how they might fail; parts, design diagrams, operating and maintenance tips. Clear, logical, easy-to-read. The definitive guide.

Builder's Greywater Guide
by Art Ludwig    1995, $15, 48pp.

How to fit greywater systems into the code with tried and tested methods. Thorough, precise, well-documented, with explicit building code references and diagrams.

Learn simple, low-tech, quick-start solutions in this 32 page booklet from Permaculture Activist, 2005, $7

Basic approaches to Tanks, Rainwater Catchment, Ram Pumps, Ground Recharge, Urban Stormwater, Ponds, Dowsing

Worms Eat My Garbage:
How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System, 2nd Ed.
by Mary Appelhof  1997, 162 pp, $13

A new edition of the definitive guide to vermicomposting--a process using redworms to recycle human food waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer for plants. Author Mary Appelhof provides complete illustrated instructions on setting up and maintaining small-scale worm composting systems. Internationally recognized as an authority on vermicomposting, Appelhof has worked with worms for over three decades. Topics include: bin types, worm species, reproduction, care and feeding of worms, harvesting, and how to make the finished product of potting soil.

The Humanure Handbook:
A Guide to Composting Human Manure
by Joseph C. Jenkins, 1994, 198pp. $25

Learn how to deal with your own shit. "Stop trying to change the world. Toilet-train the world and you won't have to keep changing it."(Swami Beyondananda) Here's all you need to know to make sewage treatment systems obsolete. Answers all the questions you never dared ask!

Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants
by Carol Steinfeld 2004, 88pp, $13

Pee=fertilizer. Witty, practical, liberating! Grow with the flow! Urine charge. A golden opportunity. Pee here now. Every day, we urinate nutrients that can fertilize plants that could be used for beautiful landscapes, food, fuel, and fiber. Instead, these nutrients are flushed away, either to be treated at high cost or discharged to waters where they overfertilize and choke off aquatic life. Liquid Gold details three ways to use urine hygienically and productively for plant growth, with studies that show the science behind this practice. Several advocates of urine diversion and their gardens are profiled, demonstrating that using urine for fertilizer is a feasible, safe, and cost-saving way to prevent pollution and save on fertilizer costs.