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Before you build your home, read this definitive guide to designing with the sun in mind by Mother Earth News contributing editor Dan Chiras. Learn how you can cut your energy bills in half by choosing the best passive solar heating and cooling techniques.

Passive solar heating and passive cooling — approaches known as natural conditioning — provide comfort throughout the year by reducing, or eliminating, the need for fossil fuel. Yet while heat from sunlight and ventilation from breezes is free for the taking, few modern architects or builders really understand the principles involved.

Now Chiras, author of the popular book The Natural House, brings those principles up to date for a new generation of solar enthusiasts.

The techniques required to heat and cool a building passively have been used for thousands of years. Early societies such as the Native American Anasazis and the ancient Greeks perfected designs that effectively exploited these natural processes. The Greeks considered anyone who didn't use passive solar to heat a home to be a barbarian!

In the United States, passive solar architecture experienced a major resurgence of interest in the 1970s in response to crippling oil embargoes. With grand enthusiasm but with scant knowledge (and sometimes little common sense), architects and builders created a wide variety of solar homes. Some worked pretty well, but looked more like laboratories than houses. Others performed poorly, overheating in the summer because of excessive or misplaced windows and skylights, and growing chilly in the colder months because of insufficient thermal mass and insulation and poor siting.

In The Solar House, Chiras sets the record straight on the vast potential for passive heating and cooling. Acknowledging the good intentions of misguided solar designers in the past, he highlights certain egregious — and entirely avoidable — errors. More importantly, Chiras explains in methodical detail how today's home builders can succeed with solar designs.

Now that energy efficiency measures including higher levels of insulation and multi-layered glazing have become standard, it is easier than ever before to create a comfortable and affordable passive solar house that will provide year-round comfort in any climate.

Moreover, since modern building materials and airtight construction methods sometimes result in air-quality and even toxicity problems, Chiras explains state-of-the-art ventilation and filtering techniques that complement the ancient solar strategies of thermal mass and daylighting. Chiras also explains the new diagnostic aids available in printed worksheet or software formats, allowing readers to generate their own design schemes.

About the Author
Daniel D. Chiras is the author of The Natural House. He holds a Ph.D. in physiology and teaches courses on sustainability and environmental health at the universities of Colorado and Denver. He is the author of five college and high school text books as well as other books on global environmental issues. Chiras is also an avid musician, organic gardener, river runner and bicyclist. He lives with his family in a passive solar/solar electric, straw bale and rammed tire house in Evergreen, Colorado.

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Twenty-five years ago, when author Hans Morsbach became interested in cultivating trees and managing small woodlands, he searched for a good how-to manual. He never found one, so he decided to write his own. Based on his subsequent experience, combining deep research into the academic literature on forestry with his successes and failures as a small-scale commercial tree farmer, the result is Common Sense Forestry, a MOTHER EARTH NEWS Book for Wiser Living, is an indispensable reference for anyone who owns or wants to own wooded property. Morsbach is an unabashed nature lover as well as a businessman, and well understands the essential importance of a long-term approach to sustainable forest management. In this highly readable and entertaining text, the author offers a comprehensive look at managing existing woodlands by creating, and later maintaining, forests that promote biodiversity while providing an income stream. This comprehensive examination of sustainable forestry includes everything from choosing land to beginning a forest through seeding and transplanting, from pruning and thinning to harvesting trees, from debates over herbicides and clearcutting to working with professional foresters, from business strategies to tax planning. While Morsbach's personal experience is in the Midwest, the information in this book is applicable to a wide range of trees and is relevant to all regions of North America.

About the Author:

When he's not in the woods, Hans Morsbach lives in Chicago, where he is a successful restauranteur.

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Lisa Carlson, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, has compiled this 640-page consumer's guide to making funeral arrangements — with or without a funeral director. Included is a state-by-state guide to funeral law.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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A manual of how to conduct a simple, low-cost burial, including everything from suggestions for the ceremony to explanations on the process of grieving.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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Discover 85 recipes for homemade cheeses and other dairy products plus teaching basic cheese-making techniques that employ the freshest ingredients and offer the satisfaction of turning out coveted delicacies. Includes step-by-step recipes are cheddar, Gouda and a 30-minute mozzarella.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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This new edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings together the Nearings' classic guides to the theory and practice of rural homesteading.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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A well-organized, easy-to-understand review of renewable home-heating options that includes everything you need to know about passive and active solar systems, wood and pellet stoves, masonry heaters and air- and ground- source heat pumps.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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It's time we moved from commuting to community and Superbia!, a MOTHER EARTH NEWS Book for Wiser Living, tells you how. An inspiring book about connecting with our neighbors, connecting our communities to the ecosystem, and connecting our everyday lives to our search for quality and joy.

The book is full of practical ideas for creating more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable neighborhoods. It is about remaking suburban and urban neighborhoods to serve people better and to reduce human impact on the environment.

The authors first trace the history of the suburbs, showing how they fail to meet many peoples' needs. They then describe how existing neighborhoods can be transformed, offering cohousing and new urbanist communities as examples. The reader is then guided through the transformation of a fictitious neighborhood that adopts the authors' 31 steps. Ideas for the blossoming of the suburb are described in order of difficulty, from easy to boldest, including: the creation of a neighborhood newsletter to foster a sense of neighborhood identity and cooperation; regular community dinners, discussion groups, and babysitting co-ops; the removal of backyard fences to create park-like spaces for community play areas, or gardens; retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, and installing community energy systems.

Examples from all over North America and beyond provide real-life proof that citizen planners can create superbia! And the most comprehensive resource listing imaginable puts all the tools needed at your fingertips.

Well-illustrated and reader-friendly, Superbia! is written primarily for the millions who live in urban areas or existing suburbs. It will also be of major interest to environmentalists, planners, and all who want to create a more humane and nurturing lifestyle.

About the Contributors:

Dan Chiras is the father of two boys, and the author of over 20 books on environmental issues and sustainability. He teaches courses on renewable energy, green building and sustainability at Colorado College. His free time is spent mountain biking, camping, canoeing, kayaking, playing music, and gardening with his boys.

Dave Wann worked with the EPA for a decade and is now a writer and video producer. Widely published in magazines, he is coauthor of the successful book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and two other books about design, as well as six video programs on community.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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If you live near a river or stream, Microhydro, a MOTHER EARTH NEWS Book for Wiser Living, explains everything you need to know to produce electricity for your home. This book outlines the basic requirements and approximate costs of home-scale hydroelectric systems that let you create clean, off-grid independent power.

Hydroelectricity is the world's largest — and cleanest — source of renewable energy. But despite lively interest in renewables generally, there is an information vacuum about the smallest version of the technology dubbed "the simplest, most reliable and least expensive way to generate power off grid."

Highly illustrated and practical, Microhydro is the first complete book on the topic in a decade. Covering both AC and DC systems, it covers principles, design and site considerations, equipment options, and legal, environmental and economic factors.

About the Author

Scott Davis has decades of experience operating, installing, designing, selling and teaching about microhydro technology. An award-winner in the field, he currently works as a system designer and retailer with an alternative energy company for whom he has authored an on-line microhydro course.

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Learn how to grow (and where to buy) a wonderful selection of lesser-known fruits, including hardy kiwi, medlars, persimmons, beach plums, pawpaws, Juneberries, che fruits and raisin trees. Highly recommended.

Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, Mother Earth News is recommending books to its readers. For more than 30 years, Mother Earth News has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.