For the last few weeks I have been shifting from book shopper to book seller and Saturday, March 7th and Saturday, April 4th I will be setting up Destination: Books, a popup book stall at the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Center here in Atlanta. Destination: Books will be carrying about a dozen titles on organic farming and sustainability from Chelsea Green Publishing in Vermont, which I have selected for the booth, which I guess still makes me a book shopper. Here’s a sampler of some of those titles:
The Worm Farmer’s Handbook: Mid-to Large-Scale Vermicomposting (2018) for Farms, Businesses, Municipalities, Schools and Institutions by Rhonda Sherman. I have been doing vermicomposting for about 5 years and you don’t have to have much more than a tub, selected food scraps and some worms to set something up. This book is written for vermi-culturists who are thinking of a bigger operation, but it has plenty of useful information for the “gentleman” worm rancher as well.
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical to Liberation on the Land (2018) by Leah Penniman. I can trace an interview with Leah Penniman in July, 2019 issue of Sun Magazine to this idea of Destination: Books at the Freedom Farmer’s Market. First, I read the interview. Then I checked out the library’s copy and thought Farming While Black was a rare blend of black history, activism, practical advice for those interested in community gardening and tips on just growing better fruits and vegetables. It inspired me to contact Chelsea Green to carry some of their books and here I am.
Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist (2013) by Michael Judd. This full-color illustrated book is almost like a wish-idea catalog of projects that can replace your lawn with something edible or practical. Why not build an earthen oven for your backyard pizza parties? Why not give up some of your lawn mowing?
Used Books Too
I will have some related titles on the environment and transportation books at the booth too, including Edward Humes’s Door to Door: The Magnificent Maddening World of Transportation (2016), David Owen’s Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability (2009) and Peter Gorman’s Barely Maps (2019). Anyone who has read Hume’s book knows how interconnected the United States is to factories in China, so when container ship traffic at Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles harbor terminals begins to decrease dramatically, due to COVID-19 you know that there will be changes afoot. China exports everything from clothes to furniture to auto parts to electronics including the iPhone.*
The Humes book makes a case on why it is important to keep things local, and ideas from Destination: Books can help you do it.
* In the opening chapter of his book, Howe traces a laundry list of components in the iPhone that must travel from all over the world Germany, Kentucky, California, Massachusetts, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Korea to China to be assembled and then shipped back to markets all over the world. When you factor in all the mileage to get the components to China it comes out to approximately 165,000 miles. If you factor in the raw materials being mined and shipped to these component manufacturers the distance traveled is close to 237,000 miles which is close to the distance to the Moon.
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