All Shades of Green
These selections highlight hot topics in today's news: GMOs, organic foods, climate change, and more. Each of these titles outline a path to agricultural sustainability -- although they can take various routes to get there. Be prepared to experience new ideas with every turn of the page.
Never out of season : how having the food we want when we want it threatens our food supply and our future / Rob Dunn
The bananas we eat today aren't your parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance. Once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.
Tomorrow's table : organic farming, genetics, and the future of food / Pamela C. Ronald, Raoul W. Adamchak
Written as part memoir, part instruction, and part contemplation, Tomorrow's Table argues that a judicious blend of two important strands of agriculture--genetic engineering and organic farming--is key to helping feed the world's growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. Pamela Ronald, a geneticist, and her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, take the reader inside their lives for roughly a year, allowing us to look over their shoulders so that we can see what geneticists and organic farmers actually do. 
Kiss the ground : how the food you eat can reverse climate change, heal your body & ultimately save our world / Josh Tickell ; foreword by John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market
Discover the hidden power soil has to reverse climate change, and how a regenerative farming diet not only delivers us better health and wellness, but also rebuilds our most precious resource--the very ground that feeds us. Josh Tickell, one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers and directors explains by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that harm us. 
The town that food saved : how one community found vitality in local food / Ben Hewitt
The captivating story of a small town coming back to life, grounded in an idea that will revolutionize the way we eat. Over the past 3 years, Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of 3,000 residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America. Even as the recent financial downturn threatens to cripple small businesses and privately owned farms, a stunning number of food-based businesses have grown in the region.
Growing a feast : the chronicle of a farm-to-table meal / Kurt Timmermeister
In Growing a Farmer, Kurt Timmermeister recounted the toil and joy of wrestling an empty plot of land on Vashon Island, Washington, into a dairy farm. Now he tells the story of a feast made from only what the farm provides. But the story of the meal begins two years earlier with the birth of a calf, Alice. Rich in detail, resonant in story, Growing a Feast depicts the effort behind every meal, the farm that comes before every table
The third plate : field notes on the future of food / Dan Barber
Barber explores the evolution of American food from the "first plate," or industrially-produced, meat-heavy dishes, to the "second plate" of grass-fed meat and organic greens, and says that both of these approaches are ultimately neither sustainable nor healthy. Instead, Barber proposes Americans should move to the "third plate," a cuisine rooted in seasonal productivity, natural livestock rhythms, whole-grains, and small portions of free-range meat.
Silent spring / Rachel Carson ; introduction by Linda Lear ; afterword by Edward O. Wilson
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson's passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.
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