Food And Gift Ideas

The Green Book, by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen, give the issues of our environment top drawer treatment. Looking at the way Americans use water and energy, and what we do with our waste, they offer useful and practical tips.

Celebrities, including Robert Redford, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Aniston, Faith Hill, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. contribute suggestions for living green. Rogers and Kostigen establish 12 aspects of our habitat, like home, work, and school, and suggest better lifestyle choices for each. Small adjustments are the focus of the book that add up to significant and positive environmental effects by using descriptive rather than numerical analyses.

A few simple suggestions in The Green Book are:

* No more ATM receipts. If the whole United States chose to not print their ATM receipts, there would be more than 2 billion feet of paper saved. This would wrap around the equator 15 times!!

* Get a voice-mail service for your home phone. If all answering machines in U.S. homes were replaced by voice-mail services, the annual energy savings would total nearly two billion kilowatt hours.

The authors straightforward view was given a 4-star rating. Starting off with easy and small suggestions was a hit. Be sure, though, to check the numbers when the authors used them for analyses as some calculations were off a bit.

The authors have done a good job in providing this information in a witty, authoritative manner. They have supplied many ideas for many areas of your life and showed how the smallest choices can have the biggest effect on our world.

A hot Christmas gift idea, The Green Book is right in line with the way we as a world are going - a healthy planet!