Building a Better World in Your Backyard

Luxuriant Environmentalism Make a huge, positive, global difference from your own home! Prioritize comfort over sacrifice while saving thousands of dollars. Explore dozens of solutions and their impacts on carbon footprint, petroleum footprint, toxic footprint, and other environmental issues.If 20% of the population implemented half the solutions in this book, it would solve the biggest global problems. All without writing to politicians, joining protests, signing petitions, or being angry at the people that are causing the problems.Good solutions are often different from conventional environmental wisdom. The average American adult has a carbon footprint of 30 tons per year. Replacing a petroleum car with an electric car will cut 2 tons. But if you live in a cold climate and you switch from electric heat to a rocket mass heater, you will cut 27 tons! Join Paul and Shawn on a journey featuring simple alternatives that you may have never heard of — alternatives which are about building a more symbiotic relationship with nature so we can all be even lazier.Nurture nature and nature nurtures us all.

Paul is a giant doofus in Montana who is bonkers about permaculture. He won't shut up about permaculture. On and on, every day...it's annoying. He has gone so far as to make a 3-DVD set that is just about the earthworks for permaculture gardening. And not only did he make a 4-DVD set about rocket mass heaters, but he made ANOTHER 4-DVD set about rocket mass heaters. Why on earth do people need 8 DVDs about something so simple? If you think that is ridiculous, take a look at his 177 hours of video of a full Permaculture Design Course and Appropriate Technology Course. Then there are the cards. Okay, the permaculture playing cards are pretty cool. Before all of that, Paul created hundreds of podcasts, YouTube videos, articles and other bits and bobs about permaculture. That should have been the first sign, right there, that health professionals should have stopped all this. That, or his 26,000 forum posts at permies.com. And he has at least that many at his other site, CodeRanch.com. Oh yeah, he used to be a software engineer before all this permaculture stuff.

Shawn's passion for building a better world grew from many years of working at a summer camp. This time inspired awe and wonder for the natural world through many hours camping in the woods, paddling on a lake, or sleeping under the stars. Seeking to solve world problems with clever thinking, Shawn decided to pursue computer engineering as a career, where he learned the importance of good design and strong critical thinking. In time, he felt like modern technology was causing more problems than it was solving, and he started looking for a better way. It was then that he stumbled upon and fell in love with permaculture as a way to use his design skills to work with nature rather than against nature. Shawn was preparing to start his own homestead when he was faced with serious health challenges that prevented him from doing any physical work. It was during this time that the opportunity to work on Building a Better World in Your Backyard came up. Shawn jumped on it, wanting to do whatever he could to share these ideas with others.