Globe Corner Blogs

Living and traveling green doesn’t take great personal sacrifice, but not all of us know how to get started without giving up our habits and routines. “Green” may be a popular trend, but you don’t have to buy expensive “earth friendly” products, eat strictly vegan, or stop going places and retreat to a secluded cabin in the woods to practice eco-living. Allow me to present some Hidden Treasures that will prove it to you.

Wake Up And Smell The Planet, The Non-Pompous, Non-Preachy Grist Guide to Greening Your Day edited by Brangien Davis with Katharine Wroth

“We bet we can guess what your morning routine looks like: You gently click off your solar-powered alarm clock, crawl out of your hemp sheets, don organic cotton slippers a recycled fleece robe, and shuffle across your bamboo floors to the bathroom where you bathe in rain water and botanicals harvested from your own garden.
Not quite? Good.” This is when you snicker and read on.

This non-intimidating small book compiled by the editors of Grist.org is filled to the brim with helpful, easily applicable ideas and real-life tips for those of us who just don’t have time to “climb up on the roof to install solar panels.”

If you feel guilty because you think you can’t make a difference without breaking your piggy bank or making dramatic changes to your lifestyle, fret not. Faced with a “your PVC shower curtain or your life” challenge, you will likely choose the latter, only the authors of Wake Up aren’t putting a knife to your throat. Instead they take you through a greener version of your normal daily routines in a fun and down-to-earth manner, educating you about what’s good and what’s bad for you and the planet. Now I know that environmentalism is not about moving to the countryside and biking twelve miles to the closest city. It’s about how each one of us can change a lot by giving up little (like your household cleaners) and live a healthier life as a result.

The Locavore Way: Discover and Enjoy the Pleasures of Locally Grown Food by Amy Colter

There are a lot of benefits to eating what grows near us, and we can do a lot for our well-being if we cheat on our chain grocery store and try buying local food. The pro-local food movement has recently become very popular, but with choices comes the challenge of how to navigate the sea of information. The answer is to get a comprehensive guide, and this is exactly what The Locavore Way is.

The Locavore Way can save you hours of your own research. Its enthusiastic author has provided a great deal of explanations, research, and tips about where to look for local food, what it takes to grow it, and how to choose, store, and prepare your local foods. This extremely handy book also covers such topics as when to look for seasonal foods and to how try your hand at growing some. In other words, it has everything to turn you from a confused novice to a savvy pro when it comes to eating healthy, well, and with less impact on the environment. The author even has a blog full of tasty recipes and gobs of information about local food.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

As anything else, long-term travel can be sustainable and simple or complicated, wasteful, and expensive. One of my favorite authors wrote a book to prove it. It illustrates how anyone can travel for any length of time and on any budget without having to micromanage your trip. It is a kind of guide that teaches you to change your perspective and expectations rather than tells you to go to a nearby store and spend hundreds of dollars on gear to ensure that your trip “goes right.”

Long-term travel is about exploration, learning, sometimes endurance, but also simplicity. Quoting Potts himself: “This notion – that material investment is somehow more important to life than personal investment – is exactly what leads so many of us to believe we could never go vagabonding [...] Fortunately, the world need not to be a consumer product.” And this book thoroughly explains how this can help any of us take off.

Also, I love that Potts has included plenty of  stories about vagabonding and famous “vagabonders.” I find it very inspirational and helpful. Not all of us may choose to hit the road for a year or more, but I assure you this book is more than a compilation of travel advice and it can be enjoyed by travelers of all purposes. With simplified perspective often comes liberation and that greater sense of adventure many of us are looking for. It’s an enlightening and unpretentious book, and I highly recommend it for everyone.

Read more: Book Reviews, Hidden Treasures, Rolf Potts, The Locavore Way, Travel Advice, Vagabonding, Wake Up and Smell the Planet, World Travel


Nastia was born in Russia, and probably that's the reason why she is so inexplicably attracted to the coldest parts of the world, such as Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Alaska and Canada. The more it snows out there - the better. Although would she be even thinking about all that cold if she hadn't first enjoyed Turkey, Bulgaria and Ukraine?

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