Readings Green
In 2009, Earth Hour became the world’s biggest mass participation event ever by getting businesses and community groups to turn off their lights for one hour and encouraging the community to make changes in their daily lives to reduce their environmental footprint.
This year, Earth Hour is on Saturday 27 March at 8:30pm
With less than six weeks to go, WWF-Australia is counting on businesses, organisations and community groups to sign-up and switch off! By supporting Earth Hour, you are sending a powerful message that you care about climate change and you want others to care too.
Getting involved is easy and is a great way to engage your community while taking the first step towards reducing your environmental footprint.
Visit the new Earth Hour Australia website for ways to get the most out of Earth Hour.
The Sustainable Living Festival 2010 is almost here, with another great program of events over 3 weeks, culminating in the main event on 19-21 February in Federation Square.
Some festival highlights include: Peter Singer talking on the ethics of climate change; Professor Charlie Veron on the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef; and Songlines World Music Corroboree.
For a full festival program, visit their website.
We are now stocking the new
KeepCup
- the sustainable drinking mug to replace all those terrible
takeaway ones thrown out everyday.
They are easy to use and clean, come in a lightweight, durable material and are designed and made here in Melbourne.
Road-tested by several members of staff, they have proven highly successful - so if you are addicted to your morning takeaway, then give the KeepCup a go.
national launch of the Transition Decade
The
launch of the Transition Decade will showcase leading work by
groups that are using this shared time frame and scale of change,
and will set out the many ways that thousands of organisations and
millions of people can join the alliance.
12 NOON SUNDAY 14 FEBRUARY 2010
MELBOURNE TOWN HALL
MASS CONVERGENCE + PUBLIC MEETING
- presenting the case to restore a safe climate
- promoting a shared timeframe for action
- demonstrating the power of collaboration
For full details go to the Friends of the Earth website.
October 15 was Blog Action Day, an annual event run by Change.org in which bloggers from around the world are asked to write about the same topic on the same day.
This year's topic was climate change, and the response was incredible. More than 13,000 blogs from 155 countries with reach to 17 million readers participated.
You can see all the blogs, including more than 50 of the world's leading nonprofit organisations -- World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Oxfam -- as well as entries from Gordon Brown and The White House, at the action day website.
Wanted! Keen Green
Volunteers!
Greener Houses Growing Greener Neighbourhoods
Interested in being involved in the development of an eco-demonstration house in Melbourne’s North? Want to help others make their homes more eco-friendly?
FREE TRAINING COURSE starts October
Information Session Thurs 15th Oct 7:30pm
Volunteers will be trained in sustainability
Register your interest now! 9457 7900 or je@nenetwork.org.au
You can find out more about the overall project from The Hornery Institute
Neco is Australia's leading online eco store, and their located in Melbourne. They have a wide variety of environmentally sustainable goods, from insulation, to lighting, to gardening for home and offices. So next time you are going shopping, check out what they have on offer first.
And now that it seems we are getting a bit more rain, the Brelli might be just the thing! Just in time for spring racing carnival, Neco has limited stock of new York's hit biodegradable Brelli in both 35" (small) and 52" (large) for only $19.95 each.
'Made from sustainable bamboo, the see-through Brelli will keep your fascinator dry without obscuring your radiant beauty.'
Check out the Neco website for the lowdown on the Brelli and their whole product range.

Friends of the Earth are encouraging you to support your favourite environmental cause by entering the Great Australian Run. It is a 15km course, starting and ending in Albert Park, on Sunday 29 November. An elite field made up of some of the best runners in the world featuring Australian heroes, Benita Johnson and Craig Mottram will lead the pack, but people of all levels are encouraged to participate and fundraise for their favourite charity. For all the details, check the website.

On September 13, Aaron from the Merri Creek Management Team, met us down at our favourite Rushall Station site to do some weeding. He showed us how to identify the weeds and remove them so the native grasses can get a chance to grow and re-establish along the creek.
Now that we know what to do, we are keen to get down their regularly as the weather improves and do as much weeding as we can. We are hoping to get together again on Sunday October 18. If you would like to join us, please email me and I will keep you posted.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We had a small, but
hard-working team down at the Merri Creek collecting litter along
the water's edge. It was really saddening to see the amount of
rubbish: styrofoam bubbles, bottles, plastic containers, plastic
food wrappers etc. But it was satisfying work, seeing the
difference it made clearing it all away, Sal even found a $10 note.
Hopefully we will be down there more in the coming months. There
has been a lot of work done upgrading the path so their is plenty
of areas for new planting and weeding.

The Merri Creek planting day went a treat. A big group turned up to help, despite the early fog, and it soon warmed up into a lovely sunny morning.
There is another day of rubbish removal and general tidying up around the same site on the 5th July, so if you would like to join in, let us know by email. Thanks again to everyone who came along and helped out.

To celebrate Fair Trade Fortnight, we organised a fair trade coffee break in the Carlton kitchen, ordering in fair trade coffee and tea from Oxfam. It was a great way to take a bit of time out from the daily grind and think about how our purchases effect other people around the world. Thanks to everyone for getting involved.


The Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping, which quietly appeared in our stores last year, has been a real success story, recording consistently solid monthly sales. Produced by the Ethical Consumer Group, it provides information on companies and brands, evaluating the social and environmental impact of companies in the Australian market.
The aims of the guide, listed on their website are:
- to inform shoppers of more ethical or less ethical choices in their buying
- to empower people and create awareness about consumer power
- to provide a means for consumers to give feedback to companies and government, and so encourage change.
It retails at only $5 and is an invaluable resource for helping us all to make well-informed choices in our everyday shopping.

If you are looking to purchase goods from overseas try Etiko. Etiko
is an ethical importer who ensures their suppliers are either:
- certified fairtrade
- certified sweatshop free
- worker or farmer owned co-operatives
Check out their website and think fairtrade next time you go shopping.
Etiko won the Sensis Social Responsibility award of the Telstra Business Awards in 2008.
We have the new floral range of blank journals from Dharma Door. The pages are made of recycled cotton waste from garment factories and the covers are handprinted. Dharma Door is a fair trade organisation that imports from developing communities in India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines and Bangladesh.


from left: Michelle, Mark, Tess, Ross, Kylie and Zandy Tibballs
(Wastewise)
Readings is committed to developing and improving environmental
practices in the workplace. In 2006 we had an external auditor
provide a performance review that outlined our main areas of impact
and what we could do to improve them.
This review
recommended applying for accreditation with Sustainability
Victoria's Wastewise program. Sarah Nickels, an environmental
auditor, helped us establish an action plan for improving our
environmental impact and achieve Wastewise accreditation. Our
environmental committee now meets regularly to make sure we are on
target.
Green Top 10
- Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save Humanity —
- Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis —
- Climate of Australia: The Authoritative Climate Reference —
- The Real Global Warming Disaster —
- The Vanishing Face of Gaia —
- State of the World 2009 —
- The Revenge Of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity —
- The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change —
- Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan —
- Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action —
Green Top 10
Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save Humanity
James Hansen
$35.00 (Trade paperback / Bloomsbury )
An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist.
In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen, the world's leading scientist on climate issues, speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science advisor for An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today. But politicians haven't made the connection between the policy and the science. He shows why Gore's solution won't work, why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon is a goal we must achieve in the next two decades if our grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown.
This urgent manifesto ...
New Environment Books
Poles Apart: Beyond the Shouting, Who's Right about Climate Change
Gareth Morgan and John McCrystal
Global Environmental Change and Human Security
Richard Matthew & Jon Barnett (et al)
Green Kids
Tuart Dwellers
Jan Ramage
Snake And Lizard
Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop
Little Panda
Kimberly Ainsworth
Ten Things I Can Do To Help My World
Melanie Walsh
Nature School
Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom
Green Architecture
Eco Houses
$35.00 (Paperback book / H F Ullmann )
Materials inspire and arouse emotions, they surround us everywhere, we possess them and feel them. Similarly to people, our formative first impression of them is provided by the visual perception they create.The Architec... More »
Eco Houses
$14.95 (Paperback book / Kolon )
'For hundreds of thousands of years man fought to make a place for himself in nature. For the first time in the history of our species, the situation is reversed and today it is imperative to make a space for nature in m... More »
Eco House Book
$69.99 (Hardcover book / Hodder Headline )
No extra details available for this item. More »
Green Is Beautiful Building Sustainable Houses
$79.95 (Hardcover book / Images Publishing )
No extra details available for this item. More »
Green Issues
Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan
$39.95 (Hardcover book / Kodansha Internat. )
This book, more than anything else, is about a mentality that pervaded Japanese society then and which can serve as a beacon for our own efforts to achieve sustainability now.
This is a book of stories, depictions of van... More »
Drivers of Change
$135.00 (Hardcover book / Prestel )
This innovative tool will help anyone concerned with trying to anticipate and respond to the challenges facing the world - from software designers to civil engineers, architects to executives. What will the world look li... More »
Forecast - The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic
$29.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
'An intelligent, nuanced report on the complex relationships between increasingly unstable weather patterns and politics, ecology and lifestyles.' (Publisher's Weekly)
'Bad news is good news if it gets us to act. Forecas... More »
Pumped: Great Ways to Save on Fuel
$12.95 (Paperback book / Hardie Grant )
Have you found yourself at a party recently, starting up a conversation about the price of petrol? Let’s face it, we’re fast becoming obsessed with the subject and it’s not going away. This timely book is full of clever ... More »
Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action
$27.95 (Paperback book / Scribe Publications )
In this meticulously documented call-to-action, David Spratt and Philip Sutton reveal extensive scientific evidence that the global warming crisis is far worse than official reports and national governments have indicate... More »
Cradle to Cradle Rethinking the Way We Make Things
$61.95 (Paperback book / North Point Press )
Environmentalists are normally the last people to be called shortsighted, yet that's essentially what architect McDonough and chemist Braungart contend in this clarion call for a new kind of ecological consciousness. The... More »
ReviewReadings Recommends: Climate Change Books
Poles Apart: Beyond the Shouting, Who's Right about Climate Change
Gareth Morgan and John McCrystal
Two Degrees Too High: Understanding the Copenhagen Summit
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Global Environmental Change and Human Security
Richard Matthew & Jon Barnett (et al)
Water Issues
Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Scribe Publications )
How did we get tricked into paying top dollar for something we could get for free from the tap? How did water – the basis for all life – become a heavily marketed product? And what is the environmental cost we’re paying ... More »
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis And The Coming Battle For The Right To Water
$24.95 (Trade paperback / Black Inc )
"Life requires access to clean water; to deny the right to water is to deny the right to life."- from the introduction to Blue Covenant.
Scientists call them "hot stains" - the parts of the earth running out of clean, dr... More »
Review
The River Runs Free: Exploring And Defending Tasmanias Wilderness
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Viking )
Geoff Law first rafted the dangerously beautiful Franklin River on a whim. He was inexperienced and in a leaky raft, the weather was treacherous, and his travelling companion was someone he didn't know and who hated the ... More »
When The Rivers Run Dry
$27.95 (Paperback book / Corgi Books )
Do you know how much water you use each day - not just the 5 litres you may drink, or the 150 litres you guzzle to cook, wash, and flush the toilet with. It takes around 500 litres of water to grow the wheat to produce a... More »
Green Design
Cradle To Cradle
$24.95 (Paperback book / Vintage )
Reduce, reuse, recycle' urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary boo... More »
Green Designed: Kitchen & Dining
$75.00 (Hardcover book / Avedition )
About 50 high-quality products from the realm of kitchen design that have earned the designation of 'environmentally friendly' while simultaneously reflecting the latest style trends.
In an age when ecological awareness ... More »
One Thousand New Eco Designs And Where To Find Them
$55.00 (Paperback book / Laurence King Publishing )
As we become only too aware of the damage man has caused to the planet, more of us want to furnish and decorate our homes with products that do not harm the environment. But being sensitive to the environment does not me... More »
Green Design
$49.95 (Hardcover book / Carlton Books )
No extra details available for this item. More »

