Coming Soon…more guides

The first Community Resilience Guide — Local Dollars, Local Sense — will be published in early March 2012. This summer, two other guides will also be published. These are:

Growing local food security.

Local food has been one of the hottest sustainability topics in recent years, and there’s been no shortage of books about it. This Community Resilience Guide will push a critical next step in this conversation by exploring the most promising, replicable models of actual, on-the-ground community food security projects. We will cover the full landscape of the thriving local food movement—including growing, processing, distribution, and education efforts—from rural to suburban to urban, from backyard gardens to large-scale enterprises.

Producing local, renewable energy.

Over 90% of U.S. power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, and non-renewable sources of energy. Worse, much of that energy—as well as the tiny percentage of electricity generated by renewable sources—is squandered by waste and inefficiency. But in the last ten years, interest in local energy production has skyrocketed, and homeowners, organizations, businesses (including cooperatives), and governments across the country are putting power in the hands of local communities. Beyond the usual “local energy” stories of rooftop solar panels and home weatherization, this Community Resilience Guide explores the latest and most promising examples of “community energy,” from group net-metering schemes and neighborhood-scale generation to publicly owned utilities and state- and national-level policy reform.