The best ecosystem books

Do you have an idea for a web or mobile app? If you do, but you’re unsure how to transform your business idea into a technical product, then this practical “software survival guide” is for you!

This is the second of 5 books I have published for entrepreneurs, designed to show you how to build your software application the smart way! As a qualified tech professional and software delivery specialist, I mentor tech startups and entrepreneurs from around the world, explaining how to get digital businesses off the ground step by step. Understanding the do’s and don’ts involved in getting started helps founders to avoid the common mistakes and pitfalls experienced by aspiring tech entrepreneurs. Having led and worked in teams creating multi-million-pound digital products from scratch, I share insider knowledge about how to create a quality digital product quickly, efficiently, and economically.

Grossly ambitious, wildly humorous, and rooted in scientific research, The Other Dark Matter shows how human excrement can be a lifesaving, money-making asset. When recycled correctly, this resource—cheap and widely available—can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, serve as medicine for antibiotic-resistant infections, reduce toxic algae blooms, and much more. With seven billion of us on this planet, each dishing out a pound of it a day (holy crap!) we excel at replenishing it.

The book implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good, and for the planet’s sake. And as a health bonus, readers take a deep dive into stool banks and fecal transplants. You will never flush the same way again!

Based on the transpersonal psychology of psychosynthesis, Growing Whole guides the reader along a path of personal and spiritual growth in order to participate more fully in the Great Turning toward a just, harmonious, and sustainable future. The book offers numerous psychosynthesis exercises that build the self-awareness, inner strength, and resilience we all need in these challenging times.

Chapter titles include: Self-Awareness; Strengthening Center; Dreams, Vision, and Purpose; Working with Blocks in Our Path; Transforming the Demons Within; Living Will Fully; Challenges of Spiritual Awakening; Relationships—Growing Whole Together; Service: The Practice of Wholeness.

Getting kids outside into nature doesn’t require living next to a national park. It means exploring outdoors, wherever we happen to be. While many kids don’t have access to yards or school gardens, all children can connect with a special kind of plant, free of charge, every day: weeds.

Weeds are plants no one planted, growing in places no one intended them to be. Often reviled, weeds can be wonderful: adaptable, resilient, strong, and beautiful. Weeds Find a Way is a lyrical exploration of weeds’ adaptations to grow, reproduce, survive, and thrive, filling our world with fragrant beauty. And by looking at ordinary weeds’ extraordinary qualities, we discover our own ability to adapt and grow, survive and thrive, wherever we are planted.

Traveling globally, Edward Struzik travels with scientists and indigenous people, exploring the haunting past of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, the exotic plant-rich tropical bogs in Hawaii, the remnants of an ancient peatland in the Mojave Desert, and places where polar bears, turtles, and rattlesnakes den in peat. What he learns along the way is that peatlands play an outsized role in regulating climate, filtering water, mitigating floods, and wildfire, and providing refuge for new and critically endangered species such as the Bornean orangutang and the Red-cockaded woodpecker.

The Garden Jungle is a celebration of the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement, and in the soil beneath our feet. Dave Goulson gives us an insight into the fascinating and sometimes weird lives of these creatures, taking us burrowing into the compost heap, digging under the lawn, and diving into the garden pond. He explains how our lives and ultimately the fate of humankind are inextricably intertwined with that of earwigs, bees, lacewings, and hoverflies, unappreciated heroes of the natural world, and how we can all help to encourage biodiversity in our back yard.

Every family is complicated. None of us has a perfectly linear story. But if we are lucky, our stories are laced with love and compassion and humor. This was most surely the case in Vanessa McGrady’s life. In Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption, her deft and moving love letter to her daughter, Grace.

After two years of waiting to adopt—years spent slogging through paperwork and bouncing between hope and despair—a miracle finally happened for Vanessa McGrady. Her sweet baby, Grace, was a dream come true. Then she made a highly uncommon decision: when Grace’s biological parents became homeless, Vanessa invited them to stay. Without a blueprint for navigating the practical basics of an open adoption or any discussion of expectations or boundaries, the unusual living arrangement became a bottomless well of conflicting emotions and increasingly difficult decisions complicated by missed opportunities, regret, social chaos, and broken hearts.

For half a billion years, life on Earth had been policed by great predators, those big, meat-seeking animals at the top of the food chain. Over the past ten thousand years, those wolves and big cats, monstrous fish and flying raptors have been swept under by the human tide. And what of it? A cadre of concerned scientists asking that very question are finding landscapes of pest and plague, chaos and decay, and a world of reason to reconsider the meat-eating beasts we’ve so blithely banished from the web of life.

Through my work, I learned we can potentially remove a significant amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through regenerative farming and ranching practices. These include no-till farming, climate-friendly livestock practices, restoring degraded land, and producing nutritious food. By re-carbonizing soils via photosynthesis and biology, regenerative agriculture can sequester atmospheric carbon underground, making it a low-cost “shovel-ready” solution to climate change. Grass, Soil, Hope takes readers on an entertaining journey on how all these practical strategies can be bundled together.

Regenerative agriculture is both an attitude and a suite of practices that restore and maintain soil health. It creates the conditions for life above and below ground by taking its cues from nature, which has a very long track record of growing things. It has multiple co-benefits, including the production of healthy, nutritious food. Each of the books listed below explore a different aspect of regenerative agriculture, all written by authors with ‘dirt under their fingernails.’