Other Resources

Individual Steps to Reducing Carbon Emissions

How to Cut Your Home Energy Costs: A brochure from the LoCaL Program, containing easy quick tips for cutting home energy costs. May be useful to print out for LoCaL team members.

Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings, By Alex Wilson, Jennifer Thorne, and John Morrill. Published by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. From refrigerators to furnaces, air conditioners to washing machines, this small book contains clear, full explanations of different home energy efficiency measures and appliances. Use the descriptions of appliances to help you find the right type of energy-saving product for your needs. Order the book for $8.95 (discounts for bulk orders) or download a condensed version for free.

Fighting Global Warming - One House at a Time. A tour of a home in Takoma Park, MD, with solar panels, corn-burning stove, and other features.

Getting Good Public Relations

Good public relations (PR) is primarily a result of building relationships with media contacts and other people who can spread the word about your work, and being persistent. See the attachment called “Working with the Media” for a short, simple guide to doing PR.
Communities Addressing Climate Change

The Empowerment Institute is the world's premiere consulting and training organization specializing in the methodology of empowerment. Its state-of-the-art empowerment tools have been applied over the past twenty-five years to achieve measurable behavior change at the community and organizational levels. The Empowerment Institute has several active climate change programs for communities, including Cool America, Cool Schools, and the Low Carbon Diet.

Sustainable Communities

The Community Solution program, started in 2003, is a national resource for knowledge and practices on low-energy living and self-reliant communities. You can find educational information about the coming global oil production peak and climate change, and design solutions to the current unsustainable, fossil-fuel based, overly centralized way of living. The program seeks alternatives to both non-renewables (hydrogen, large scale coal/gas-to-liquids, carbon sequestration, tar sands) and renewables (large scale wind systems, biofuels, solar) that are risky and intended to maintain inequitable and unsustainable levels of resource consumption.
Portland, Oregon leads the nation in addressing climate change. To learn about the many ways residents are working with the City to reduce carbon emissions, click on “Residents” on Portland's Sustainable Living page.

The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices, by Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti. This book describes the principles of sustainability. The book talks about many Swedish communities that have adopted sustainable practices explaining how they did it and how other communities in any part of the world can do the same.

The town of Umeå, Sweden, has created a sustainable platform – the Green Zone – for motorists that was entirely designed with the environment in mind. The area offers service for both car and driver--with a complete service facility, an energy station, a food store, and a roadside restaurant.

The E. F. Schumacher Society, named after the author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, is an educational non-profit organization founded in 1980, based on the premise that both social and environmental sustainability can be achieved by applying the values of human-scale communities and respect for the natural environment to economic issues. Building on a rich tradition often known as decentralism, the Society initiates practical measures that lead to community revitalization and further the transition toward an economically and ecologically sustainable society.