Register now for the workshop of your choice before it sells out. Response to our workshop program this year has been overwhelming. Almost all workshops offered to date have sold out. So register early.

With over 200 workshops offered in 2007, our program has grown substantially. We are offering a variety of workshops in Southern California in both Los Angeles and San Diego, and we have started to expand to the East Coast where new incentives are making solar an attractive investment. We also continue to offer workshops in San Francisco, San Jose, Hopland here at the Solar Living Center, and other locations.

Select a topic below for a listing of workshops in an area of interest to you:

• Basic Building Skills
• Biofuels & Alternative Transportation
• Green & Natural Building
• Green Careers & Business
• Local Sustainability
• Permaculture & Organic Food
• Solar & Renewable Energy
• Sustainability for Educators
• Water Security
• Women's Learning Series

Here's an interesting concept and great website that you won't want to miss -- www.jpods.com

What is a JPod? It's a small, efficient, safe, computer driven vehicle for transporting people and cargo. An empty JPod weighs about 450 pounds. A JPod runs suspended from an overhead rail and travels about 30-40 miles per hour.

There are several different types of JPods. People JPods carry people and their shopping bags or luggage. Gurney JPods are larger and are mobile ambulances that carry medical support equipment and a care giver with a patient. Trash JPods carry waste. Cargo JPods carry a standard pallet. Other specialty JPods can be summoned to transport wheelchairs and bicycles and their riders.

The JPod system is designed to endure the worst extremes of weather. The vehicle is suspended below the rail with its drive mechanism enclosed above inside the overhead rail, protecting it from rain and snow. JPods are designed to operate between -58 to 122 Fahrenheit in 45 mph sustained winds with snow loads of 50 pounds per square foot. In higher winds vehicle travel is suspended. The rails and supports are designed to withstand 90 mph sustained winds with snow loads of 50 pounds per square foot.

Now you can give money to the Institute without paying out any money!

We would like to introduce you to a new online search tool that raises money for the Solar Living Institute at no cost to you. It's called GoodSearch, and it is an online search engine that will donate one cent to the charity of your choice (such as the Solar Living Institute) for every search you perform.

GoodSearch is partnered with Yahoo, so your searches are as good as any other. Using GoodSearch is simple - just go to this page and you will automatically be contributing to the Solar Living Institute. Make it your homepage, one of your home tabs, add it to your Favorites, or download it for your toolbar, and it will be even easier to support our programs.

If everyone who reads our newsletter used GoodSearch for their online search needs, it could generate over $100,000 for our programs here at the Solar Living Institute. Thanks for your support!

In our bookstore we have an area that lists the latest titles that we have added.

We provide FREE shipping on book and DVD orders totaling $100 or more.

Be sure to check out our books in the following categories:

• Biofuels
• Climate Change
• Ecological Design and Planning
• Ecovillages
• Environment and Economy
• Food and Permaculture
• Fossil Fuel Depletion
• Natural and Green Building
• Progressive Leadership
• Renewable Energy
• Sustainable Living
• Waste Composting
• Water, Water Collection, Greywater Systems, and Ponds

Shop with the Solar Living Institute, and help support our valuable work!

We're hiring here at the Solar Living Institute. We have two position openings:

Workshop Coordinator: This position reports to our Workshop Director. Review the job description for the Workshop Coordinator position and send your cover letter and resume to our Workshop Director, Lindsay Dailey, at lindsay.dailey@solarliving.org. The position is open until filled.

Renewable Energy Instructor (New Position): This position reports to our Workshop Director. Review the job description for the Renewable Energy Instructor position and send your cover letter and resume to our Workshop Director, Lindsay Dailey, at lindsay.dailey@solarliving.org. The position is open until filled.

Intern Coordinator (New Position): This position reports to our Executive Director. Review the job description for the Intern Coordinator position and send your cover letter and resume to our Executive Director, Bob Gragson, at bob.gragson@solarliving.org. The position is open until filled.

For additional energy and environmental positions throughout the world, the following are some good websites for your review:

• Green Dream Jobs
• Environmental Jobs & Careers
• Environmental Career Opportunities (EcoJobs)
• EcoEmploy.com
• Idealist.org
• Orion Grassroots Network
• EnvironmentalCareer.com
• Green Energy Jobs

In this important essay, Paul Palmer argues that traditional recycling has outlived its usefulness. He says that what we really need is a system for designing and manufacturing products with perpetual re-use in mind. We need to recycle the function of products, not just the materials from which they are made. This is the true Zero Waste approach.

Below are some excerpts from this essay:

"The basic problem that has always plagued recycling is that it accepts garbage creation as fundamental. Zero waste strategies reject garbage creation as a failure, actually an abomination that threatens the planet, an historical accident, a politically motivated defect in the design of our industrial-commercial system of production. Zero waste actually goes deeper in that it rejects waste of every kind at every stage of production. Zero waste demands that all products be redesigned so that they produce no waste at all and furthermore, that the production processes (a kind of product in themselves because they too are carefully designed) also produce no waste. Zero waste at no point interfaces with garbage but rather simply looks beyond it. In the theory of zero waste, once all waste is eliminated, there will be no garbage, no need for any garbage collection, no garbage industry and no dumps. All that superstructure of garbage management will fade away as simply irrelevant."

"Recycling claims to save energy, but this is by and large an empty claim. Recycling actually is a way to insure that energy is wasted for no reason. Zero waste already shows the way to recapture almost 100% of the energy, by refilling, so why are we still smashing bottles? Only because garbage fleets demand methods which make use of their core capability -- hauling heavy loads around the country, no matter whether to a dump or a recycling facility."

"Functional reuse is a broad general principle that applies to every single product made anywhere. Not to ten or twenty percent of the contaminated materials in a garbage can, but to everything. It is only from working with inherent functions that new patents and new worldwide businesses can emerge."

"One estimate says that industry produces seventy- one times as much garbage as households, while producing the products we want. A theory that ignores 98.5% of a problem no longer commands respect."

We are already in full swing in preparation for SolFest XII to be held Aug. 18-19, 2007. Alice Walker, Bruce Cockburn, and others will appear this year on the SolFest main stage.

For those of you who want to exhibit at the event this year, we anticipate brisk booth sales and encourage you to line up your booth early.

For more information on being an exhibitor at this year's event, continue to check the Exhibitor page on our website. This year's exhibitor map is already downloadable, and it will soon be followed by this year's exhibitor brochure.

The numbers are damning. Within 15 years, 98% of the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia will be gone, little more than a footnote in history. With them will disappear some of the world's most important wildlife species, victims of the rapacious destruction of their habitat in what conservationists see as a lost cause.

Yet this gloomy script was supposed to have included a small but significant glimmer of hope. Oil palm for biofuel was to have been one of the best solutions in saving the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming. Instead the forests are being torn down in the headlong rush to boost palm oil production.

More startling is that conservationists believe the move to clear land for this "green fuel" is often little more than a conspiracy, providing cover to strip out the last stands of timber not already lost to illegal loggers. In one corner of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, a mere 250,000 hectares or 1,000 square miles...- ... almost twice the size of Greater London...-...of the six million hectares of forest allocated for palm oil by the government have actually been planted.

The fear is that Indonesia's aim of almost doubling the 6.5 million hectares under oil palm plantation in the next five to eight years - tripling it by 2020 - to meet rocketing worldwide demand will afford ever-greater opportunities for the timber thieves. An estimated 2.8 million hectares of forest are already lost every year.

Until now palm oil - of which 83% is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia - was produced for food. But the European Union's aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, partly by demanding that 10% of vehicles be fueled by biofuels, will see a fresh surge in palm oil demand that could doom the rainforests.

U.S. honeybees are suffering from "colony collapse disorder." Beekeepers in 24 states say these essential pollinators are simply disappearing, with losses of 30% to 60% on the West Coast and, in some cases, more than 70% on the East Coast and in Texas. "I have never seen anything like it," says California keeper David Bradshaw. "Box after box after box are just empty." Perplexed scientists are testing theories including stress, toxins, and viruses. It's not the first time bees have met a mystery fate, "but it's never been on a scale like this," says bee specialist Dennis van Engelsdorp. With bees pollinating more than $14 billion of U.S. seeds and crops a year -- every third bite we eat, according to industry buzz -- those with full hives stand to benefit. "It's supply and demand," says a keeper who expects to earn $520,000 for a month in California's almond orchards.

For more information:

• "Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril," The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2007
• "Bee colony collapse mystery studied," Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, Feb. 25, 2007
• "Fewer bees to pollinate more state almond acres means windfall for keepers," The San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 24, 2007
• "Honeybee Disappearance Puzzles Scientists," PBS News Hour, April 3, 2007

Crude Impact is a powerful and timely story that deftly explores the interconnection between human domination of the planet and the discovery and use of oil. This documentary film on DVD exposes our deep-rooted dependency on the availability of fossil fuel energy and examines the future implications of peak oil -- the point in time when the amount of petroleum available worldwide begins a steady, inexorable decline.

In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a geologist at Shell Research Labs, shocked the oil industry by predicting that United States oil production, the largest in the world at that time, would peak in the early 1970s and then continuously and irreversibly diminish. His prediction was vilified and largely ignored -- until it came true. In Crude Impact, modern day disciples of Hubbert presage how quickly global peak oil will become a reality and its many serious implications for our way of life and our world.

Journeying from the West African Delta region to the heart of the Amazon rainforest, from Washington to Shanghai, from early humankind to the unknown future, Crude Impact chronicles the collision of our insatiable appetite for oil with the rights and livelihoods of indigenous cultures, other species and the planet itself. With great depth and insight, the film highlights the underlying myths and beliefs that are propelling us toward what many experts believe will be a cataclysmic period for humanity.

This timely, eye-opening investigation parallels the high-powered drama of Syriana but brings it to a level of accessibility, awareness and action for citizens on all points of the economic-cultural-political spectrum. A story filled with discovery, sorrow, outrage, humor and ultimately, hope. Crude Impact uncovers the complex entanglement of the fate of humankind with its fierce dependence on petroleum, while providing a vital inspiration for change.

Crude Impact was awarded the Best Environmental Feature Film at the 3rd Annual Artivist Film Festival in Los Angeles. It was also awarded the Social Justice Award at the 22nd Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival in Amsterdam.

Crude Impact uncovers some harsh realities about our world and our relationship to fossil fuels. Yet as discussed in the film, there is cause for hope. Crude Impact is meant to inspire us to take action, because as Dr. William Rees says in this film, "this new knowledge gives us the possibility of creating a brilliant future for all of us."

Transforming concrete, impervious, grossly oversized sidewalks into beautiful, edible “green walks” while maintaining, indeed enhancing, adequate pedestrian pathways might just be the most radical acts any one can take while creating a myriad of benefits for a community.

Some solutions created when removing extraneous portions of concrete sidewalk as cited by the Urban Alliance for Sustainability in San Francisco include:

• Immediately available green space for planting, low maintenance, drought tolerant, delicious perennial polyculture food gardens that provide fresh, local (as local as it gets) organic fruits and vegetables that do not need to be transported (at great cost, incredible produce waste due to spoilage and immense fossil fuel expenditure contributing to climate change), are not produced by industrial agriculture (known for destroying precious top soil, wasting precious water resources pumped at great cost and energy expenditure contributing to climate change and social minority wage slavery) and immediate opportunities for light exercise and outdoor recreation imperative to health
• More beautiful sidewalks by removing uniform (some would say ugly) concrete and increasing green space and vegetation incorporating art and beautiful design
• Improving the ecology of San Francisco by reducing impervious “hardscape” (sidewalks) resulting in re-hydrating the San Francisco aquifers which reduces the potential for costly/ecosystem- destroying/toxic combined storm drain/sewer system overflows
• Create new relationships in the neighborhood by involving local community in designing and implementing the project – resulting in health benefits and increased community well-being (see study from University of Illinois)
• Showcase local culture and create opportunities for community connection through co-created community design – especially through planting plan to include plants of cultural significance to members of the local community
• Reduce crime by improving community vigilance, awareness and ownership (see story documenting evidence in San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 2006)
• Reduce air pollution through vegetation (see this State of CA resource)
• Increase property values in the area through greening/vegetation (see this State of CA resource)
• Reduce wind speeds to create more comfortable microclimates through increased vegetation (see State of CA resource)
• C02 sequestration through vegetation to reduce impacts of global warming
• Reduction of noise pollution through vegetation (see State of CA resource)