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 workshop days 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 are also now offering workshops in Tlaxcala, Mexico (see below), and 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

The Solar Living Institute is proud to be partnering with Proyecto San Isidro, a natural building and sustainable living school in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala. Join us this year as we explore sustainability in a fascinating international context.

During the first week of these unique workshops, foreigners (typically from the U.S., Canada and Europe) convene for an immersion in regional Mexican culture. The area surrounding Tlaxco, with its millennia-long history of natural building and cultures rooted in the land, will be your classroom. Through field trips, classroom exercises and hands- on "practices," participants will learn and experience various techniques and get an overview of regional, Mexican, and indigenous cultures rarely experienced by visitors. During the second week, participants from México join the group and the bulk of the coursework focuses on hands-on practices.

• Land Restoration & Ecological Living (July 24 - Aug. 4, 2007)
• Natural Building & Traditional Architecture (Nov. 20 - Dec. 1, 2007)

For more information about this unique opportunity, visit our website at www.solarliving.org or call the Solar Living Institute!

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!

A report commissioned by the Pentagon says the U.S. military needs to break its oil addiction. The country used an average of 16 gallons of fuel per soldier per day in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006, compared to four per soldier per day in the Persian Gulf War and one per soldier per day during World War II. The increase is attributed to cuts in troops and the use of centralized bases farther from conflicts. The study says the rising cost and shrinking supplies of oil could compromise effective military response, and recommends alternative fuel and energy efficiency. "We have to wake up," said National Defense Council Foundation President Milton R. Copulos. "We are at the edge of a precipice and we have one foot over the edge. The only way to avoid going over is to move forward and move forward aggressively with initiatives to develop alternative fuels. Just cutting back won't work."

The world's cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the U.S., the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30% who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70% -- the majority -- who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus- based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40%, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city's eight million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in strife-torn Colombia safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that "high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work." He further observes: "Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals. In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply." He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, "roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why," he asks, "are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?"

Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility. Congestion also takes a direct economic toll in rising costs in time and gasoline. And urban air pollution, often from automobiles, claims millions of lives.

We are already in full swing in preparation for SolFest XII to be held Aug. 18-19, 2007. Amy Goodman, Alice Walker, Bruce Cockburn, Dar Williams, 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. To reserve your booth, call Travis O'Guin at 1-888-821-2132 ext. 113. This year's exhibitor site map and exhibitor brochure are downloadable from our website.

Tickets for this year's SolFest will be available soon. Get your tickets early for SolFest XII which promises to be the best SolFest yet!

Learn how to grow your own delicious mushrooms and remediate contaminated soil, cultivate a biointensive backyard garden to provide local fresh produce for your dinner table, and learn to prepare delicious organic meals with your fresh produce!

Join us at the Solar Living Center for three days of workshops:

• May 25: Mycoremediation: Grow Your Own Delicious Mushrooms
• May 26: Biointensive Backyard Gardening
• May 27: Eat Organic For Less

Sign up for two or more classes and save $20 on each! Call us at 707-744-2017 to register today.

Partners, who support us through annual dues and our growing continuous-giving program, are essential to funding the Solar Living Institute. The financial support of folks like you, which can range from as little as $35 a year to $2,500 or $10,000 a year, helps us continue to grow and thrive.

The Solar Living Institute is growing rapidly. Your contributions are critical to help us to continue to grow since our work is far from over! If you have never been an Institute partner, or if your partnership has lapsed, won't you please join us in inspiring and educating people about sustainable living? Even the smallest contribution can help.

Find out more about our partnerships, and some of the many thank-you gifts you can receive for your support.

We have several scholarships available for our upcoming Permaculture First Responder workshop taking place May 11-13. As peak oil sets in and climate change brings on unprecedented natural disasters, we see more clearly our dependency on a fragile centralized system.

This incredible three-day training brings together permaculture design skills along with practical medical training to provide the most cutting edge and integrated approach that one can use in being best prepared and responding to the climatic and social transitions that we are experiencing as a human culture today.

For more information on scholarships for those in financial need, please contact instructor Benjamin Fahrer at benja77@earthlink.net, or sign up for the workshop on our website today!

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."

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has unveiled a Climate Change Action Plan in hopes of making the English capital the greenest city in the world. Under the scheme, London will switch 25% of its power supply to local generation, and businesses that invest in green technology will earn merit badges, Scout- style. The U.K. plans to cut carbon emissions 60% by 2050, but London's leaders hope to achieve that goal within 20 years, and are setting aside $92.3 million in next year's budget to do so. "This will make London the first city in the world to have a really comprehensive plan to cut its carbon emissions," says the mayor's climate-change adviser. Livingstone also appealed to the 7.5 million common folk, urging energy efficiency and introducing such cutting-edge ideas as discounts on insulation. "Londoners don't have to reduce their quality of life to tackle climate change," said the mayor, "but we do need to change the way we live."

For more information:

• "Action Today to Protect Tomorrow: The Mayor's Climate-Change Action Plan" Greater London Authority, Feb. 2007
• "London's Climate Change Action Plan," World Changing, March 1, 2007
• "London's Climate Change Plan Includes Hybrid Electric Buses," EV World, March 2, 2007
• "Mayor of London Unveils Climate Change Action Plan," Green Car Congress, March 4, 2007

We know many of you are interested in green careers from the feedback we receive from you. Put our 2007 Green Career Conference in San Francisco on Nov. 17 on your calendar now.

For 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