Concerned with rising gas prices and dwindling fuel supplies? Over 10,000 people from throughout Northern California and around the world will descend on the Mendocino County hamlet of Hopland on August 18 and 19 for SolFest. For two days, Hopland will be transformed from a wine-country village into the bustling solar capital of the world. The Solar Living Institute is hosting the 12th Annual SolFest celebration at its 12-acre solar-powered oasis. Leading experts in all things sustainable, green and organic will be on hand speaking and teaching, over 150 exhibitors will be showcasing the latest in energy and fuel-saving technology and products, and world- class entertainment, food and drink will ensure that visitors are entertained as well as inspired and informed.

Headlining the show will be legendary songwriter and guitar wizard Bruce Cockburn. In a career spanning four decades, Bruce has recorded and produced some of the most poignant and meaningful songs in the world. There will also be performances by folk icon Dar Williams, and many other talented musicians and artists. On Saturday night, the Moondance will feature the smoking hot music and dancers of the Afro- Funk Experience, a Haute Trash fashion show, the Gaiatronic sounds of DJ Dragonfly, and much more. Moondance is free with every paid SolFest admission.

For those who want to learn how to reduce energy bills, or wean themselves from their gasoline vehicles, there will be many opportunities to learn. Presenters in six workshop areas will cover topics from renewable energy and post-petroleum preparation to yoga and health. Over 60 workshops are free with the price of admission. There is truly something for everyone at SolFest.

Perhaps most exciting is the incredible lineup of panels and speakers on our main stage. You can hear the latest news in alternative fuels, with experts discussing pros and cons of biodiesel, hydrogen, ethanol and electric vehicles. Experts will update you on the latest breakthroughs in solar and renewable energy technologies and policies. Keynoting on the main stage will be Pulitzer-prize winning author and activist Alice Walker.

Be sure to see this year's preliminary SolFest XII stage and workshop schedule.

Tickets for this year's SolFest are now available on our website via InTicketing. For each SolFest ticket you purchase online through InTicketing, they will plant one tree. Get your tickets early for SolFest XII which promises to be the best SolFest yet!

For more information or tickets call 707-744-2017, or go to www.solfest.org.

Volunteer at this year's SolFest -- Aug. 18-19, 2007.

We ask that you visit our website and use the volunteer application or give our volunteer coordinator Michelle a call at 707-263-1510. She will get you scheduled on the phone.

Without the energy of our volunteers, SolFest would not be possible. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you again this year.

Want to share a ride to SolFest this year?

Find someone with whom to share a ride to SolFest through the special SolFest SpaceShare page. If you are willing to provide a ride, please be sure to list that through our SolFest SpaceShare page also.

Register now for the workshop of your choice before it sells out. Response to our workshop program this year has been overwhelming. By mid-July, we've already surpassed our total sales for all of 2006! Demand for our workshops is hot! 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 now offering workshops in Tlaxcala, Mexico, 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

After four years, Alcohol Can Be A Gas by David Blume is now at the printer. The prepublication special offer is still running, but is only good on the first 1000 books sold on the Permaculture website in 2007. Here's the deal: You'll receive an autographed, hardcover edition of the book at the paperback price of only $47 -- a savings of $12. You also get a year's free subscription to Dave's alcohol fuel newsletter. And you will get a free copy of the Alcohol Can Be A Gas DVD worth $20. This is an $87 value for only $53.

In 1983, David Blume wrote and hosted a 10-part how- to television series called "Alcohol as Fuel" for KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate. He also wrote the definitive how-to book on ethanol, Alcohol Can Be A Gas!, to be sold on the air. The book was at the printer preparing to go to press, and the first airing of the television series in San Francisco was underway, to be followed by release to 140 PBS stations nationwide. But Big Oil managed to stop the project, according to Blume. The book has sat on the shelf for the past 20 years.

Beginning in 2003 David raised money from individuals to fund his research into the current state of the art in alcohol fuels. He traveled extensively in both the US and Brazil collecting and documenting innovations and the success of Brazil's program. Four years of full time work with a team of researchers has resulted in a completely new version of the book.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century is an information dense, highly readable, profusely illustrated manual, covering every aspect of alcohol fuel from history of crops, hand-on fuel production and vehicle conversion. It's the first comprehensive book on small- to farm-scale alcohol production and use written in over 90 years.

Internally divided into five books, the single volume contains 596 pages with more than 500 illustrations, charts and photos. It sports a 700-word glossary and full index. It retains the original 1983 foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller. Alcohol Can Be A Gas is a complete toolbox for farmers, green entrepreneurs and activists.

Each year we host about 25 interns from around the world here at the Solar Living Center. Interns generally spend three months with us.

Read more information on our Solar Living Institute internships and our program, our current and former interns, testimonials from 2005 intern Jude Wu and 2006 intern Chris Neidl, and information on our intern village.

If you are interested in applying, please complete our online internship application.

Below is a list of items needed by our interns. If you have any items you would like to donate, please contact our intern coordinator, Peter Huff.

Join the Solar Living Institute and David Holmgren in Mexico!

The Solar Living Institute is thrilled to announce the participation of David Holmgren, famed Australian co- founder of the permaculture philosophy, as a guest- teacher this summer. Join us for two weeks of permaculture education in the beautiful village of Tlaxco at Proyecto San Isidro, a well-established natural building and permaculture school.

Holmgren will participate in a two-week intensive, entitled Ecological Living and Land Restoration. The workshop will provide participants with a deep understanding of the principals of ecological interdependence and regenerative systems. Students will develop practical skills and learn to select appropriate technologies and design/maintain sustainable systems for meeting basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, energy, community, education, etc.

Call 707-744-2017 for more information about this special opportunity with one of the world's ecological visionaries. Limited space remaining. Sign up today!

• 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!

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.

If you've been thinking about finding your niche in the emerging green economy, you won't want to miss the Solar Living Institute's second annual Green Career Conference taking place in San Francisco on November 17.

As the global issues of climate change and peak oil become increasingly urgent, we must rethink the way we occupy the planet and satisfy our basic needs, including food, shelter, transportation and energy. Redesigning these basic needs will create a plethora of new jobs, entrepreneurial ventures, and exciting opportunities.

Join the Solar Living Institute and its cadre of sustainable living professionals for an interactive day of practical information that will help you find a rewarding career, and make a living while making a difference!

Last year's conference sold out early. People are already signing up for this event. Seating is limited. Sign up now to ensure your space at this special event.

Register by September 1 and save $50 with our early bird price!

West Coast Green is the largest residential green building conference and expo in the country. This annual event is held at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium from September 20-22, 2007.

The conference and expo is designed to showcase the latest innovations and technologies in green building with over 270 exhibitors and 8,000 industry professionals attending.

At the heart of the event is a feast of innovations, ideas and opportunities designed for building professionals, homeowners, and those seeking the latest information on high-performance, healthy building, green remodeling, and design.

The three-day event features on-going tours of a green modular show home, inspiring lectures from leaders and visionaries in the building industry, practical information on energy-saving building materials and technologies, hands-on product demonstrations, and professional networking opportunities.

Join the Solar Living Institute favorite Andy Black as he brings Payback: The Financial Case for Solar and Breakthrough Solar Sales and Marketing to the East Coast this August 23 and 24! New Jersey is leading the way on impressive rebates and incentives for solar electric, and the market is taking off. If you are a sales person, a PV career-seeker, or a business owner, you won't want to miss this unique opportunity to gain inside knowledge from the country's leading expert on PV financial analysis and sales.

Sign up on our website at www.solarliving.org or call 707-744-2017 for more information.

Researchers say more intensive farming of more land in the Midwestern U.S. -- in part a result of the push for more corn production -- could contribute to the largest- ever "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico this summer. The zone is created when fertilizer and other runoff find their way down the Mississippi River and into the gulf, encouraging algae to grow. The algae's decay process sucks up all the available oxygen, leaving none for other marine life. Last year's dead zone was 6,662 square miles; scientists modeling the zone for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say this year's could be as big as 8,500 square miles.

"I am anticipating a historically large [dead zone] this summer," says Eugene Turner from Louisiana State University, noting that the change could be due to weather, love of biofuels, or other farming practices.

That's because growing corn in vast monocultured fields requires heavy doses of synthetic nitrogen, but all of that fertilizer doesn't end up in corn plants. A good bit of it washes into streams which feed into the Mississippi River, then to be carried clear down to the Gulf.

In a process known as hypoxia, all of that free nitrogen feeds a giant algae bloom, which ties up oxygen and destroys most life underneath: hence the "Dead Zone."

According to a report by researchers R. Eugene Turner of LSU and Nancy Rabalais of the Louisiana University Marine Consortium, preliminary measures of nitrogen passing into the Gulf through the Mississippi, taken in May, augur the biggest Dead Zone ever recorded.

"Hypoxia as a large-scale phenomena was unlikely to have occurred before the 1970s," the researchers write. The Dead Zone's emergence roughly coincides with the age when Earl "Rusty" Butz, Nixon's ag czar, ruled the USDA with an iron fist. Butz famously used the power of his office to prod farmers to plant "fencerow to fencerow," with as much fertilizer as required to produce bumper crops. That policy has been in place ever since.

For more information:

• "Gulf Dead Zone to be Biggest Ever," BBC News, July 18, 2007
• "Gulf Dead Zone: Bigger than Ever," Grist, July 17, 2007

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!

Once the transportation system ran entirely on biofuels. When motive power was supplied by horses and other animals, wide swathes of countryside were devoted to growing the fuel for these biological "engines." Even the railroad ran on wood in its early days, drawing fuel from forests surrounding the tracks. Then came coal-fired locomotives and petroleum-propelled cars and trucks. Farm and forest lands turned to other uses while oil took over as the dominant vehicle fuel. From using the plant products of current photosynthesis, we shifted to the fossil residues of ancient photosynthesis.

Today biofuels are reemerging primarily in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, and farm fields are back in competition with oil fields to drive transportation. This is raising questions about the place of biofuels in the overall use of agricultural lands, and in the transportation system itself. To what degree should we return to using farm and forest lands to supply vehicle fuel? Rely on biofuels to meet all our needs? Or don't use them at all because demands on the land for food, feed and fiber are already too great? Somewhere between these polar opposites the answer is to be found.

At its root the biofuels debate is over the degree to which current photosynthesis can replace prehistoric photosynthesis. Obviously the plant growth of today cannot equal millions of years of accumulated fossil biomass. But it can generate significant amounts of biofuels, as a collaboration of top U.S. bioenergy experts concluded in one of the most comprehensive scenarios for replacing petroleum with biofuels, the Role of Biomass in America's Energy Future (RBAEF).

A strong earthquake hit northwestern Japan on Monday morning, and aftershocks continued into the night. The 6.8-magnitude quake killed at least nine people, injured more than 900 others, and flattened houses and highways. It also led to a fire, leak, and waste spills at a powerful nuclear plant. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa facility, which produces the most electricity of any nuclear plant in the world, shut down during the event, but not before a transformer caught on fire and a reactor ruptured, sending about 315 gallons of radioactive water into the sea. The trembling also toppled at least 100 barrels of nuclear waste stored on site.

Company officials delayed, then downplayed news of the damage, saying there was little environmental risk. Japan is home to 55 nuclear reactors which supply 30% of the quake-prone country's electricity and have suffered a long string of accidents and cover-ups. Nearly 13,000 people packed into evacuation centers such as schools and other secure buildings in the quake zone 160 miles northwest of Tokyo, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

The quake halted gas service to about 35,000 homes and disrupted the water supply to all of Kashiwazaki, a city with a population of around 95,000 that was hardest hit by the quake. About 25,000 homes in Niigata prefecture were without electricity, local officials and media said. More than 60,000 homes in the quake zone were without water, 34,000 lost natural gas and 25,000 had no electricity as of late Monday afternoon, local official Takashi Takagi said.

For more information:

• "After quake, Japanese officials seek radiation leaks," Detroit Free Press, July 17, 2007
• "Japan quake victims take shelter, mudslides feared," Reuters, July 17, 2007
• "Japan Quake Causes Nuke Plant Leak, Fire," The Guardian, July 16, 2007
• " Japan Hit by 6.8-Magnitude Quake; Radioactive Leak,"Bloomberg News, July 16, 2007

Savings of US $180 billion per year predicted in first global analysis of renewables versus fossil fuels, reports Greenpeace and EREC.

According to a joint report by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), investing in a renewable energy as the source for electricity in our future will save 10 times the fuel costs of a "business as usual" scenario, saving US$180 billion annually and cutting CO2 emissions in half by 2030.

In the first global analysis of its kind, "Future Investment - A Sustainable Investment Plan for the Power Sector to Save the Climate," demonstrates a powerful economic argument for a shift in global investments toward renewable energy (including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and bio energy), within the next 23 years, and away from fossil fuel, coal and nuclear power.

The report, which stresses the urgent need for decisive action now, gives the financial rationale for Greenpeace's "Energy [R]evolution," a blueprint for how to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050, while maintaining global economic growth.

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 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