The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City is a comprehensive guide to achieving a completely sustainable urban lifestyle by creating a mini-ecosystem where residents grow their own fruits and vegetables, raise chickens, rabbits, and fish, recycle 90% of their waste, solar heat their hot water, and use a variety of other alternative technologies-all on a 1/8-acre city lot. Long considered the bible of urban homesteading, this book is the result of four years of living with and refining the systems of the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, California-a collaborative project which combined the collective skills of the members of the Farallones Institute to develop a center for creating and testing experimental, ecologically stable and resource-conserving living systems. With its vision of an intimate connection between the urban habitat and ecological principles The Integral Urban House will inspire and empower people to act within their own communities to create places where they can live more sustainably. The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City is a magnificent, inspiring record of eco-technically effective intelligent human cooperation... This is magnificent news for humanity. We are on our way. -- R. Buckminster Fuller Civilized cities, nourishing food, renewable energy, closed nutrient cycles, -- these form the vision of this pioneering guidebook. With it we can start to build a new urban culture that is practical, sustainable, inviting and exciting. -- Amory Lovins

A classic is back in print! One of the favorite books of 1970s back-to-the-landers, The Toilet Papers is an informative, inspiring, and irreverent look at how people have dealt with their wastes through the centuries. In a historical survey, Van der Ryn provides the basic facts concerning human wastes, and describes safe designs for toilets that reduce water consumption and avert the necessity for expensive and unreliable treatment systems. The Toilet Papers provides do-it-yourself plans for a basic compost privy and a variety of graywater systems.