Just arrived at Main Street in time for spring: Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden, a title we've repeatedly special-ordered for customers and finally decided to carry new, the best one-volume introduction to sustainable ecological design currently in print.

"Permaculture is notoriously hard to define in a sound-bite. Here's one way to describe it: If you think of natural building, sustainable agriculture, solar energy, graywater recycling, consensus process, and the like as tools, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps organize those tools and suggests how and when to use them."