Middle Class Lifeboat

A comprehensive guide to safeguard your livelihood, income, and standard of living through the ups and downs of any economy. Most Americans, no matter what their economic circumstances, identify themselves as middle class. A recent Gallup poll showed that 63% consider themselves upper-middle or middle class. And they are feeling burned out and squeezed, under pressure to bring home more and more money just to maintain their standard of living. Middle Class Lifeboat is an answer to that pressure, a comprehensive guide to living a more stress-free lifestyle. Part I: Safeguarding Your Livelihood: profiles the 53 best jobs to have to be self- sufficient whether the economy is up or down. Part II: Safeguarding Your Income: 6 ways to extend your earnings, that don't always involve money. Part III : Safeguarding Your Standard of Living: 10 off-the-grid lifestyle choices to increase your quality of life

This book uses detailed case studies of two secondary schools to examine the relationship between curriculum choice and gender identity among fourteen-year-old pupils making their first choices about what subjects to pursue at exam level. It reveals a two way process. Pupils' decisions on what subject to take are influenced by how they perceive themselves in gender terms, and the curriculum once chosen reinforces their sense of gender divisions. The author looks at the influences on pupils at this stage in their lives from peers, family and the labour market as well as from teachers. She argues that the belief in freedom of choice and school neutrality espoused by many teachers can become an important factor in the reproduction of gender divisions, and that unless the introduction of the national curriculum is accompanied by systematic efforts to eradicate sexism from the hidden curriculum it will fail in its aim of creating greater equality of educational opportunity among the sexes.

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress--the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats--seem like echoes of a bygone era. But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories--of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large. How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by G nter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.

The collapse of industrial civilization is rapidly unfolding and offers us an opportunity far beyond mere survival, even as it renders absurd any attempts to “fix” or prevent the end of the world as we have known it. Sacred Demise is about the transformation of human consciousness and the emergence of a new paradigm as a result discovering our purpose in the collapse process, thereby coming home to our ultimate place in the universe. Our willingness to consciously embark on the journey with openness and uncertainty may be advantageous for engendering a quantum evolutionary leap for our species and for the earth community. "We face an awesome internal transition that will take us into very unfamiliar territory and will call upon our deeper resources. Carolyn Baker's Sacred Demise is a courageous, wise, and compassionate guide for us all through this inner journey." Michael Brownlee, Co-founder, Transition Boulder County "Carolyn speaks with a confidence that never flinches from entering into the hardest truths of our times, or from the most difficult truths about the culture we are immersed in, so that we might emerge from the chrysalis of global crisis with open hearts and a renewed way of living on Earth together."--Juan Santos, Fourth World Blogspot

In the 14 years since Sierra Club Books published Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner's groundbreaking anthology, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, the editors of this new volume have often been asked: Where can I find out more about the psyche–world connection? How can I do hands–on work in this area? Ecotherapy was compiled to answer these and other urgent questions. Ecotherapy, or applied ecopsychology, encompasses a broad range of nature–based methods of psychological healing, grounded in the crucial fact that people are inseparable from the rest of nature and nurtured by healthy interaction with the Earth. Leaders in the field, including Robert Greenway, and Mary Watkins, contribute essays that take into account the latest scientific understandings and the deepest indigenous wisdom. Other key thinkers, from Bill McKibben to Richard Louv to Joanna Macy, explore the links among ecotherapy, spiritual development, and restoring community. As mental–health professionals find themselves challenged to provide hard evidence that their practices actually work, and as costs for traditional modes of psychotherapy rise rapidly out of sight, this book offers practitioners and interested lay readers alike a spectrum of safe, effective alternative approaches backed by a growing body of research.

A guide to discovering personal goals and interests explains how to apply that information toward obtaining satisfying employment

Explains how to identify personal goals and interests and reveals how to apply that information toward obtaining satisfying employment, with tips on interviews, salary-negotiation techniques, and career searching online.