1 H.C. Flores’s “Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community” is a passionate, hands-on plan for reinvigorating communities. Flores, who’ll make an activist of you if you let her, sets forth lofty ideals and then gives you the practical knowledge (and hand-drawn illustrations) to back them up. Now, tearing up the lawn may not be for everyone, but we could all stand to eat a few more weeds. Zoom 2 Richard Seireeni set out to write a book on “ecopreneurs,” but he ended up realizing that there’s a bigger, unseen community out there that’s making and breaking green companies. The result of his realization is “The Gort Cloud, the Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands.” Seireeni, by way of explaining his theory, tells a series of engaging stories about some of the country’s most well-known and successful green companies. Zoom 3 Shannon Hayes was a farmer who had a hard time telling customers how to cook her grassfed meat. So she went on an educational journey, and “The Farmer and The Grill, a Guide to Grilling, Barbecuing and Spit-Roasting Grassfed Meat” is the result. The tips on choosing a cut of meat and working your grill are mingled with a series of mouthwatering recipes for grassfed beef, lamb, pork and poultry. Zoom 4 In “The Carbon-Free Home, 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit,” authors Stephen and Rebekah Hren give homeowners a wide range of ways to green up their living spaces. From one-hour, no-cost jobs for novices to projects for experienced carpenters that take several weekends and cost thousands, the Hrens take great care to detail each step of the way, as well as the energy saved and any future maintenance. Zoom 5 Dierdre Heekin, half of the duo who wrote “In Late Winter We Are Pears,” is back with a dreamy tale of her global adventures into the world of wine and spirits. “Libation, a Bitter Alchemy,” traces Heekin’s attempts to produce wine from her Vermont land, as well as the historical journeys of many of the world’s oldest drinks. Zoom

Just over the border in Vermont is a company that really lives up to its name. Chelsea Green, based in White River Junction, has been publishing books on sustainable living for 25 years, and it’s a company that practices what it preaches: It’s taken steps to reduce natural resource and energy use by printing most of its books on chlorine-free recycled paper with soy-based inks.

The company was founded in 1984 by Margo and Ian Baldwin, who had moved to Vermont from New York City. According to Taylor Haynes, the company’s marketing coordinator, the Baldwins wanted to “work together on something creative and also make a living, as good jobs were not so easy to find.” The Baldwins named the company after the Vermont town they lived in, Chelsea, which was known as “Chelsea Green” because it had two greens instead of one, Haynes says.

One of the first books Chelsea Green published was “The Man Who Planted Trees,” an ecological fable. Since then, the company has published more than 400 titles, including the New York Times bestsellers “The End of America,” by Naomi Wolf, and “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency,” by Robert Kuttner.

The company has evolved since its early days: What was once a startup now employs 21 people and is seen as the preeminent publisher of books on sustainable living. Its book topics run the gamut, including organic gardening and local agricultural movements, natural science and ecology, green building and renewable energy and political activism and social commentary.

And over the years, it has honed its mission. Today, announces the company on its website, “a new worldwide grassroots movement is taking shape. . . . People increasingly feel that they have no choice: In order to continue living, they must reclaim, must lay claim to their ecosystems, their food and water, their land and housing, their sufficiencies. . . . While continuing our commitment to remain at the forefront of information about green building, organic growing, and renewable energy – the practical aspects of sustainability – we will also publish for a new politics of sustainability, for the cultural resistance that living demands of us now.” It continues: “Our purpose is: to stop the destruction of the natural world by challenging the beliefs and practices that are enabling this destruction and by providing inspirational and practical alternatives that promote sustainable living.”

To give you an idea of the range of Chelsea Green’s offerings, we’ve reviewed some books. (Just click on the photos to read the reviews.) If you’d like to know more, look for its books in these local stores: Main Street Book Ends of Warner, River Run in Portsmouth, Gibson’s in Concord, the three Toadstool locations, Water Street Books Exeter and Village Square in Bellows Falls. And to see the full list of Chelsea Green’s titles and learn more about the company, visit chelseagreen.com.