National Network for Equitable Library Service

What you choose to wear becomes part of your identity, but it doesn't affect just you. Your clothing sends a message to the world, whether you want it to or not! And often we don't know what that message really is. Can Your Outfit Change the World? looks at how and where clothes are made, how the people who make the clothes are treated and how the companies who sell the clothes affect the health of our planet. Armed with information, you can follow the book's guide to spending your fashion dollars in a responsible and eco-friendly way.

The World Around Us series introduces children to complex cultural, social and environmental issues in a straightforward and accessible way. These illustrated nonfiction picture books tackle global concerns and initiate conversations about subjects that are difficult, sad or overwhelming with school-aged children who are just beginning to observe the world outside their homes. A gentle introduction to the issue of poverty, On Our Street explores the realities of people living with inadequate resources.

Better Together explores how people gather in groups of all kinds to fulfill the basic human need for companionship. From the smallest units of parents, siblings and friends to global organizations that try to build on a foundation of common human experience to meet their goals, people working together are a powerful force for change. Too often, we look at someone and see all the ways we are different. People all around the world come together to build things, teach and entertain each other, and provide everything from better health care to good food to security and education.

With these 61 readable essays, Cape Breton's Tom Urbaniak brings a courageous, critical and constructive eye to problems of our time. Whether it's revitalizing struggling communities, harnessing the power of small investors, reforming tired institutions or protecting parliamentary democracy, he is able to point to workable solutions. In this practical and thought-provoking reader, Prof. Urbaniak challenges students and citizens to engage with their region and with the world.

Finalist, Banff Mountain Book Competition. On a cool morning in the winter of 2011, a logger named Dennis Cronin was walking through a stand of old-growth forest near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. His job was to survey the land and flag the boundaries for clear-cutting. As he made his way through the forest, Cronin came across a massive Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building. It was one of the largest trees in Canada that if felled and milled could easily fetch more than fifty thousand dollars.

Follow the journey of a Canadian and Indian couple, Savannah and Sandeep, as they travel the world to capture the human side of one of the biggest energy transitions of our times - the global shift from fossil fuels to renewables. In this exciting and provocative new book, readers are taken into the homes of the coal miners who live and work in Jharia, a town in India that has been on fire for the past 100 years due to poor coal mining practices. Life in Jharia is a version of Dante's inferno - 700,000 people live in the most unimaginable conditions.

Martin Parnell's third book highlighting the power of sport to change lives takes the reader on an inspirational journey into Afghanistan, a country known for political chaos and female oppression. "The children were stoning us, the people said bad words like 'prostitutes, why don't you stay at home? You are destroying Islam.'" -Zainab, Afghanistan's first female marathon runner. In 2016, Martin Parnell went on a journey that many believed was madness: running a marathon in Afghanistan in a quest to fight for women's rights and gender equality.

The essays in If You're Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change focus on the interconnection of community/workplace/individual and how literature (and thinking about literature) has a role in social struggles aimed at making that nexus more liberatory. The essays' topics include various social issues in contemporary writing--daily work, narrative, love poems, the teaching (and hence status) of poetry, and postmodernism.

CanLit-the commonly used short form for English Canadian Literature as a cultural formation and industry-has been at the heart of several recent public controversies. Why? Because CanLit is breaking open to reveal the accepted injustices at its heart. It is imperative that these public controversies and the issues that sparked them be subject to careful and thorough discussion and critique. Refuse provides a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently.

How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism? Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality -once tightly regulated by conservative institutions- become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market.