Book Recommendations
In need of a book to read? Interested in sustainability? We’ve got you sorted!
Our 10-item reading list covers a wide variety of themes and genres: Whether you’re interested in the economic or the social justice side of sustainability; whether you’d like to read the bible of Buddhist economics or a collection of essays from women in the climate movement, we’ll have something for you.
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson (editors)
‘A mosaic that honors the complexity of the climate crisis like few, if any, books on the topic have done yet ... a feast of ideas and perspectives, setting a big table for the climate movement, declaring all are welcome.’ – Rolling Stone
There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it’s clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial ‘table’. More than a problem of bias, it’s a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.
All We Can Save is an anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save. (allwecansave.earth)
Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson
‘As advocate for the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world.’ - Barack Obama
Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change: from a Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to a farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda.
In Climate Justice, she shares their stories, and many more.Powerful and deeply humane, this uplifting bookis a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope. (bloomsbury.com)
https://islandpress.org/books/economics-sustainable-food
The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet by Nicoletta Batini (editor)
Producing food industrially like we do today causes tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation. But because the food industry does not bear those costs and the price tag for these losses does not show up at the grocery store, it is too often ignored by economists and policymakers.
The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. (…)Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. (…) In the years ahead, few issues will be more important for individual prosperity and the global economy than the way we produce our food and what food we eat. This roadmap for reform is an invaluable resource to help global policymakers improve countless lives. (islandpress.org)
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben
Since the dawn of our species, trees have been our silent companions, permeating our most enduring tales and never ceasing to inspire fantastical cosmogonies. Hermann Hesse called them ‘the most penetrating of preachers.’ A forgotten seventeenth-century English gardener wrote of how they ‘speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.’
But trees might be among our lushest metaphors and sensemaking frameworks for knowledge precisely because the richness of what they say is more than metaphorical — they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating complex information via smell, taste, and electrical impulses. This fascinating secret world of signals is what German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The Hidden Life of Trees.
Wohlleben chronicles what his own experience of managing a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany has taught him about the astonishing language of trees and how trailblazing arboreal research from scientists around the world reveals ‘the role forests play in making our world the kind of place where we want to live.’ As we’re only just beginning to understand non-human consciousnesses, what emerges from Wohlleben’s revelatory reframing of our oldest companions is an invitation to see anew what we have spent eons taking for granted and, in this act of seeing, to care more deeply about these remarkable beings that make life on this planet we call home not only infinitely more pleasurable, but possible at all. (brainpickings.org)
The History of Bees by Maja Lunde
The category of literature known as climate fiction – “cli-fi,” as it’s known – has gotten quite crowded in recent years. (…) Into this busy field enters Maja Lunde’s novel The History of Bees. Lunde, a writer of children’s and young-adult books, pieces together a tale that makes the long-term effects of climate change the backdrop for a set of stories about familial relationships, love, and loss.
Following a simple premise – what would happen if bees disappeared? – Lunde’s novel, originally released in Norwegian in 2015, jumps back and forth, across time, between the stories of three beekeepers. The term, it should be noted, is used loosely: There’s William, a British biologist in the mid-1800s; George, a farmer in the contemporary Midwest; and Tao, a young Chinese mother in a bee-less 2098 who spends hours performing manual labor in the fields to make up for the lack of apiformes. All three are dealing with personal problems brought about by the existence – or lack – of bees in their life. But the novel smartly relies limitedly on its ecological-disaster framework and instead gains its best footing in the quiet and intimate relationships it depicts between its characters. At times, it’s easy to forget you’re reading a novel exploring the consequences of a species extinction – instead, you’ve become invested in the lives of the people whose stories it follows. (theatlantic.com)
https://profilebooks.com/work/how-bad-are-bananas/
How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything by Mike Berners-Lee
Part green-lifestyle guide, part popular science, How Bad Are Bananas? is the first book to provide the information we need to make carbon-savvy purchases and informed lifestyle choices and to build carbon considerations into our everyday thinking.
The book puts our decisions into perspective with entries for the big things (the World Cup, volcanic eruptions, the Iraq war) as well as the small (email, ironing, a glass of beer). And it covers the range from birth (the carbon footprint of having a child) to death (the carbon impact of cremation).
Packed full of surprises — a plastic bag has the smallest footprint of any item listed, while a block of cheese is bad news — the book continuously informs, delights, and engages the reader. Solidly researched and referenced, the easily digestible figures, statistics, charts, and graphs (including a section on the carbon footprint of various foods) will encourage discussion and help people to make up their own minds about their consumer choices. (barnesandnoble.com)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58506534-sustainability-for-the-rest-of-us
Sustainability for the Rest of Us: Your No-Bullsh*t, Five-Point Plan for Saving the Planet by John Pabon
Have you ever wondered whether all your plastic recycling, reusable cup carrying, and hybrid car driving are really making a difference? How about the money you give to charity or the politicians you vote for? Why is it that, after 100 years of the modern environmental movement, things only seem to be getting worse?
In Sustainability for the Rest of Us, John Pabon looks back on his nearly two decades in the business of saving our Earth to reveal why much of what we've been doing isn't having a big impact at all. This hilarious, no-holds-barred, unorthodox book will reveal to readers - regardless of their experience - what we really need to change, why we need to change, and how to make it happen. Consider this sustainability made simple.
Readers will also find out why:
Being heartless can actually make a difference.
We should look to China for climate leadership.
You shouldn't trust NGOs with your money.
Greenies are ruining everything.
Condoms might just save humanity. (johnpabon.com)
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
Small Is Beautiful is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. Hailed as an ‘eco-bible’ by Time Magazine, Schumacher’s richly researched statement on sustainability has become more relevant and popular with each year since its initial publication during the 1973 energy crisis.
A landmark statement against ‘bigger is better’ industrialism, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful paved the way for twenty-first-century books on environmentalism and economics, like Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty, Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism, Mohammad Yunis’s Banker to the Poor, and Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy.
The book still offers a crucial message for the modern world struggling to balance economic growth with the human costs of globalization. (environmentandsociety.org)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. (pulitzer.org)
Do you have any books to recommend? Let us know and we’ll make sure to add them to this list!