Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages

Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Kristen Iversen · 416 pages

Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment

David Kirby · 510 pages

Massive fish kills from flesh-eating parasites. Unusual concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Recalls of meats, vegetables, and fruits because of deadly E-coli bacterial contamination. Recent public health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. This book is about our American food system gone terribly wrong--and the people who are fi

The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply

Marie-Monique Robin

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

Barry Estabrook · 256 pages

Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

The Cyanide Canary: A True Story of Injustice

Joseph Hilldorfer, Robert Dugoni · 304 pages

Recounts the story of young Scott Dominquez, a promising former high school wrestler who was left brain damaged by the environmental malpractices of his employer, documenting the efforts of an EPA investigator to bring the employer to justice.

A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr · 502 pages

A Civil Action is a 1996 work of non-fiction by Jonathan Harr about a water contamination case in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s. The book became a best-seller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. The case is Anderson v. Cryovac. The first reported decision in the case is at 96 F.R.D. 431 (denial of defendants' motion to dismiss).

Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

Dan Fagin · 538 pages

Recounts the decades-long saga of the New Jersey seaside town plagued by childhood cancers caused by air and water pollution due to the indiscriminate dumping of toxic chemicals.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan · 450 pages

What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Adam Minter · 284 pages

"When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-- veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-- travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar indust

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

Elizabeth Kolbert · 217 pages

"New Yorker writer Kolbert tackles the controversial subject of global warming. Americans have been warned since the late 1970s that the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere threatens to melt the polar ice sheets and irreversibly change our climate. With little done since then to alter this dangerous course, now is the moment to salvage our future. By the end of the century, the world will

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

Marc Reisner · 582 pages

"Beautifully written and meticulously researched."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This updated study of the economics, politics, and ecology of water covers more than a century of public and private desert reclamation in the American West. At its core, this book is a history of the massive engineering projects—dams, aqueducts, and diversions—that allowed the arid American West to bloom into a collect

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer · 341 pages

After spending much of his life shifting between various omnivore and herbivore eating habits, the author presents a thought provoking look at why and how humans choose their diets. Delivering the pros and cons of eating meat, he invites readers on an insightful exploration into the many facets of food. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work,

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

Russell Gold · 375 pages

Fracking has vociferous critics and fervent defenders, but the debate between these camps has obscured the actual story: Fracking has become a fixture of the American landscape and the global economy. It has upended the business models of energy companies around the globe, and it has started to change geopolitics and global energy markets in profound ways. Here the author tells the story of this o

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal

Tristram Stuart · 480 pages

In "Waste," Stuart points out that farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers in North America and Europe discard between 30 and 50 percent of their food supplies--enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over. Traveling from China to New York, from Pakistan to Japan, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy--but also inspiring innovations--to the global food crisis.

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

John Vaillant · 272 pages

Roman de société. Roman témoignage Cette histoire vraie captivante donne à voir les beauté de l'Alaska. Le bûcheron Hadwin abbat un épicéa de 300 ans : arbre sacré pour les indiens Haïdas. L'homme disparaît sans laisser de mystérieusement.

Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat

Philip Lymbery, Isabel Oakeshott · 448 pages

Farmageddon is a fascinating and terrifying investigative journey behind the closed doors of a runaway industry across the world - from the UK, Europe and the USA, to China, Argentina, Peru and Mexico. It is both a wake-up call to change our current food production and eating practices and an attempt to find a way to a better farming future.--COVER.

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson · 320 pages

"An important, controversial account ... of the way in which man's use of poisons to control insect pests and unwanted vegetation is changing the balance of nature." Booklist.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Donovan Hohn · 402 pages

When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

Edward Humes · 288 pages

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of the world of garbage. Trash is America's largest export. Individually, we make more than four pounds a day, sixty-four tons across a lifetime. We make so much of it that trash dominates America's place in the global economy--now the most prized product made in the United States. In 2010, China's number-one export t

The Big Thirst: The Marvels, Mysteries & Madness Shaping the New Era of Water

Charles Fishman · 388 pages

The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Rather than only three states of water -- liquid, ice, and vapor -- there is a fourth, "molecular water," fused into rock 400 miles deep in the Earth, and that's where most of the planet's water is found. Unlike most precious resources, water cannot be used up; it can always b

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

Michael Grunwald · 472 pages

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food

Jonathan Bloom · 372 pages

American Wasteland chronicles how we waste food from farm to fork and examines the impact of our squandering. With an upbeat tone, the book offers suggestions on how we -- as a nation and as individuals -- can trim our waste. A word of warning: It's a book that forces you to reconsider your approach to food. Because once you're looking for food waste, it's hard to miss. - Publisher.

War of the Whales: A True Story

Joshua Horwitz · 448 pages

"The tale of a crusading attorney who stumbles on one of the U.S. Navy's best-kept secrets: a submarine detection system that floods entire ocean basins with high-intensity sound--and drives whales onto beaches. As Joel Reynolds launches a legal fight to expose and challenge the Navy program, marine biologist Ken Balcomb witnesses a mysterious mass stranding of whales near his research station in