The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

The Future Is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today's Technologies

Bob McDonald · 303 pages

The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet

Kristin Ohlson · 256 pages

Thousands of years of poor farming and ranching practicesand, especially, modern industrial agriculturehave led to the loss of up to 80 percent of carbon from the worlds soils. That carbon is now floating in the atmosphere, and even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it would continue warming the planet. In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elega

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

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

Tim Flannery · 357 pages

"The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Originally somewhat of a global-warming skeptic, Tim Flannery spent several years researching the topic and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public that has received patchy and mislea

The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity

James E. Lovelock · 184 pages

Storms Of My Grandchildren: The Truth About The Climate Catastrophe And Our Last Chance To Save Humanity

James Hansen · 336 pages

Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story

Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Peterson Myers · 311 pages

Over thirty years ago, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first warned that manmade chemicals had spread across the planet, permeating virtually every living creature and the most distant wilderness. Her landmark book documented the deadly toll of these synthetic chemicals to birds and wildlife. Only now, however, are we recognizing the full consequences of this insidious invasion, which is derailing

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 Control of Nature

John McPhee · 272 pages

McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond · 592 pages

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G

The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

Paul Bogard · 337 pages

Describes how ever-present, modern artificial lights have changed the way humans experience darkness and bemoans the fact that the primal dark sky can no longer influence science and art.

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.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

Florence Williams · 338 pages

Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Elizabeth Royte · 311 pages

Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away? In Garbage Land, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us o

The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

Gretchen Bakke · 352 pages

"The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts str

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

Dan Barber · 486 pages

"Renowned chef Dan Barber introduces a new kind of cuisine that represents the future of American dining in THE THIRD PLATE. Barber explores the evolution of American food from the "first plate," or industrially-produced, meat-heavy dishes, to the "second plate" of grass-fed meat and organic greens, and says that both of these approaches are ultimately neither sustainable nor healthy. Instead, Bar

The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems

Van Jones · 237 pages

The award-winning human rights activist and advisor to policy makers and presidential candidates delivers a 21st-century economic plan to rescue working-class Americans. Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, thi

The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture

Fritjof Capra · 464 pages

Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet

Tim Jackson, Bill McKibben, Herman E. Daly, Mary Robinson · 276 pages

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren · 408 pages

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

Jeffrey D. Sachs · 400 pages

From one of the world's greatest economic minds, author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty, a clear and vivid map of the road to sustainable and equitable global prosperity and an augury of the global economic collapse that lies ahead if we don't follow itThe global economic system now faces a sustainability crisis, Jeffrey Sachs argues, that will overturn many of our basic assump

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

Thom Hartmann · 336 pages

"While everything appears to be collapsing around us - ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, the end of cheap oil, water shortages, global famine, wars - we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio's web movie Global Warning, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happeni

The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet

Jim Robbins · 236 pages

Describes the efforts of a former alcoholic nurseryman, whose near-death experience prompted him to attempt to find the best specimens of the U.S.'s 872 known species of trees and use them to propagate their offspring around the world.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

James Howard Kunstler · 313 pages