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

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.

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.

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

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

Marie-Monique Robin

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).

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.

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

Elizabeth Royte · 288 pages

Tap or bottled? This book is an incisive, stylish and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water. Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we're hardly conscious that Poland Spri

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,

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

Kristen Iversen · 416 pages

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.

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.

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.

Not On The Label

Felicity Lawrence · 344 pages

A shocking and highly readable expose of the state of the food production industry in Britain today. Felicity Lawrence will take some of the most popular foods we eat at home to show how the food industry in Britain causes ill health, environmental damage, urban blight, starving smallholders in Africa and Asia, and illegal labourers smuggled and exploited in Britain.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Eric Schlosser · 383 pages

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar Amerca. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism ab

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.

The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

Tracie McMillan · 330 pages

"In 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters"--Jacket.

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

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It

Karl Weber · 321 pages

From the Publisher: Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "more than a terrific movie-it's an important movie." Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and

Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food

Eric Schlosser, Charles Wilson · 304 pages

A behind-the-scenes look at the fast food industry. This book reveals the truth about what lurks between those sesame seed buns, what a chicken "nugget" really is, and how the fast food industry has been feeding off children for generations. The coauthor is Charles Wilson.

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.

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

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 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.

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