Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

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

No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process

Colin Beavan · 288 pages

The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time

Elizabeth Rogers, Thomas M. Kostigen · 201 pages

Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

Alan Weisman · 528 pages

A powerful investigation into the chances for humanity's future from the author of the bestseller The World Without Us. In his bestselling book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman considered how the Earth could heal and even refill empty niches if relieved of humanity's constant pressures. Behind that groundbreaking thought experiment was his hope that we would be inspired to find a way to add h

Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace

Vandana Shiva · 205 pages

"A leading voice in struggles for global justice, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental activist and physicist. In Earth Democracy, Shiva updates the struggles she helped bring to international attention--against genetic food engineering, cultural theft, and natural resource privatization--uncovering their link to the rising tide of fundamentalism, violence against women, and planetary d

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 Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Andrea Wulf · 484 pages

From the Prologue... When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation t

Green Illusions

Ozzie Zehner · 437 pages

"We don't have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what's wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy--more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels--alternative technologies come w

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

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 Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience

Rob Hopkins · 242 pages

We live in an oil-dependent world, and have got to this level of dependency in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most people don't want to think about what happens when the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead ca

The End of Nature

Bill McKibben · 225 pages

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · 336 pages

From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

Al Gore · 325 pages

With this book, the author, former Vice President Al Gore brings together leading-edge research from top scientists around the world; photographs, charts, and other illustrations; and personal anecdotes and observations to document the fast pace and wide scope of global warming. He presents, with alarming clarity and conclusiveness - and with humor, too—that the fact of global warming is not in qu

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 Politics of Geoengineering

Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Christina Giannopapa, Ntorina Antoni · 216 pages

This book offers the first comprehensive social science perspective on geoengineering—technologies that deliberately intervene in Earth’s systems to counter climate change. It examines the political, legal, economic, and societal dimensions of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), combining SWOT analyses with regional perspectives from Africa and the Asia-Pacific. Co

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

James Hansen · 336 pages

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

Paul Roberts · 400 pages

Petroleum is now so deeply entrenched in our economy, our politics, and our personal expectations that even modest efforts to phase it out are fought tooth and nail by the most powerful forces in the world: companies and governments that depend on oil revenues; the developing nations that see oil as the only means to industrial success; and a Western middle class that refuses to modify its energy-

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

Bob McDonald · 303 pages

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

Mark Hertsgaard · 352 pages

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

Alisa Smith, J.B. MacKinnon · 272 pages

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America

Thomas L. Friedman · 516 pages

Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.

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.