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

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

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,

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

Fred Pearce · 346 pages

Visit Sunny Chernobyl - Adventures in the world's most polluted places

Andrew Blackwell · 320 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 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

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.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein · 576 pages

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The

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

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.

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 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

Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. · 288 pages

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

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

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 Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Bjorn Lomborg · 540 pages

The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer · 259 pages

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

Marie-Monique Robin

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

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.

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

Christopher Steiner · 281 pages

Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives.Of course, everybody already knows how about gasoline has affected our driving habits. People can't wait to junk their gas-guzzling SUVs for a new Prius. But there are more, not-so-obvious changes on the horizon that Chris Steiner trac

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

James Howard Kunstler · 313 pages

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

Taras Grescoe

"Taras Grescoe rides the rails all over the world and makes an elegant and impassioned case for the imminent end of car culture and the coming transportation revolution"I am proud to call myself a straphanger," writes Taras Grescoe. The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering--a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford i