Green Reading List

THE GREEN READING LIST

List of must read books for Green Awareness!

The first section (4 pages) is a list of the recommended books. The second section consists of revues/synopses/price/availability of the individual books. 

Complied and Edited by John Gale 
 


 
This list is currently made up of 42 (or 45)  books in the following categories –
 
Science – 1
Human History – 2
The Natural World and Ecology – 8
The Current Global Crisis – 4
Global Economics and Politics – the Grey Realities  -  6 (or 7)
Global Economics and Politics – the Green Possibilities – 6
Deep Green Philosophy – 10 (or 12)
Personal Actions – 2
Green Politics – 3
 


  
Science

 Almost Everyone's Guide to Science : The Universe, Life and Everything      1999 -  John and Mary Gribbin     ISBN  978-0300084603

       and for anyone who’s already received too much education in reductionist-science – any of the many text books on Ecology that have a holistic approach – such as those authored by E.Odum or H.T.Odum.




Human History

Guns, Germs and Steel : a short history of everybodyfor the last 13,000 years.         -        Jared Diamond       (1997)       ISBN    0-224-03809-5
  
1491 : the Americas before Columbus   -   Charles C. Mann           (2006)         ISBN   978-1-86207-876-5




The Natural World and Ecology

A Green History of the World : The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilations   –  Clive Ponting    1991   ISBN 0140176608

The Diversity of Life (Rev Ed edition)E. O. Wilson   1992 (2001)                                         ISBN -   978-0140291612

Overshoot : The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change      -  William R. Catton      1982     ISBN  0 252 00988 6

Animate Earth : Science, Intuition and Gaia.           -      Stephan Harding.         (2006)         1 903998 75 1
        
A Sand County Almanac : and sketches Here and There.              -              Aldo Leopold         (1949)        0-19-505928-X
 
The Unnatural History of the Sea: The past and future of humanity and fishing  -  Callum Roberts  (2007)   ISBN 978 1 85675 294 1


Home Place : Essays on Ecology (1990)    ISBN 1-896300-53-7 
Earth Alive : Essays on Ecology (2006)      ISBN 1-897126-03-4
                     - both by Stan Rowe   




Current Global Crisis

The Last Oil Shock ; A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man    -    David Strahan        (2007)      ISBN  978-0-7195-6423-9
  
Six Degrees : Our future on a hotter planet.              -               Mark Lynas              (2007)        ISBN -   978-0-00-720904-0
 
Heat : How to stop the planet burning.            -                  George Monbiot          (2006)            ISBN -   978-0-713-99923-5
   
The Revenge of Gaia : why the earth is fighting back and how we can still save humanity.   - James Lovelock      (2006)       ISBN -  978-0-713-99914-3






Global Economics and Politics 

 the grey realities

The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism -  Naomi Klein (2007)     ISBN 978-0141024530

A Brief History of Neoliberalism     -   David Harvey  (2005)            ISBN  978-0-19-928327-9

Understanding Power : The Indispensable Chomsky.          -             Edited by P.R. Mitchell and J. Schoeffel          (2003)       ISBN   0-099-46606-6
   
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists     -  Robert Tressel   -  ISBN 978-0586090367

The Spirit Level : Why Equality is better for Everyone      -  Wilkinson and Picket    2009   ISBN 978 0 141 03236 8

Planet Dialectics : Explorations in environment and development (1999) or Global Ecology ; A new Arena of Political Conflict (1993)    -   Wolfgang Sachs

- and the green possibilities


One No, Many Yeses : A journey to the heart of the Global Resistance movement.      -       Paul Kingsnorth      -    (2003)     ISBN  0-7432-2027-7

Localization :  A Global Manifesto        -             Colin Hines                    (2000)              ISBN -  1 85383 612 5
The Eco-technic future : Envisioning a post-peak world.  -  John Michael Greer   2009     ISBN  978 0 86571 639 1
  
Voluntary Simplicity : Toward a way of life that is outwardly simple, inwardly rich -  Duane Elgin     (Rev. edit. 1993)    ISBN  0 688 12119 5

The Biochar Debate : Charcoal’s potential to reverse climate change and build soil fertility    – James Bruges  -  (2009) ISBN 978 1 900322 67 6





Deep Green Philosophy

The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and language in a more-than-human world.       -         David Abram     (1996)      0-679-77639-7

A Sand County Almanac : and sketches Here and There.              -              Aldo Leopold         (1949)        0-19-505928-X

The only world we’ve got : A Paul Shepard Reader (1996) and/or Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998)   -  Paul Shepard

The John A Livingston Reader (2007) and/or Rogue Primate : an exploration of human domestication (1994)   -   John Livingston

Natural Alien : Humankind and Environment   -   Neil Evernden    ( 2nd edit. 1993)       ISBN  978-0802077851

Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology    -   Andrew McLaughlin   (1993)     ISBN 0 7914 1384 5

The Idea of Wilderness : From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology   -   Max Oeschlaeger     (1991)   ISBN  0 300 05370 3

The Green Reader   -   Andrew Dobson   1991    ISBN  0 233 98653 7

Deep Ecology for the 21st Century : Readings on the philosophy and practice of the new environmentalism   -  George Sessions   1995   ISBN- 978-1570620492

Ecological Ethics : An introduction (2nd edit.) – Patrick Curry (2011) 
ISBN 978-0-7456-2





Personal Actions

Ecology Begins at Home: Using the Power of Choice     -   Archie Duncanson   1989         ISBN-13: 978-1903998458


Humanure Handbook:  A Guide to Composting Human Manure   (3rd Revised edition) -   Joseph C. Jenkins ( 2006)   ISBN-13: 978-0964425835




Green Politics

Green Political Thought  (4th Edit.)         -   Andrew Dobson         (2007 [1990])      ISBN  0-415-40352-9

Green Politics : The Global Promise      -  Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra    (1985)     ISBN  0 586 08523 8 
 
Environmentalism and political theory : Towards an ecocentric approach : Robyn Eckersley   (1992)  ISBN  1 85728 020 2


Costs and Amazon etc reviews of books on the green reading list


Science

Almost Everyone's Guide to Science : The Universe, Life and Everything      (Paperback) (1999)

by John and Mary Gribbin

ISBN-13: 978-0300084603
Amazon (Hardcover - 10 Aug 1998)
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Almost Everyone's Guide to Science is an essential book for the reader who is interested in science but doesn't know where to start. Gribbin gives a broad overview of physics and biology, starting with the atom before building up to larger objects: humans, the earth, the solar system and the universe. He also explains how scientific concepts are linked together--what evolutionary theory has to say about the way we think, how chaotic uncertainty and quantum uncertainty affect each other and how sub-atomic particles came into being in the big bang.
A radical departure for Gribbin, who is known for books that focus on sharply defined areas of science at the cutting edge of research. This time, he has gone to the opposite extreme, offering an overview of the whole scientific endeavour, in which he explains how everything is connected to everything else, from atoms to quarks, molecules to biology, life and the universe.
Gribbin never goes beyond a layperson's capability even when explaining the most complex subjects. Don't bother to read it if you don't have a healthy curiosity or the patience to put up with complicated scientific concepts. And don't worry about not understanding all of it; what you do understand will stagger you.
Amazon.com Review
Science isn't for everyone, but if you have even the faintest trace of curiosity about the world around you, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science will be a delight. Gribbin’s choice of subjects for this latest project reaches new territory, expanding in breadth to cover not just physics but chemistry, geology, meteorology, and the life sciences as well; in short, he introduces the world as we know it. Challenging but not intimidating, his writing presumes an actively intelligent reader willing to pause and think things out from time to time. Like the best science writers, he knows that his characters are people like Einstein and Darwin rather than theories like relativity and natural selection. This human-centered writing style is absorbing and a little sneaky--even those readers pathologically resistant to retaining scientific information will find themselves startled once or twice by an odd paradox or brilliant insight. This mastery of storytelling is ultimately what sets Gribbin apart from most other science writers; if you've decided that it's time to survey what we know about the world, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science is the best place to start.
From Publishers Weekly
Any book attempting to explain topics as diverse as the inner workings of atoms and the origin of the universe, as well as everything in between, is bound to be superficial. Gribbin's is that, but it is also informative, providing a knowing, if idiosyncratic, view of many of the major contemporary issues in science. Gribbin (In Search of Schr?dinger's Cat, etc.) has written "a guide not so much for fans of science and the cognoscenti but more a guide for the perplexedAanyone who is vaguely aware that science is important, and might even be interesting, but is usually scared off by the technical detail." He begins by paying attention to the work of physicists and their view of the atom, moving sequentially to chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, astronomers and cosmologists. Topics as diverse as the nature of chemical bonds, the structure of biological molecules, evolution, plate tectonics, the greenhouse effect, stellar evolution and the big bang all touched on. Throughout, Gribbin emphasizes fundamentals of science and of the scientific method, particularly through the mantra, "if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong." Overall, this is a good bet for the would-be weekend scientist who favors breadth over depth and wants to know a lot in little time.
 




Human History


Guns, Germs and Steel : a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.         -        Jared Diamond       (1997)       ISBN    0-224-03809-5

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Human history on this planet.

An excellent  explanation of how European dominance came about.

Amazon.co.uk Review
Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
Until around 11,000 b.c., all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.
The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.
He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.




Human History

 
1491 : the Americas before Columbus   -   Charles C. Mann           (2006)         ISBN   978-1-86207-876-5

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Recent archaeological finds are showing us that what we were taught about the New World is rubbish. A real eye opener.

Amazon Synopsis
Up until very recently it was believed that in 1491, the year before Columbus landed, the Americas, one-third of the earth's surface, were a near-pristine wilderness inhabited by small, roaming bands of indigenous people. But recently unexpected discoveries have dramatically changed our understanding of Indian Life. Many scholars now argue that the Indians were much more numerous, were in the Americas for far longer, and had far more ecological impact on the land than previously believed. This knowledge has enormous implications for today's environmental disputes, yet little has filtered into textbooks, and even less into public awareness. Mann brings together all of the latest research, and the results of his own travels throughout North and South America, to provide a new, fascinating and iconoclastic account of the Americas before Columbus.

Part of a typical customer review ( 1 of 254 ) on Amazon USA

Although recent years have yielded significant progress in understanding how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press. Far too many people still hold to one of two myths of the Indians, or have little conception at all of pre-Columbian America.
The first popular myth is that the Indians were a bunch of primitive savages just keeping the land warm until superior Europeans showed up. It's sad to read reviews here that assert that because Indians used stone tools they were therefore "stone age", with the implication that their culture was no further advanced than that early period.
The second myth makes the Indians into proto-flower-children, naively and simply in tune with their environment.
Both myths are based on stereotyping and are condescending to the pre-Colombians. How could people spread over two continents and many millennia be briefly summarized? They can't be! The Americas saw the development of a broad range of cultures, just like every other inhabited area of the world. Some cultures overstressed their environment and soon collapsed. Others created stable conditions under which they could survive for generations. (Which is not the same as saying they didn't impact nature.) But even the latter could be brought down by climate change, political instability, disease (especially European), or contact with outsiders (Indian or European).
Great cities arose in mesoamerica and the Andes, and also in other areas when the right conditions prevailed. And sophisticated cultures existed even where city building wasn't favored.
This book takes the reader through a vibrant overview of centuries of Indian culture both before and shortly after Columbus landed. Much of the narrative is based on work-in-progress by archaeologists and historians, and will certainly become dated with time, but it is an important update to the common, current understanding of the subject.

This book is a welcome update to our thinking about the Americas before Columbus. It's also one of the best books I've read in long time, and I highly recommend it.







The Natural World and Ecology

A Green History of the World : The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilations   –  Clive Ponting    1991   ISBN 0140176608

Clive Ponting

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From Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive assessment of humanity's assault on the environment across the centuries, by British historian Ponting (University College, Swansea). Examining the interaction between societies and their surroundings from the earliest hunter-gatherer groups on, Ponting describes the first great leap of civilization--the development of crops and agriculture--as the start of a systematic environmental transformation. As groups settled near their fields and as populations grew, the burden on the land increased, and at times the ecological pressure grew too great. Crop irrigation, the author says, led to increased salination and diminished yields, while a loss of forest cover brought erosion and the destruction of precious arable land. The Sumerian civilization in the Middle East and the Mayans of Central America, among others, fell victim to these limits to growth, with the collapse in some cases being precipitous. Other societies survived, however, to participate in the more recent great transition involving the use of fossil fuels for energy. With this step, Ponting says, environmental degradation increased exponentially through pollution at all stages of the industrialization process--and, in addition, the industrialized societies, by their exploitation of others less advanced, created the Third World, with its Pandora's Box of poverty, overpopulation, and other social ills that continue to worsen today. Ponting suggests no solutions, marking instead the devastating course of human progress and the ruins that serve as its milestones. Few colorful anecdotes, but an impressive accumulation of evidence culled from the annals of recorded history: a sobering view of a planet deeply in peril. (Maps and charts.)

Part of a typical customer review on Amazon USA

If you are politically active in any sphere -- environmental, feminist, race, labour issues -- and as a result you do a lifetime of research and reading and discussion, you often feel a sense of despair when attempting to explain your point of view to anyone who hasn't covered the same ground. Waving a booklist several pages long doesn't seem like a good way to win hearts and minds. So you wish for a book you could recommend that would really provide the broad
 overview, the minimal foundation of your own understanding.
For the automobile critic it's probably "Asphalt Nation." For the media critic it might be "Manufacturing Consent". Environmental economists have various basic texts to draw on, but at present I nominate Ponting as the best compromise between accessibility and comprehensiveness.
In one fairly brief volume he manages to summarize the technological and economic history of the human race, the central importance of food production throughout that history, and the implications of prior human experience for today's human experience. Ponting's chapter on the age of European expansion might be the best concise survey essay on colonialism that I've read. That one chapter alone is worth the price of admission, and offers a capable answer to the frequently asked question "Why can't the Third World make capitalism work?"
If you have only one chance to convince a dear friend that environmental issues are real and urgent; if you have only one title on environmental issues in your upcoming class booklist; if you want a handy, solid, one-volume reference for those maddening internet discussions; if you need to explain to an office mate just why you are not so keen on untested GMO releases; or if you just want a book that will cause lively discussion for your reading club -- I can heartily recommend Ponting. He has earned a place in the environmentalist canon. I feel the impulse to give lots of copies away to friends and colleagues, and what higher praise is there?







The Natural World and Ecology


The Diversity of Life (Rev edition)E. O. Wilson   1992 (2001)                                         ISBN -   978-0140291612
by Edward O. Wilson  1992 (2001)                                                                                             
ISBN-13: 978-0140291612

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This is still the best book on biodiversity. Wilson, an eminent Harvard entomologist, details the rise of biodiversity on earth and the human threats to it. His eloquent plea to save the rich variety of plant and animal life will resonate with readers of all ages and educational backgrounds. He examines organic history in terms of reproductive isolation, nucleotide variation (microevolution) and adaptive radiation (macroevolution). Wilson focuses on the abundance of life forms within tropical rain forests, especially pointing out that both vanishing species and their threatened natural habitats (hot spots) must be saved if we are to maintain the earth's rich and needed genetic reservoir. Identifying five natural events that have disrupted evolution and global diversity (e.g., climatic changes, meteorite strikes), Wilson maintains that the present sixth great extinction is being caused by human neglect and ignorance.

 Amazon.com
Humans, the Harvard University entomologist Edward O. Wilson has observed, have an innate--or at least extremely ancient--connection to the natural world, and our continued divorce from it has led to the loss of not only "a vast intellectual legacy born of intimacy" with nature, but also our very sanity. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson takes a sweeping view of our planet's natural richness, remarking on what on the surface seems a paradox: "almost all the species that ever lived are extinct, and yet more are alive today than at any time in the past." (Wilson's elegant explanation is a scientific education in itself.) This great variety of species is, of course, threatened by habitat destruction, global climate change, and a host of other forces, and Wilson revisits his oft-stated call for the protection of wilderness and undeveloped land, noting that "wilderness has virtue unto itself and needs no extraneous justification." We should, he continues, regard every species, "every scrap of biodiversity," as precious and irreplaceable, without attempting to quantify that regard with utilitarian measures such as "bio-economics." In short, Wilson offers with this book a simple, workable environmental ethic that extends the work of Aldo Leopold (author of Sand County Almanac) and other conservationists. A remarkably productive and influential scientist, Wilson is also a fine writer, and his survey of biodiversity makes for welcome and instructive reading. --Gregory McNamee

This important book is highly recommended for all biologists, environmentalists, and academic libraries.-- H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, N.Y.




The Natural World and Ecology

Overshoot : The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change      -  William R. Catton      1982     ISBN  0 252 00988 6

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This review is from: Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Paperback)

I consider it one of the most important books I've ever read on what ecology and sustainability should mean in human terms and, more importantly, the predicament the human population has now got itself in. I'd suggest that anyone who reads this book also looks at You Tube and looks up Albert Bartlett discussion on exponential growth.
Read together one can begin to understand that sustainability is not a gift of technology and cannot overcome the developed world's consumerist culture. Climate Change, using Catton's analysis, is not the primary problem to be addressed but should be viewed as a symptom (one of many extra-metabolites) of our culture.
Green policies can be read and understood in a completely new light, usually not a very flattering one!

Because of the importance of this book, I’ve put in a rather long review.
I recently finished reading a critically important book by Professor William R. Catton, Jr., entitled, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.”2 I not only consider it one of the most influential books I have ever read, but I believe it ranks as one of the most important books ever written, period. I wished I had read it 27 years ago, but at that time I had already left my undergraduate ecological roots behind me while engaged in the excitement and challenges of the start of my public health career at the Wisconsin State Health Department. Well, better late than never!
Despite its maturity, Overshoot remains a vividly fresh and visionary work of brilliance and foresight. The ecological foundations of Catton’s thinking are strong and enduring due to his careful research and interpretive power. His treatise explains much about the human condition that we find ourselves in now, early in the 21st century. In a breathtaking yet concise sweep of history and biology through the eyes of a human ecologist, Catton reveals how we got here and where we are in all probability headed. He summarizes this view as follows:
Today mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future [by way of] diachronic competition, a relationship whereby contemporary well-being is achieved at the expense of our descendants. By our sheer numbers, by the state of our technological development, and by being oblivious to differences between a method that achieved lasting increments of human carrying capacity [agriculture] and one that achieves only temporary supplements [reliance on fossil fuels and other mined substances], we have made satisfaction of today’s human aspirations dependent upon massive deprivation for posterity.2
In a series of essay-like chapters, he explains how the inhabitants of modern civilization (homo colossus, he calls us, due to our prodigious use of energy, raw materials, and mechanical/prosthetic amplification devices) are living more and more luxuriously but, ironically, more and more dependently on the limited and nonrenewable resources and energy we have unearthed from the geologic past. The result, he says, is a mortgaging of our and our descendants’ future.
From a vantage point of the late 20th century, he offers not only a paradigm shift but also a temporal shift for 21st century humanity. What we have built, what we have become, and what we have come to expect as individuals and complex societies is, he writes, but a unique and historically brief interlude of riches (“exuberance,” he labels it) as we (especially the Western “we”) have dominated and abused the planet whose ecological workings and whose place in it most of us did not and still do not fully understand.
Catton pulls no punches. Because of humankind’s lack of understanding and wisdom, there is likely to be no happy near-future ending as the exuberant interlude comes to a close. It is finishing because we have shot way over the planet’s carrying capacity to sustain the desired living standard for most of the earth’s population. (There will be seven billion of us on April 2010,3 a doubling from about 1965.) We have overshot and continue to overshoot via the troika of (1) habitat takeover, (2) habitat destruction, and (3) the drawing down of finite ancient geological resources, all the while believing that new technology, undiscovered resources, clean energy, interplanetary resettlement, or faith will save us. Yet analogous crashes of populations and civilizations have been recorded in history many times before; it is just that today the stage is global and the size of the susceptible population is larger by orders of magnitude. We may claim innocence by reason of ignorance, but nature, Catton reminds us, does not care about our ignorance.
When will the first symptoms of overshoot arrive? Arguably, we may well be there already if we would interpret local and global events in the proper ecological context. Periodic genocides, global food crises, world wars, global climate change, soaring crude oil and commodity prices, massive droughts, gigantic forest fires, ocean dead zones, off-the-scale plant and animal species extinction rates, massively fouled human environments, global pandemic threats, resource wars, diminishing energy and resource reserves… the list goes on and on. The evidence is all around us that the downward slope is in the near future. Technology, stored wealth, and prudent local resource management may postpone and smooth for some of us the period of reckoning. But from a global perspective, population decline mediated by increasing pestilence, war, and famine is inevitable. Heinberg, in a modern update, has called this the “universal ecological dilemma,” referring to the fact that population and consumption growth cannot possibly continue unabated on a finite planet.4
As individuals, we still have choices to make. We can work for short-term humanitarian gain and labor toward helping developed and developing economies devise programs and policies that lead to healthier and safer environments, homes, communities, jobs, recreational activities, and transport systems. Or we can choose to focus our efforts on the larger picture and work on developing societies and communities built around more limited but long-term sustainable transportation, agricultural, health, and economic systems. At the very least, we may need to do both.
But haunting questions remain once an ecological perspective of public health takes root. Are we who work in public health unwitting accomplices in the global climate, resource, habitat, and species diversity destruction by saying it is alright to create and try to support unsustainable transportation-based economies as long as we strive to keep their current inhabitants safe and healthy? Is it ethical to assist in leaving a broken planet to our children, as long as we would do so safely and healthfully for those of us lucky enough to live in this short period of exuberance before the onrushing ecological and economical descent?
Overshoot, if read perceptively and openly, raises uncomfortable dilemmas for most areas of public health. It means that the gains of low infant and maternal mortality and rises in population longevity-brought about in great part by harnessing fossil fuels, the agricultural “revolution,” modernization, and disease and injury reduction efforts-in many instances impedes rather than facilitates moving toward sustainable living. It can be argued from the ecological perspective that most public health efforts, as humanitarian as they are by intention and immediate effect, through accelerating population pressures on the environment are paradoxically hastening the destruction of the earth’s habitat on which the next generation of humanity depends. It raises the concern that our perceived gains may be only illusory and temporary, with huge but unmeasured and unlinked environmental costs that will eventually lead to shorter lives of misery over longer periods of time for our descendants.
The nexus of the challenge of Catton’s temporal paradigm shift as it relates to public health is this: We have been able to conceptualize the goals and practices of public health by reducing geographic disparities and striving to improve the human condition at the local, national and global levels. But are we able to conceptualize the role and value of our labors temporally, across the 21st century to the 22nd century and beyond?
Public health may have a future as an instrument, practice, and science to serve humankind. Catton’s book helps to teach and remind us that it will continue to do so only in an ecological context that looks beyond a single program and views the bigger sustainable ecological system. Human health and the health of the environment and ecosystems we depend on should be seen as the opposing forces that they sometimes are; forces that must be moved more to equilibrium and away from a focus solely on short-term human gains.







The Natural World and Ecology

Animate Earth : Science, Intuition and Gaia.           -      Stephan Harding.         (2006)       ISBN  1 903998 75 1

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An explanation of the functioning of Gaia and our role in the process from a lecturer in Holistic Science.
Green Books review - Stephan replaces the cold, objectifying language of science with a way of speaking of our planet as a sentient, living being rather than as a dead, inert mechanism. For example, chemical reactions are described using metaphors from human life, such as marriage, attraction, repulsion etc, so as to bring personality back into the world of rocks, atmosphere, water and living things. In this sense, the book is a contemporary attempt to rediscover anima mundi (the soul of the world) through Gaian science, whilst assuming no prior knowledge of science.
'Animate Earth' argues that we need to establish a right relationship with the planet as a living entity in which we are indissolubly embedded? and to which, in the final analysis, we are all accountable. The book inspires the reader to connect with a profound sense of the intrinsic value of the Earth, and to discover what it means to live as harmoniously as possible within a sentient creature of planetary proportions.
Review in ‘Resurgence’ magazine by Edmund O’Sullivan is Professor Emeritus and Associate Director of the Transformative Learning Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
OVER THE LAST thirty years I have read many books that have helped me to deepen my ecological consciousness and to strengthen my commitment to the care of this wonderful planet that is the source of the gift of my life. A few of these books stand out and they are ones that I have the occasion to teach with and also re-read from time to time. Let me name a few.
I think of The Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry, Fritjof Capra’s Web of Life, David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, New and Selected Poems of Mary Oliver and Charlene Spretnak’s Resurgence of the Real. These are authors who leave you with the feeling that they truly love and care for the ground on which they walk. After reading Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth, I now add this book to my list.
This is an absolutely wonderful book which I would urge every reader of this review to make a part of their permanent library. Harding writes with a profound love, wonder, deep intuition and intelligence: conveying to the reader the utmost urgency of our present moment on the Earth, encouraging us to recover the ancient view of Gaia as a fully integrated, living being consisting of all her life forms, air, rocks, oceans, lakes and rivers, if we are ever to be able to halt the latest, and possibly the greatest, mass extinction. He also makes it clear, citing Stephan Jay Gould, that we have to “love what we want to save”. Animate Earth is the author’s work of love for Gaia.
Substantively, the task that Harding has set for himself is twofold. First, he takes his readers on an intellectual journey, helping them in the absolutely necessary transition from the mechanistic science of modern Western thought to a holistic science embedded in the very processes of the Earth and the universe. This is a paradigm book.
At the same time, Harding mentors his readers through meditative exercises into Gaian intuitions so that they can palpably feel what he is getting at when he talks about “animate Earth”. The subtitle of the book sets forth the dual task: Science, Intuition and Gaia.
In covering the scientific aspects, Harding introduces the concept of “animate Earth” through a deep order elaboration of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. In this work he is propounding an excursion into a post-modern animism that is based on the deep intuitions of indigenous peoples coupled with the findings of modern science. While at this task, the scope and range of his scholarship are breathtaking. He embeds Gaia, that is our “animate Earth”, in the wider universe processes akin to the work of Swimme and Berry’s Universe Story, then brings us into the minute details of the micro-cosmos that we see in the work of Margulis and Sagan’s Microcosmos. It is demanding work for the reader, but vitally necessary. It might be said that Harding ‘leaves no stone unturned’.
The hard scholarship is combined with wonderful meditative interludes throughout, to help the reader grasp what Harding is talking about at a deeply intuitive sensate bodily level. The reader is asked, at the beginning of the book, to find his or her own ‘Gaia Place’ to do these meditations. I consider them so valuable that I have committed myself to incorporating them into my ongoing personal practice



The Natural World and Ecology
    
A Sand County Almanac : and sketches Here and There.              -              Aldo Leopold         (1949)        0-19-505928-X  

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Natural History/Nature Conservation/Nature Philosophy.
Light’ natural history sketches until you’re hit by the final section. This is a cult ‘Deep Green’ book written by an American ecology professor - former ‘game ranger’ of the early 1900’s. Source of ‘Thinking like a mountain’ and ‘The Land Ethic’.

A Sand County Almanac is built around three main ideas:
  • Land is a community of living things. This idea argues for the study of ecology.
  • Land is to be loved and respected. This idea argues for conservation ethics.
  • Land yields a harvest of culture. Leopold calls this "a fact long known, but forgotten recently."
Leopold bathes the reader in these ideas through argument, explanation, description—in essays that build toward the final section of the book, which outlines the famous Land Ethic that has so strongly shaped the modern conservation movement. But the strength of the book isn't just that it proposed an idea whose time had come (and which is still as vital as it was in 1945). A Sand County Almanac has survived because it helps the reader experience that idea. Reading this book creates a continuing awareness of land as a living community, a thing to be loved and respected, and the deepest source of all our cultural harvests.
The power of A Sand County Almanac is that it helps us see in so many ways that the land is an organism, a circulating system, of which we are but a part. If and when we tinker, we must exercise ultimate care. But the beauty of this book is that it does so not by merely exercising our minds, but by helping us see, hear, feel, and experience the land organism as it moves and breathes—by working a wonderful experiment in what Leopold calls "that dark laboratory we call the soul."

Taken from the 1994 preface of Susan Flader’s 1974 Thinking like a Mountain.
This is a biography of the word famous ecologist, the late Aldo Leopold (1887 – 1948), whose seminal 1947 book A Sand County Almanac is central in the development of modern environmental ethics .

‘I first learned about Aldo Leopold rather improbably in a college course on German literature. We were reading Thomas Mann, and the professor compared him with Leopold. Stunned that none off us had heard of Leopold, he told us that when he wanted to give his friends in Germany a book that represented the best writing that America could produce, he sent Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. I bought a copy, but for years it remained my private discovery, as I never met anyone else who knew the book.’  


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  A Sand County Almanac is a 1949 non-fiction book written by American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Describing the land around Leopold's home in Sand County, Wisconsin and his thoughts on developing a "land ethic", it was edited and published by his son, Luna, a year after Leopold's death from a heart attack. The collection of essays is considered to be a landmark book in the American conservation movement.





The Natural World and Ecology

The Unnatural History of the Sea: The past and future of humanity and fishing  -  Callum Roberts  (2007)   ISBN 978 1 85675 294 1

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There is a crisis evolving because of over-fishing. Some predict that at current levels, all major fish stocks will have collapsed by 2050. In this compelling and meticulously researched book, Professor Callum Roberts provides a fascinating account of man's relationship with the sea, giving particular emphasis to the errors of fishing practices in the past, and starkly predicting the troubles of the future. "The Unnatural History of the Sea" is an impassioned yet engaging plea to recover the richness and diversity of marine life to ensure a healthy marine world for future generations.
Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation, Environment Department, University of York. He has spent most of his career studying the effects of fishing on marine life and seeking ways to improve ocean management.

This book is about the sea, but the same story could be told for mans exploitation of the land ecosystems. Only the impoverishment occured earlier on land (Martin & Klein 1984). And this is the punchline of the book: shifting baselines is deceiving the average spectator into believing, that nature wasn't much in the first place. This argument can still be heard. Why conserve nature if it wasn't much in the first place? The author of the book lists up the disasters and in doing so depicts the very much different nature there once was - and that can be again one day, if only we allow it. Please read this book.



The Natural World and Ecology

Home Place : Essays on Ecology (1990)    ISBN 1-896300-53-7 
Earth Alive : Essays on Ecology (2006)      ISBN 1-897126-03-4
                     - both by Stan Rowe   

Home Place: Essays on Ecology (Henderson Book Series) [Paperback]

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Rejecting Francis Bacon's notion that the purpose of science is to control Nature, Stan Rowe presents a collection of essays advocating companioning with Nature. First released in 1990, the essays in 'Home Place' range from the personal -- the search for a childhood vision of pristine grassland, the boy who goes from hunting to respecting wildlife and the living space around him -- to theory on land use, environmental law, agriculture, education, and technology as it affects the relationships between humanity and the Ecosphere.

Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology [Paperback]

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This is a collection of thought-provoking essays, short pieces, and reviews that explore and uncover the intimate connections between humans and the Earth. Through a strong mix of proof and irony, respected ecologist Stan Rowe re-examines the concept of living with - not against - the Earth. In "Earth Alive", Rowe prompts us to think in revolutionary terms about developing a new worldview, and living more responsibly on our increasingly damaged planet. This innovative collection gives hope for restoring diversity on Earth - which Rowe points to as the only true path to sustainability. Let "Earth Alive" guide you toward the beauty of the planet we call home, and through the eyes of the author see its infinite source for inspiration.


Written by a professional academic ecologist who described himself as "Not a misanthrope, but a defender of Earth against the excesses of anthropes", Earth Alive: Essays On Ecology is an anthlogy of brief yet well-structured essays about ecology and principle. Ranging from "The Ecology of Cities", to "What on Earth is Life?", to a straightforward "Manifesto for the Earth" (co-written with Ted Mosquin) that stresses the importance of reducing human population levels and human consumptive excess, particularly in developed countries, the essays convey an urgent need to protect dwindling natural resources and look toward sustainable coexistence. Most essays were previously published in various periodical venues, but now they are collected into one serious-minded, scientific, and unabashedly pro-environmental volume.





Current Global Disasters

The Last Oil Shock ; A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man    -    David Strahan        (2007)      ISBN  978-0-7195-6423-9  

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One of the best and most readable of the ‘Peak Oil’ books.

Amazon Synopsis
This may be the most important book you or anyone else will read in the next fifty years. Assuming humanity survives that long. Draining the lifeblood of industrial civilization, the terminal decline of oil and gas production will spark a crisis far more dangerous than international terrorism, and just as urgent as climate change. World leaders know it, so why aren't they telling? The last oil shock is the secret behind the crises in Iraq and Iran, the reason your gas bill is going through the roof, the basis of a secret deal cooked up in Texas between George Bush and Tony Blair, the cause of an imminent and unprecedented economic collapse, and the reason you may soon be kissing your car keys and boarding pass goodbye. David Strahan explains how we reached this critical state, how the silence of governments, oil companies and environmentalists conspires to keep the public in the dark, what it means for energy policy, and what you can do to protect yourself and your family from the ravages of the last oil shock.

One of the six 5 star reviews on Amazon USA

We all know it is coming, don't we? Petrol prices escalating, Maui fields producing less and less, Government trying to fire up a coal-fired power plant at Marsden Point to substitute for increasingly expensive oil, Australia going to nuclear-based power generation - obvious, isn't it? This exceptionally informative book will explain why this is happening and what to expect in the future.

Mr. Strahan is a British investigate journalist who has undertaken the task of becoming extremely well-informed about what is referred to as "peak oil" - the point at which oil and gas recovery reaches a maximum and then goes into irreversible decline. This is no breathless "conspiracy book" but a factual resume by an author who has that unusual knack of making the complex easier to understand. His massive bibliography of source material goes on for 25 pages, so those want to debate his facts can easily find the source. This is not an opinionated book but one crammed with objective information and intelligent analysis.

Mr. Strahan starts out with the science of petroleum exploration then continues with a fascinating history of how information is gathered about present supplies and future reserves. He adds detail as to how governments and oil companies have reacted to what should be obvious, discusses the ramifications of international politics and oil depletion, then finishes with a critique of the hard-core realities of substituting various other sources for power generation as petroleum products inevitably run dry.

One can argue climate change, its causes, and possible solutions, but there is no argument here - oil recovery has hit "peak" in most areas and is declining everywhere but the Mideast, and even here the reserve figures may be deliberately overrated. Please buy this book - educated people simply must understand the full dynamics of this apparently insoluble problem.





Current Global Disasters


Six Degrees : Our future on a hotter planet.              -               Mark Lynas              (2007)        ISBN -   978-0-00-720904-0  

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By using major scientific projections, Lynas tells the impact of each degree of temperature change. Sobering reading, but forewarned is forearmed.

Royal Society science book of the year 2007.On deciding the winner, Professor Jonathan Ashmore, Chair of the Judges said: "Lynas gives us a compelling and gripping view of how climate change could affect our world. It presents a series of scientifically plausible, worst case scenarios without tipping into hysteria. Six degrees is not just a great read, written in an original way, but also provides a good overview of the latest science on this highly topical issue. This is a book that will stimulate debate and that will, Lynas hopes, move us to action in the hope that this is a disaster movie that never happens. Everyone should read this book."

Amazon Product Description

Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is what readers of Al Gore's best-selling An Inconvenient Truth or Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point will turn to next. Written by the acclaimed author of High Tide, this highly relevant and compelling book uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years.

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report projecting average global surface temperatures to rise between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Based on this forecast, author Mark Lynas outlines what to expect from a warming world, degree by degree. At 1 degree Celsius, most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. A 3-degree rise would spell the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, disappearance of Greenland's ice sheet, and the creation of deserts across the Midwestern United States and southern Africa. A 6-degree increase would eliminate most life on Earth, including much of humanity.

Based on authoritative scientific articles, the latest computer models, and information about past warm events in Earth history, Six Degrees promises to be an eye-opening warning that humanity will ignore at its peril.








Current Global Disasters

Heat : How to stop the planet burning.            -                  George Monbiot          (2006)            ISBN -   978-0-713-99923-5
  
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Surely one of the most important books of the decade. But the combination of government inactivity and the ‘unexpected’ accelerating pace of Global Warming mean that many of the ‘extremist’ measures recommended are now thought by some/many to be inadequate.

Synopsis lifted from Penguin Books.
Started to worry about just how hot our world is going to get, and whether you can do anything about it? As the effect of climate change grows by the day, so does the amount of hot air and bluster spouted by politicians and businessmen on what we should do about it. What with the excuses, the lies, the fudged figures, the PR greenwashing and the downright misinformation on the power of everything from wind turbines to carbon trading, when it comes to saving the world, most people don’t know what they’re talking about.
Luckily, George Monbiot – scourge of big business, riler of governments, arch-enemy of climate change deniers everywhere – does. Packed with killer facts and inspiring ideas, shot through with passion and underlined by brilliant investigative journalism, with a copy of Heat you really can protect the planet.
 ‘I defy you to read this book and not feel motivated to change’ The Times




Current Global Disasters


The Revenge of Gaia : why the earth is fighting back and how we can still save humanity.   - James Lovelock      (2006)       ISBN -  978-0-713-99914-3

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One of the centuries greatest thinkers but not everyone will agree with his ‘solutions’.

Amazon Synopsis
For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization. This short book, written at the age of eighty-six after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.

Professor James Lovelock is one of the world's leading scientists. He has been writing for very many years on subjects relating to the dangers of damage to the environment we inhabit.
The Revenge of Gaia is a fascinating insight into the problems that face the entire world with regard to changes in world climate.
I believe it should be required reading for every decision maker on Earth!
This lovely "Penguin" format makes it a delight to own and have on one's shelf!
                        ___________________________________

Essential reading for those who are concerned about the fate of the planet in the next few years. This book will open your eyes to the harsh realities of what we face. Don't miss it!
                        ___________________________________





Global Economics and Politics 

 the grey realities

The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism -  Naomi Klein (2007)     ISBN 978-0141024530
  (Paperback)   ISBN-13: 978-0141024530
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 Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published on 4 September 2007, becoming an international and New York Times bestseller[7] translated into 20 languages.[13] The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin, the United States (for example in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and the privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority not because they were democratically popular, but because they were pushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters or upheavals. It is also claimed that these shocks are in some cases, such as the Falklands war, created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in the wake of the crisis.
Review
'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell' John le Carre 'Packed with thinking dynamite ... a book to be read everywhere' John Berger 'If you read only one non-fiction book this year, make it this one' - , Books of the Year, Metro 'There are few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books' - John Gray, Guardian 'Lucid, calm, impeccably researched, gorgeously readable' - , Books of the Year, Observer 'A brilliant, brave and terrifying book' Arundhati Roy 'Powerful ... epic ... dramatic' Daily Telegraph 'A brilliant book written with a perfectly distilled anger, channelled through hard fact. She has indeed surpassed No Logo' Independent 'Excoriating ... passionate and informed ... Her prose packs a punch' Scotsman.
Amazon UK customer review.

Totally mindblowing, 30 Oct 2008
  
This is my first ever review on Amazon. No book has ever moved me to want to take action before like The Shock Dcotrine. Ok, so writing an Amazon review isn't going to change the world but getting as many people as possible to read this book is a step in the right direction.

A friend who recommended the book to me said it was powerful, but I wasn't prepared for just how powerful. Page after page I felt real physical rage and disbelief at how these horrific and world changing events have been happening for decades (and continue to happen) and yet have remained so under the radar of most of us.

Describing the contents of the book has been done very eloquently in other reviews, so I won't repeat that here. But I will just say PLEASE, whatever your political colour, however sceptical you are, PLEASE read this book, it will change how you view the world.



the grey realities

A Brief History of Neoliberalism     -   David Harvey  (2005)            ISBN  978-0-19-928327-9

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A superb, short explanation of why virtually anything in the financial world happens the way it does. Cannot be too highly recommended. An essential read.

Amazon Product Description
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements
3 of the very many ‘rave’ reviews of this excellent book.
 Red Pepper, 1 September 2006
'an excellent introduction to the political and economic story of neoliberalism....highly readable book.'.
Leave it to David Harvey to brilliantly summarize in little more than 200 pages what has taken more than thirty years to emerge as a political-economic form of governance."--The Professional Geographer

"The many strengths of A Brief History of Neoliberalism cannot be adequately conveyed in this short space, but include powerful analyses of the devastating impact of neo-liberalism on the environment and labouring conditions (especially for women), a nuanced perspective on the external and internal forces compelling states to turn towards neo-liberalism, and the ways in which Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation" is highly pertinent to the neo-liberal era of capitalism."--Labour/Le Travail



the grey realities

Understanding Power : the Indispensable Chomsky.          -             Edited by P.R. Mitchell and J. Schoeffel          (2003)       ISBN   0-099-46606-6   

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Politics/Current Affairs.

Transcripts from some of Noam Chomsky’s Q&A sessions through the 90’s. Another ‘must read’. Punchier than ever but being transcripts of talks it’s not in Chomskys’ usual dense style and therefore easy to read.

Amazon Synopsis
Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sell-out lectures. Now, in "Understanding Power", Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power. In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions - published here for the first time - Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as US foreign and domestic policy, "Understanding Power" is definitive Chomsky.

Amazon.com Review

Understanding Power is a wide-ranging collection of transcribed and previously unpublished discussions and seminars (from 1989 to 1999) with sociopolitical analyst Noam Chomsky.
The chapters, each covering discrete sessions with Chomsky, arrive in a question-and-answer format that at times becomes delightfully contentious. Chomsky holds forth on such disparate topics as American third-party politics, the stifling of true dissent, the illusion of a muscular media, heavy-handed American imperialism (from Southeast Asia to Mexico), a dysfunctional and self-destructing United States political left, the gilding of the Kennedy and Carter administrations, and the impotent state of labor unions.
The relatively accessibility of Understanding Power is a welcome balance to Chomsky's often formidable scholarly writings. This is a book best taken in doses: a sort of bedside reader. --H. O'Billovitch




the grey realities

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists     -  Robert Tressel   -  ISBN 978-0586090367

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A superb socialist tract.

It has been claimed that this is the book that was responsible for Labour being voted in after WW2.

Amazon Synopsis
Originally published in 1914, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a timeless story of Socialism, political awakenings and class struggle, told with a volatile mix of heartfelt rage and sly humour. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Owen, a journeyman-prophet with a vision of a just society. Owen's spirited attacks on the greed and dishonesty of the capitalist system rouse his fellow men from their political quietism. It is both a masterpiece of wit and political passion and one of the most authentic novels of English working class life ever written. This enduring favourite is now reinvigorated by a smart new jacket and exclusive extra material as part of Perennial's Modern Classics line of reissues. Now its timeless message of justice, equality and reason will be introduced to a whole new generation of discerning readers.




the grey realities

The Spirit Level : Why Equality is better for Everyone      -  Wilkinson and Picket    2009   ISBN 978 0 141 03236 8

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Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show: - How almost everything – from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy – is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is - That societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them – including the well-off - How we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.

“Might be the most important book of the year.”—Guardian
“Fascinating and deeply provoking…The Spirit Level does contain a powerful political message. It is impossible to read it and not to be impressed by how often greater equality appears to be the answer, whatever happens to be the question. It provides a connection between what otherwise look like disparate social problems.”—David Runciman, London Review of Books





-         the grey realities

Planet Dialectics : explorations in environment and development (1999)  or  Global Ecology ; A new Arena of Political Conflict (1993)    -   Wolfgang Sachs

Wolfgang Sachs is one of the most thoughtful intellectuals to deal with the dual crisis in the Western world's relations with nature and social justice. In this book readers will find trenchant and elegant explorations of some of the foremost issues the world faces at the beginning of the new century: efficiency--the mantra of our times; speed--the love affair with modernity; globalization--a market inevitability and the juggernaut of history?; sustainability--oxymoron as rhetoric; development--the 20th century's great undelivered promise; limits--a new principle for the coming century

Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development                    

               

ISBN 978-1856497015  

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This is a collection of explorations of some of the foremost issues the world faces at the end of the century. It considers the crisis of the Western world's relations with nature and social justice, examining: efficiency - the mantra of our times; speed - the love affair with modernity; globalization - a market inevitability and the juggernaut of history; sustainability - oxymoron as rhetoric; development - the 20th century's great undelivered promise; and limits - a new principle for the coming century.

“Sachs's ideas are dynamite. They call into question the whole phase of human activity which we are used to describing as development.” —New Internationalist

“Short, pithy and well reasoned.” —Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society




Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict  (edited by Wolfgang Sachs)


ISBN-13: 978-1856491648                

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In 'Global Ecology', the critique of Western-style modern development is worked out in relation to the current environmental debate. Behind the public's hope of effective action by governments on environmental issues lies a complex terrain of conceptual confusion, conflicts of interest and philisophical dispute. This is why some of the world's leading environmental thinkers have come together in this volume to probe critically the new language being developed by the environmentalprofessionals.
The authors examine the contradictions inherent in the fashionable notion of sustainable development. They explore the emerging conflicts over the distribution of environmental risks between North and South. And they warn that 'global ecology' seen in a managerial perspective, may degenerate into an effort to redesign and manage Nature in order to keep economic growth going in the face of a rising tide of resource plunder and pollution. The y critically examine the turn towards globalizaton, arguing that it has become the dominant paradigm for viewing issues of development and of ecology - at the expense of more local and more human dimensions ad livelihoods.
Contributors are: Hans Achterhuis, Vandana Shiva, Wolfgang Sachs, Christine von Weizsäcker, and many others.






Global Economics and Politics 
-  the green possibilities



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First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and emergence of globalization. The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published after World War II.
The book is divided into four parts: The Modern World; Resources; The Third World; and Organization and Ownership.
In the first chapter of 'Small Is Beautiful', "The Problem of Production", Schumacher argues that the modern economy is unsustainable. The natural resources (especially fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argues that nature's resistance to pollution is limited as well. He concludes that government effort must be concentrated on reaching sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements, like education for leisure or technology transfer to the Third World, countries will not solve the underlying problem of unsustainable economy.
Schumacher's philosophy is one of "enoughness," appreciating both human needs, limitations and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village-based economics, which he later termed “Buddhist Economics.” Buddhist Economics forms the basis for 'Small is Beautiful's fourth chapter.
He faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that “growth is good”, and that “bigger is better,” and questions the appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries, promoting instead “production by the masses.” Schumacher was one of the first economists to question the appropriateness of using GNP to measure human wellbeing, emphasizing that “the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption.”



the green possibilities

One No, Many Yeses : a journey to the heart of the Global Resistance movement.      -       Paul Kingsnorth      -    (2003)     ISBN  0-7432-2027-7

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It’s not only the white middle classes that are upset by the wide-boys, bailiffs and bankers of the non-elected Global Government  (WTO, IMF
and  WB [World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank).

Amazon Synopsis
It could turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century: a global coalition of millions, united in resisting an out-of-control global economy, and already building alternatives to it. It emerged in Mexico in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels rose up in defiance of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The West first noticed it in Seattle in 1999, when the World Trade Organisation was stopped in its tracks by 50,000 protesters. Since then, it has flowered all over the world, every month of every year. The 'anti-capitalist' street protests we see in the media are only the tip of its iceberg. It aims to shake the foundations of the global economy, and change the course of history. But what exactly is it? Who is involved, what do they want, and how do they aim to get it? To find out, Paul Kingsnorth travelled across four continents to visit some of the epicentres of the movement. In the process, he was tear-gassed on the streets of Genoa, painted anti-WTO puppets in Johannesburg, met a tribal guerrilla with supernatural powers, took a hot bath in Arizona with a pie-throwing anarchist and infiltrated the world's biggest gold mine in New Guinea. Along the way, he found a new political movement and a new political idea. Not socialism, not capitalism, not any 'ism' at all, it is united in what it opposes, and deliberately diverse in what it wants instead -- a politics of 'one no, many yeses'. This movement may yet change the world. This book tells its story.





the green possibilities

Localization :  a Global Manifesto        -             Colin Hines                    (2000)              ISBN -  1 85383 612 5


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A ‘localization’ programme providing a starting point for an alternative to globalization.      

Amazon Book Description and Synopsis
Localization is a manifesto to unite all those who recognize the importance of cultural, social and ecological diversity for our future – and who do not aspire to a monolithic global consumer culture. It is a passionate and persuasive polemic, challenging the claims that we have to be 'internationally competitive' to survive and describing the destructive consequences of globalization. This book is unique in going beyond simply criticizing free trade and globalization trends. It details self-reinforcing policies to create local self-sufficiency and shows clearly that there is an alternative to globalization – to protect the local, globally.
Governments hold up international competitiveness a the be-all and end-all of policy, presenting globalization as inevitable. The author shows that it isn't and that local economies, local autonomy and local democracy can all be protected - globally - if the aid and trade rules are changed. The text provides the arguments and examples for all those threatened by the onward march of a monolithic, undifferentiated, global consumer culture, and for those wanting to preserve local values and services - whether local food, local housing, education, transport or environment.

 Amazon review by David Piachaud, Professor, London School of Economics
Are the protesters of Seattle and Prague "a mere rabble of exuberant irrationalists" (The Economist, September 23, 2000) or are they visionaries who are addressing the limits of globalisation?
Colin Hines tackles the task of formulating a workable alternative with enthusiasm and imagination. It would be well for those firmly embedded in the'Washington consensus' that dominates the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO to read and think about what their critics have to say. In this reviewers opinion, three-quarters of the book makes very good sense and one-quarter is completely 'off the wall'. The problem is that only time will tell for sure which is which. But compared with turgid and unquestioning recitations of the benefits of globalisation that dominate the thinking of the rich and powerful (symbolised by The Economist), this book is refreshingly open. It even offers grounds for optimism.
Economists and ecologists, globalisers and localisers, doers and dreamers will all gain from reading this book.






the green possibilities

The Eco-technic future : envisioning a post-peak world.  -  John Michael Greer   2009     ISBN  978 0 86571 639 1

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If you only going to read one book, then make it this the one.   

In response to the coming impact of peak oil, John Michael Greer helps us envision the transition from an industrial society to a sustainable ecotechnic world - not returning to the past, but creating a society that supports relatively advanced technology on a sustainable resource base. Fusing human ecology and history, this book challenges assumptions held by mainstream and alternative thinkers about the evolution of human societies. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change. Instead, social change must explore many pathways over which we have no control. The troubling and exhilarating prospect of an open-ended future, he proposes, requires dissensus - a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity. Written in three parts, the book places the present crisis of the industrial world in its historical and ecological context in part one; part two explores the toolkit for the Ecotechnic Age; and, part three opens a door to the complexity of future visions. For anyone concerned about peak oil and the future of industrial society, this book provides a solid analysis of how we got to where we are and offers a practical toolkit to prepare for the future.

And a review from the states.

This book is a welcome leap forward past the earlier works of Richard Heinberg (The Party's Over), James Kunstler (The Long Emergency), Jared Diamond (Collapse) and others. The most important aspect of Mr. Greer's work is that it uses a language that enables further discussion of the post-peak future. Rather than pummeling us senseless with statistics proving the validity of the peak oil hypothesis, he moves forward well past that. Instead he connects the dots between peak-oil, global warming, the future of food, economics, energy, employment, and culture. Using general terms, he wisely avoids being prescriptive about how we might respond to the challenges facing us. The variables are too numerous and fluid to attempt prescriptive solutions. This book is a 'must-read' if you're anxious to move past the body of literature that warns us of impending crisis. It could well become an enduring standard.






the green possibilities
 
Voluntary Simplicity : toward a way of life that is outwardly simple, inwardly rich -  Duane Elgin     (Rev. edit. 1993)    ISBN  0 688 12119 5

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First published in 1981, "Voluntary Simplicity" was quickly recognised as a powerful and visionary work in the emerging dialogue over sustainable living. Now - nearly thirty years later and with the planet facing the perfect storm of an economic, ecological, and humanitarian crisis - Duane Elgin has once again revised and updated his revolutionary book. "Voluntary Simplicity" is not about sacrifice and living in poverty; it is a book about happiness and living with balance. Elgin illuminates the shift toward green ways of living growing around the world and shows the promise of a new pathway into the future.





the green possibilities

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility (Schumacher Briefing 16)

 – James Bruges-  (2009) ISBN 978 1 900322 67 6  

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The Biochar Debate is the first book to introduce both the promise and concerns surrounding biochar (fine-grained charcoal used as a soil supplement) to nonspecialists. Charcoal making is an ancient technology. Recent discoveries suggest it may have a surprising role to play in combating global warming. This is because creating and burying biochar removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Furthermore, adding biochar to soil can increase the yield of food crops and the ability of soil to retain moisture, reducing need for synthetic fertilizers and demands on scarce fresh-water supplies.
While explaining the excitement of biochar proponents, Bruges also gives voice to critics who argue that opening biochar production and use to global carbon-credit trading schemes could have disastrous outcomes, especially for the world's poorest people. The solution, Bruges explains, is to promote biochar through an alternative approach called the Carbon Maintenance Fee that avoids the dangers. This would establish positive incentives for businesses, farmers, and individuals to responsibly adopt biochar without threatening poor communities with displacement by foreign investors seeking to profit through seizure of cheap land.
The Biochar Debate covers the essential issues from experimental and scientific aspects of biochar in the context of global warming to fairness and efficiency in the global economy to negotiations for the future of the Kyoto Protocol.


"Our planet is in an existential crisis. While scientists fret and economists debate, politicians dither and business leaders derail. There is a disconnect between physical reality and political reality. And yet, the physical one always trumps; did we imagine it otherwise? James Bruges has got this right. Biochar offers us a last chance to cheat death, but we'll only be given one try. Fail and our epitaph will be a hard black layer writ in the strata: Here Lies the Human Experiment, R.I.P."--Albert Bates, author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook and founder of Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology




Deep Green Philosophy

The Spell of the Sensuous : perception and language in a more-than-human world.       -         David Abram     (1996)     ISBN 0-679-77639-7

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Green spirituality/nature philosophy.

If you’re feeling lazy/busy and generally inadequate/overworked, there is an interview The Ecology of Magic - An Interview with David Abram (equivalent to approx. 7 sides A4) to be found at       http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/index.html that gives a general sort of feel about this ’must read’ book .

I initially read this book because it has the best reviews I’d ever come across – and I agree with them. A ’must read’.

 Describes the influence of spoken and written language and rational thinking on man's perception of the natural world around him.

David Abram's writing casts a spell of its own as he weaves the reader through a meticulously researched work that gently addresses such seemingly daunting topics as where the past and future exist, the relationship between space and time, and how the written word serves to sever humans from their primordial source of sustenance: the earth.
"Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air," writes Abram of the separation caused by the proliferation of the written word.
In writing The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram consulted an engaging collection of peoples and works. He uses aboriginal song lines, stories from the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the speeches of Socrates to paint a poetic landscape that explains how we became separated from the earth in the first place. With minimal environmental doomsaying, Abram discusses how we can begin to recover a sustainable relationship with the earth and the nonhumanbeings who live among us--in the more-than-human world.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abram    Named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world,[4] Abram has been the recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and Watson Foundations.




Deep Green Philosophy

A Sand County Almanac : and sketches Here and There.              -              Aldo Leopold         (1949)        0-19-505928-X

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Natural History/Nature Conservation/Nature Philosophy.
Light’ natural history sketches until you’re hit by the final section. This is a cult ‘Deep Green’ book written by an American ecology professor - former ‘game ranger’ of the early 1900’s. Source of ‘Thinking like a mountain’ and ‘The Land Ethic’.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  A Sand County Almanac is a 1949 non-fiction book written by American ecologist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Describing the land around Leopold's home in Sand County, Wisconsin and his thoughts on developing a "land ethic", it was edited and published by his son, Luna, a year after Leopold's death from a heart attack. The collection of essays is considered to be a landmark book in the American conservation movement.






Deep Green Philosophy

The only world we’ve got : A Paul Shepard Reader (1996)   and/or    Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998)   -  Paul Shepard


The philosopher and essayist Paul Shepard (1925-1996) brought to the environmental literature of the 1960s and '70s the political passion of the time, but a passion matched with a demand for scholarly precision. This anthology from his work, which Shepard himself assembled not long before his death, addresses themes he touched on in many of his books. Many of them deal in one way or another with the disastrous consequences of humankind's increasing detachment from the natural world as a by-product of "the ecological insolence of the last century." In Shepard's view, the natural world--and particularly the world of animals--is the source of human intelligence and the wellspring of the imagination. He examines, for instance, the antiquity of the human eye, an organ essential to the cognitive revolution that distinguishes us from other primates; the origins of language and of literature in the imitation of birdsong; and the lessons animals of many species can teach us about ourselves. Shepard delves into environmental psychology, anatomy, history, linguistics, and a host of other topics to make his arguments, which are strikingly original. They have also been influential in shaping modern environmental philosophy, and this useful collection shows why that should be so. --Gregory McNamee


The only world we’ve got : A Paul Shepard Reader

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Review

"A superb introduction and summation of the work of Paul Shepard, an exceptionally clear thinker who is also a lucid and exhilarating writer.... His work is valuable but very urgent, shining in the sun like the tip of the vast iceberg of knowledge and reflection that supports it."

Peter Matthiessen, Author of The Snow Leopard
"Much of what we value in contemporary thought about 'nature and culture' grew up in the seedbed of Paul Shepard's thinking. His Writing about child development, physical and cultural anthropology animal behavior, art and mythology, the history of agriculture and other subjects is endlessly stimulating."

Barry Lopez, Author of Arctic Dreams

"The Only World We've Got brings us back into the sanctity of Paul Shepard's texts, where we can once again take a deep breath and remember that life is holy and a wildness of spirit is not only something to be retrieved and honored but the very essence of our humanity."


Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1996)

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" When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites which are of our own making." --from Coming Home to the Pleistocene
Paul Shepard was one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. Seminal works like The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Thinking Animals, and Nature and Madness introduced readers to new and provocative ideas about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard returned repeatedly to his guiding theme, the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today's ecological and social ills.
Coming Home to the Pleistocene provides the fullest explanation of that theme. Completed just before his death in the summer of 1996, it represents the culmination of Paul Shepard's life work and constitutes the clearest, most accessible expression of his ideas. Coming Home to the Pleistocene pulls together the threads of his vision, considers new research and thinking that expands his own ideas, and integrates material within a new matrix of scientific thought that both enriches his original insights and allows them to be considered in a broader context of current intellectual controversies. In addition, the book explicitly addresses the fundamental question raised by Paul Shepard's work: What can we do to recreate a life more in tune with our genetic roots? In this book, Paul Shepard presents concrete suggestions for fostering the kinds of ecological settings and cultural practices that are optimal for human health and well-being.
Coming Home to the Pleistocene is a valuable book for those familiar with the life and work of Paul Shepard, as well as for new readers seeking an accessible introduction to and overview of his thought.





Deep Green Philosophy

The John A Livingston Reader (2007) and/or Rogue Primate : an exploration of human domestication (1994)   -   John Livingston


These make up the best of John H Livingston’s books.

John A. Livingston is Canada’s Rachel Carson. His cogent, brilliant writing on the effects of man on nature has defined an entire generation of environmentalists and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the underpinnings of today’s issues. Radical when first published in the early 1970s and 1980s, Livingston’s arguments that we must find new approaches to our perception of nature and our place within it or face the irreversibility of our destruction of nature now reads prophetically. The Reader brings two of Livingston’s poetic and provocative books back into print for a new generation of readers and features an appreciation by Graeme Gibson.

As well as an interview with Farley Mowat, The John A Livingston Reader contains 2 earlier books One Cosmic Instant : A Natural History of Human Arrogance (1973) and The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (1981). £11.28  12 new from £7.94 6 used from £13.67

Rogue Primate An award-winning study of the relationship of humans to nature argues that humans have become so domesticated by and dependent on technology they can no longer truly relate to nature and are more prone to damage their environment. 6 used from £4.40

Livingstone was a brilliant original thinker who was decades ahead of his time. The environmental community ignored him, because he was a robust critic of their ideology. This book does the best job that I have seen of describing humankind's transition from ordinary animals into domineering monsters. It's a crucial book for those who are seriously trying to understand ecological history.


‘John Livingston: An Appreciation’ can be found at  http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/GW79-John_Livingston.pdf






Deep Green Philosophy

Natural Alien : Humankind and Environment   -   Neil Evernden    ( 2nd edit. 1993)       ISBN  978-0802077851

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5.0 out of 5 stars This book saved my sanity, May 6, 2000 By Derrick Jensen (Crescent City, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment (Paperback)
This is the book that started me on my career as an environmental writer/philosopher. In my late twenties I thought I was going insane because so much around me made so little sense: we're destroying the planet yet people continue with their lives as though nothing is wrong. And then I read The Natural Alien, and I realized that it's the culture that is crazy, not me. This book helped me to see how the insane and destructive actions of our culture spring from how we perceive the world, and revealed the hidden assumptions that guide the destructiveness. I will be forever in debt to Neil Evernden for writing this extraordinary book.





Deep Green Philosophy

Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology    -   Andrew McLaughlin   (1993)     ISBN 0 7914 1384 5

£25.00

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Review by David Orton
A very important book for showing the relationship, along with the contradictions, between deep ecology and the progressive political tradition. McLaughlin, a socialist and US philosophy teacher, combines deep ecology, bioregionalism and a social justice perspective in a clarifying analysis of the roots and destructiveness of industrial society. He shows that industrial society is the problem for radical ecologists and this society can have a capitalist
or socialist face. This book has provided intellectual background support and understanding for the emergence of the "left" theoretical tendency within deep ecology known as left biocentrism. McLaughlin is also well known within the deep ecology movement for his writings on the eight-point Deep Ecology Platform, which he has called the "heart of deep ecology".







Deep Green Philosophy


The Idea of Wilderness : From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology   -   Max Oeschlaeger     (1991)   ISBN  0 300 05370 3

£18.00

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How has the concept of wild nature changed over the milennia? And what have been the environmental consequences? In a work of intellectual history, the author presents an examination of humankind's relationship with the natural world through the ages - from early teomism through Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian supernaturalism to the rise of materialism and modernism.
It is the Kantian idea of wilderness--its teleological meaning--that occupies the author here. From the minds of five "poetic thinkers and thinking poets," namely, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, Oelschlaeger, professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, brings new dimension to such matters as the origin and uses of the natural world. Against a dubious reconstruction of the Paleolithic notion of a sacred, shared wilderness, the author deconstructs the modernists' concepts of wild nature as "matter in motion." The scientific revolution in particular is shown to have widened the fissure in our cultural idea of wilderness, between the idea of nature as our "magna mater"--an organic model of the cosmos--and modernist models in history, cosmology, philosophy, and even in the author's survey of today's ecology movement (from "resourcism" to eco-feminism). Oehlshlaeger is a cautious critic and reluctant prophet; nonetheless his proposed "postmodern idea of wilderness" swims against the currents of our intellectual history and invites criticism from members of many disciplines.







Deep Green Philosophy

The Green Reader   -   Andrew Dobson   1991    ISBN  0 233 98653 7

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Green politicians and theoreticians argue that current, piecemeal responses to the environmental crisis now facing the world will not work. What is needed, they say, is a fundamental overhauling of the system and a new paradigm for viewing humankind's place in the world. This book is an attempt to form such a worldview by extracting selections from dozens of previously published books and essays. Excerpted are authors such as Kirkpatrick Sale, E.F. Schumacher, Edward Abbey, and Rachel Carson. Each essay is short; most are two to five pages. By arranging the book into five sections (The Green Critique, The Green Society, Green Economics, Green Politics, and Green Philosophy), editor Dobson shows the Green movement to be more than environmentalism. For readers wishing an overview of Green thought, this book is an excellent starting point.





Deep Green Philosophy

Deep Ecology for the 21st Century : readings on the philosophy and practice of the new environmentalism   -  George Sessions   1995   ISBN- 978-1570620492

£26.10

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Discusses the fundamental relationship between human beings and nature, and suggests an ethical and philosophical foundation for environmental protection in the next hundred years.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This understandable and much-needed anthology attempts to dispel the confusions and misunderstandings about "deep ecology" that have provoked charges of misanthropy from partisans of anthropocentric alternatives and even affected Vice President Al Gore's influential work, Earth in the Balance (LJ 3/1/93). Contributors are recognized theorists, historians, and activists in the deep ecology movement, including editor Sessions, a philosopher; poet Gary Snyder; environmental historian Donald Worster; wilderness advocate Dave Foreman; and the founder of the movement, Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess. In Part 1, various theorists define deep ecology and explore the cultural significance of its ecocentric orientation; Part 2 examines the historical roots of this movement in literature, philosophy, and science; Part 3 consists solely of Naess's recent essays, most of them previously unpublished; Part 4 differentiates deep ecology from social ecology, ecofeminism, and New Age positions; Part 5 explains the connection of deep ecology to wilderness preservation; and Part 6 centers on the dubious politics of sustainable development.

From Booklist

This anthology, although dominated by the writings of Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who formulated the ecosophy of the deep ecology movement, presents a broad mix of issues by leading deep ecologists. Glendinning argues that psychological distress results from our alienation from nature. Turner profiles Gary Snyder's efforts to practice his vision of "living as part of a larger system of plant and animal communities governed by reciprocity." McLaughlin clarifies Naess' eight-point platform for change, and Snyder proposes specific action on several levels in the areas of population, pollution, consumption, and transformation (of society). Sessions discusses the roots of ecocentrism and anthropocentrism, the ecocentric philosophers (Spinoza, Thoreau, Muir, Santayana), and modern writers with an ecocentric message (Leopold and Carson, among others). Also included are a consideration of ecofeminist charges of androcentrism, and an examination of the ideologies of the New Age movement, generally antipodal to those of deep ecology.





Deep Green Philosophy

Ecological Ethics  (2nd edit.) by Patrick Curry

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Review of ‘Ecological ethics, an Introduction - Patrick Curry’  by Ian Whyte of ‘LeftBio’

This review is authored by a person actively engaged in the struggle (read battle) to protect the Earth in this time of environmental (and human) crises. Every person, with even a modicum of interest in the survival of the Earth as we know Her, and this should be all of us,
ought to read this book.
Curry’s Ecological Ethics, which is eloquently written and easy to read, supplies a positive rationale for an ecocentric ethics. His goal “. . . to suggest a promising and reasonably coherent set of ethical ideas and practices based on ecocentric values. . .” is admirably achieved. In so doing, it supplies a rational basis for the philosophical foundation of that which I do.
Curry makes it plain that, although the existing ethical structure may have appeared to be sufficient in the past, it is seriously deficient when dealing with the natural world and indeed, has inexorably lead us to the current confluence of crises.

The very axioms upon which the current ethical structure is built are incapable of dealing with modern ecological problems. It must adapt from being human focussed to include all creation. Curry starts “. . . from the belief, or perception, that nature - which certainly includes humanity - is the ultimate source of all value. . . . Not only does it have intrinsic value . . . but agency, intention, emotion: attributes which some arrogantly claim solely human, but which result from, and are properties of, the entire web of life. And relationships between subjects entail ethics.”      

It is especially gratifying that Curry, in a fairly gentle manner, often takes sides in the argument, and frequently forcefully states the conclusions derived from the discussion. (p 19 - “. . . behind these human caused changes is pathological ethics, not an absence of ethics.” and, p 6 - the problem is human caused “ecocide”.)

Curry discusses various kinds of  ethics, and settles on virtue ethics as the one most suitable, when combined with ecocentrism, with which to address the aforementioned crises. Ecocentric virtue ethics are then used to analyse many current paradigms, grouped under headings such as light green ethics, dark green ethics, Ecofeminism, and green  citizenship. The last chapter addresses the issue of human overpopulation.

Curry does not advocate a absolutist ethics; at least twice he states that purism is not an option, p 14, 90, but rather is advising that existing ethics be modified in order to fit within and to accommodate ecocentric ethics.

This book, Ecological Ethics, provides a solid philosophical foundation from which those who love the Earth may proceed, and I unreservedly recommend it.      
Get this book! Read this book! Adopt the philosophy of this book!





In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the highly successful Ecological Ethics, Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics.
He discusses light green or anthropocentric ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; the mid-green or intermediate ethics of animal liberation/rights; and dark or deep green ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the Land Ethic, the Gaia Hypothesis and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered and attention is paid to the close relationship between ecocentrism and virtue ethics. Other chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. In this new edition, all these have been updated and joined by discussions of climate change, sustainable economies, education, and food from an ecocentric perspective.
This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject which puts ecocentrism and the critique of anthropocentrism back at the top of the ethical, intellectual and political agenda. It will be of great interest to students and activists, and to a wider public.
"A profoundly useful and informative guide."
Morning Star
"Ecological Ethics is the best practical introduction to the role of philosophy in understanding the greatest environmental challenges of our time. Everyone who wants to make a difference should read it."
David Rothenberg, New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of Survival of the Beautiful and Why Birds Sing

"An excellent introduction to the different schools of ecological ethics, and as importantly, a strong defense of why a deep-green (or ecocentric) ethics represents the future of ethics if we humans wish to sustain a viable civilization on planet Earth."
Erik Assadourian, Senior Fellow and Director of the Transforming Cultures Project, Worldwatch Institute

"The environmental crisis has many facets - technological, political, economic. But there are deep ethical questions that undergird them all, and Patrick Curry elucidates a number of them. You needn't agree with all his answers to make use of this volume; use it as a guide to asking your own questions."
Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"Curry is one of the most creative and important new voices in post-secular, or animistic, environmental ethics."
David Keller, Utah Valley University







Personal Actions

Ecology Begins at Home: Using the Power of Choice     -   Archie Duncanson   1989         ISBN-13: 978-1903998458


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There are many books which explain the enormous environmental challenges we face today, and others which list the thousand and one things we can do to improve our environment, such as recycling, saving energy and growing our own food. The task can seem overwhelming, and the effect can be disempowering. Archie Duncansonis book is different. It shows how one man looked around him and saw what he could do to reduce his personal ecological footprint. Using the power of choice, he is making his contribution to the environmental effort and inspiring others to do the same. On the basis that you only need to take one step to make a difference, Archie takes you on the first stage of his journey towards a more environmentally friendly home and an easier conscience. With delightful illustrations, and packed full of simple ideas to reduce the ecological impact of your daily life, Ecology Begins at Home is an inspiration for adults and children alike.

'This is definitely the best book yet on how to green your lifestyle.' - Permaculture Magazine




Personal Actions

Humanure Handbook:  A Guide to Composting Human Manure   (3rd Revised edition) -   Joseph C. Jenkins ( 2006)   ISBN-13: 978-0964425835
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This book tells all you'll ever need to know about how you can save the precious by-products of the food you eat. Joe tells us organic gardeners how (our shhhh)it can be completely recycled - safely and simply while saving lots of: 1. water, 2. time, 3. money spent on commercial fertilizer and/or 4. sweat lugging so much animal manure from far away places to our gardens

There are almost seven billion defecating people on planet Earth, but few who have any clue about how to constructively handle the burgeoning mountain of human crap. "The Humanure Handbook, Third edition", will amuse you, educate you, and possibly offend you, but it will certainly pertain to you-unless, of course, your bowels never move. This new edition of The Humanure Handbook is: the tenth anniversary edition; richly illustrated; perfect for reading while sitting on the 'throne'; revised, improved, and updated; and there are 256 pages of crap.

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Green Politics

Green Political Thought  (4th Edit.)         -   Andrew Dobson         (2007 [1990])      ISBN  0-415-40352-9
 

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For those wishing to wend their way through the different aspects and degrees of ‘Greeness’ – then this is THE book. 
 By a local Prof. at Keele Uni. Guest speaker at the Stafford &Stone Green Party 2008 AGM .

Amazon Synopsis
This highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition, having been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas which have grown in importance since the third edition was published. Andrew Dobson describes and assesses the political ideology of 'ecologism', and compares this radical view of remedies for the environmental crisis with the 'environmentalism' of mainstream politics. He examines the relationship between ecologism and other political ideologies, the philosophical basis of ecological thinking, the potential shape of a sustainable society, and the means at hand for achieving it. Features new to this edition include: analysis of an intellectual and political 'anti-environment' backlash; an account of sustainability in ecological thought; the effect of globalization on ecologism; ecological citizenship; and, an expanded bibliography. "Green Political Thought" remains the starting point for all students, academics and activists who want an introduction to green political theory.





Green Politics


Green Politics : the Global Promise      -  Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra    (1985)     ISBN  0 586 08523 8 

 1 used from £8.00

If you are interested in Green politics, this is one of the books that you MUST read. It discusses the core issues of Green politics, and assesses the growing popularity (at the time) of the Green movement, which primarily took root in Europe--in particular the then West Germany.




Green Politics


Environmentalism and political theory : Towards an ecocentric approach : Robyn Eckersley   (1992)  ISBN  1 85728 020 2

Price: £25.99    Used from  £7.65

A good primer for environmental political thought. Eckersley does an admirable job of bringing the political theory of Habermas and others to environmental political theory. However, it seems that the ecocentrism of Eckersley leaves little room for real political conflict.