Books

Safran Foer is a wonderful writer. Whether you agree with or understand the tact he takes in a given piece, it is always well put and stylistically elegant. For him to take on a topic like our diet and its relationship to climate change was exciting. As he shows clearly in this book diet and specifically eating fewer animal products is one of the most powerful levers individuals have over their environmental footprint. Just by switching a few ingredients in what they eat, they can directly impact, as the United Nations says, many of the worlds environmental problems from local...

I don't read a lot of fiction, but this was given to me as a present and I heard good things about it. What attracted me more than anything else was to the book was that it is about the intertwining relationships between humans and trees. On reading it you realise it is not just about humans and trees, it is the relationships between trees and all life, and the infrastructure that has made that happen over evolutionary time. The book was so beautifully written, it has descriptive passages that are just a joy to read, and only very occasionally...

George Monbiot is one of the pre-eminent voices of our times, all the more shocking because he is given space in a major newspaper like the Guardian. This book is a compilation of many of his editorial style articles over the years. He writes on a vast range of topics. I list this book here in the environment section and although that is perhaps foremost, almost every section of this website would find itself covered by this wonderful book. Climate change, social isolation, housing, each article is a short readable chunk of thinking material. Some of the material may be...

I was lucky enough to see Will Potter speak as part of the Voiceless lecture series in 2014, and thus I have a signed copy of this import book. Throughout its pages, he sets out how the environmental and animal rights movements have been demonised by a capitalist, political and social world that sees them as a threat to their continued profitable existence. I'm reminded very much of a quote I remember after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, when an ex-member of the government said: "We weren't spending most of our time looking at terrorists, we were looking at...

The first line of a book I wish to write is "It is almost impossible to overstate how much we live an evolutionary existence". Given such pretensions, I thought reading this classic by Richard Dawkins was a good idea. It showed me whilst at once I had a very good idea of how evolution works, the complexities of it and the examples really do boggle and edify the mind. Some of the interesting parts I had no idea about where the scientific ideas of other ways evolution could happen other than Darwin's ideas of natural selection. Perhaps reading Dawkin's account...

As has been said, we are sleep-walking to the edge of a cliff. I don't know what to do with the information contained in this book. I almost envy the people who can dismiss the terrible truth of what we are doing to this planet with hand waving statements like "Science doesn't know everything", who go about their small daily lives as if only they and their social circles matter. Clive Hamilton lays out the science of global warming in detail and says as most knowledgable people do, that organisations like the IPCC which our governments rely on to inform...

The authors of the book are Canadians, who have the idea of travelling around the US and looking at how the car dominates economic and social life. They echo many of the experiences I have in Australia living without a car. They also give a wealth of information about the effects cars have on our society, from many different perspectives, but I would say the one which resonates most is how unfriendly and isolating they are on urban culture. People need this sort of information, they need a counter-narrative to the status quo that cars are OK. We've largely given...

The importance of humanity's relationship with our environment didn't start with the release of Silent Spring, or the industrial revolution. How we have treated our environment has been affecting the rise and fall of civilisations for thousands of years. This wonderful and important book talks in detail about a number of things I've already been aware of but hadn't been put in a way that reached me so deeply before. Our extinction of species which has a long history is illustrated with tales such as the demise of the American Passenger Pidgeon. These examples were profound and will stay with...

After reading this book, I felt abreast of most of the issues surrounding whaling, and its history. It offers a reasonably even-handed approach, whilst informing the reader that the blue whale has never recovered from the slaughter that went on unimpeded from the 18th to the 20th centuries, he also asks the question of how the whaling moratorium can continue when some species have made good recoveries. The only problem I see in this book is that whilst I don't believe the author is wrong that whaling can be done responsibly if you accept (which I don't) that it is...

One of two books I've read with this title, Affluenza (Affluence + Influenza) takes the point of view that ever increasing consumption is a disease, caused by greed, spread by advertising, it's symptoms are ever increasing piles of stuff we never use, and it's logical end is the destruction of the natural world in which we live. On average we have twice as much 'stuff' now as we did fifty years ago, yet studies show we are no happier now than we were then. Perhaps if we were to give away half of our 'stuff', we wouldn't need to work...