Top Enviro Books

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Top Enviro Books

From the first story that captured your imagination as a child to the last paperback you picked up at the airport, what you read profoundly shapes your world. So this is a call to all you erudite green bookworms, what environmental book has the power to inspire change?

Together let’s build the most important must-read book list out there.
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41 votes

The Lorax

"Unless someone like you...cares a whole awful lot...nothing is going to get better...It's not." Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the dange...
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27 votes

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolut...
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25 votes

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between carnivore and vegetarian. As he became a husband and a father, he kept returning to two questions: Why do we eat animals? And would we eat them if we knew how they g...
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20 votes

Walden, or Life in the Woods

Walden emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that, he argues, is the lot of most people. The book is not a traditional autobiography, but combines autobiography with a ...
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18 votes

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit 

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicat...
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16 votes

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature o...
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15 votes

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

"Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only per...
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13 votes

Ecoholic Home

Our resident Ecoholic comes to the rescue again, offering reminders and tips on how to keep your castle (however humble) clean, energy-efficient and healthy. We spend so much time at home — why not make it a sustainable haven instead of a polluting...
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12 votes

An Inconvenient Truth

Both the book and film were inspired by a series of multimedia presentations on global warming that Gore created and delivers to groups around the world. With this book, Gore, who is one of our environmental heroes--and a leading expert--brings toget...
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10 votes

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

Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie—it’s an important movie.” A...
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10 votes

No Impact Man

What does it really take to live eco-effectively? For one year, Colin Beavan swore off plastic and toxins, turned off his electricity, went organic, became a bicycle nut, and tried to save the planet from environmental catastrophe while dragging his...
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10 votes

A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

"First published in 1949 A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of natu...
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9 votes

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs

No Logo employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing—and the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that will surely alter the course of the 21st century....
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8 votes

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered 

Small Is Beautiful is Oxford-trained economist E. F. Schumacher’s classic call for the end of excessive consumption. Schumacher inspired such movements as “Buy Locally” and “Fair Trade,” while voicing strong opposition to “casino capitali...
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6 votes

Ecoholic Body

Adria Vasil, Canada’s straight-shooting green living expert, is back, and this time it’s personal . . . care, that is. Her latest eco bible delivers the lowdown on virtually every product that comes into contact with our bodies. From the pollutan...
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6 votes

Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating

The renowned scientist who fundamentally changed the way we view primates and our relationship with the animal kingdom now turns her attention to an incredibly important and deeply personal issue-taking a stand for a more sustainable world. In this p...
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6 votes

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

Sometime this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Niño ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundr...
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6 votes

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto 

In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and elo...
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5 votes

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than ...
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5 votes

The Ecology of Commerce Revised Edition: A Declaration of Sustainability

The world has changed in the seventeen years since the controversial initial publication of Paul Hawken's "Ecology of Commerce," a stirring treatise about the perceived antagonism between ecology and business. Yet Hawken's impassioned argument--that ...
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5 votes

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

Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick wit...
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4 votes

The Limits to Growth

In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot, ' or resource use beyond the carrying cap...
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4 votes

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

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet--one that is "hot, flat, and crowded." In this Release 2.0 edition, ...
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3 votes

Carmin Cares

Carmin likes lots of things, from ice cream to flowers to princess rings. Most of all, she loves her art - drawings and paintings that touch the heart. When a day at the park doesn't go as planned, Carmin chooses to take a stand.
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3 votes

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water

Bottled and Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last one hundred years—and why we are poorer for it. It’s a big story and water is big business. Every second of eve...
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