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The ancient Biblical story of Noah and the Ark tells how humans and God worked together to save the biota of the Earth from an ecological catastrophe. To survive the Flood and repopulate the Earth with humans and animals, Noah brought all the animals on board the Ark with his family – two by two. This provides the template for our SavingtheEarth.net Short List – two choices from each section!
If you are looking for a place to start with your reading on the environment, we suggest you begin with one of our favorite recommendations listed below.
Recommended Books on Planet Earth |
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Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth
Jay Apt, Michael Helfert and Justin Wilkinson
This awe-inspiring collection of photograhs gives those of us stuck on Earth a glimpse of what our home planet looks like from the window of a spacecraft. All the continents are shown, as well as weather events, the aurora borealis, and the visible effects of anthropogenic environmental change - deforestation and desertification chief among them. Take a sobering look at our lovely planet and realize how small and fragile it really is.
2003, National Geographic
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Planet Earth & The Blue Planet Seas of Life
(Special Collector's Edition - 10 DVD Set)
Alastair Fothergill, producer
BBC natural history producer Alastair Fothergill spent the last ten years producing two of the most stunningly beautiful series ever created. Seas of Life is the definitive exploration of the marine world, chronicling the mysteries of the deep, coastline populations, sea mammals, tidal and climatic influences, and the complete biological system that revolves around the world's oceans. Planet Earth uses high definition photography and revolutionary ultra-high speed cameras to produce the ultimate portrait of our planet - capturing rare action, impossible locations and intimate moments with our planet's best loved, wildest and most elusive creatures. Sixteen hours of viewing time, including many extra features.
2007, BBC Warner
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Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World's Wildlife
David Burnie
Stunning photographs and informative text elevate this book beyond a coffee-table existence. It includes nformation on the classification of animals, their habitats and behavior with charts, maps, photographs and illustrations. Subsequent chapters focus on specific species, divided into broad groups: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes and invertebrates. Endangered species information is at the end of each chapter. Since biodiversity is now at the forefront of biologists' concerns, the volume reports on the issues critical to ecology, from habitat loss to the species that are most endangered within each class.
Amazon.com Editor's Choice - Best of 2001
2005, DK ADULT
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Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
Carl Safina
In this lyrical and heartfelt account of the North Atlantic Blue Tuna and Pacific Salmon, Safina describes how populations have fallen by more than 90% in just the last few decades - the result of changing global temperatures, overfishing, pollution, and inland watershed destruction. Safina argues that we must extend our sense of biological community to ocean animals before it is too late.
1999, Owl Books
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Galapagos (DVD)
In these volcanic islands off the west coast of Ecuador we see a living laboratory of life, both geological and biological. The westernmost islands are still rising above the sea, while the eastern islands are sinking, ultimately to disappear below the surface. Between the two are the middle islands - fertile, lush lands that contain an incredible diversity of life and inspired Darwin to first formulate his theory of evolution. This beautifully filmed journey highlights the exotic wildlife in the midst of gorgeous scenery.
2007, BBC Warner
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The Life of Birds (3 DVD set)
The definitive series on the most colorful, popular and perfectly adapted creatures on earth, The Life of Birds traverses the globe, covering 42 countries and examining over 300 different species. Pushing filming technology to the limits, new behavior is brought to the screen in staggering detail. Infrared cameras find oilbirds deep in pitch-black caves; ultra-slowmotion film unravels the complexities of bird flight; and ultraviolet cameras reveal the world from a bird's point of view. Ten hours viewing time.
2002, BBC Warner
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The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
From 1804 to 1806, Meriwether Lewis, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men, made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping the rivers as they went, tracing the principal waterways to the sea. Together the captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the flora and fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they encountered, and the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed, from their base camp near St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River. These journals are an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration and the writing of natural history.
1997, Mariner Books
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Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden
Michael P. Branch, ed.
Reading the Roots is an unprecedented anthology of outstanding early writings about American nature. Rather than begin with Henry David Thoreau, who is often identified as the progenitor of American nature writing, editor Michael P. Branch instead surveys the long tradition that prefigures and anticipates Thoreau and his literary descendants. The selections in the book describe a diversity of landscapes, wildlife, and natural phenomena. The volume also includes a critical introduction discussing the cultural, scientific, and literary value of early American nature writing; headnotes that contextualize all authors and selections; and a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary sources in the field.
2004, University of Georgia Press
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A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden; Or, Life in the Woods / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod
Henry David Thoreau
Subtly interweaving natural observation, personal experience, and historical lore, these primary works by Thoreau reveal his brilliance not only as a writer, but as a naturalist, scholar, historian, poet, and philosopher. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip taken with his brother. Walden, one of America's great books, is at once a personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, manual of self-reliance, and masterpiece of style. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod portray landscapes changing irreversibly even as he wrote. Thoreau’s essential works in one volume.
1985, Library of America
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A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851
Henry David Thoreau
Many reader’s exposure to Thoreau's published works like Walden and The Maine Woods are intrigued enough to look deeper. Inevitably, you end up with the Journals. Thoreau's journal of 1851 reveals profound ideas and observations in the making, including wonderful writing on the natural history of Concord. This journal allows the reader to follow Thoreau through the cycle of the seasons he observed so closely.
1993, Penguin
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Sailing Alone around the World
Joshua Slocum
Sir Joshua Slocum’s spellbinding account of his 46,000 mile, three-year-long solo journey around the world—the first ever made—has inspired generations of readers. "I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston…” Sailing Alone, a compelling statement of self-reliance, is the “nautical equivalent” to Thoreau’s Walden. Slocum said afterwards that he had been “in touch with nature as few have ever been”, and described his entrance to the stormy Strait of Magellan: “…the scene was again real and gloomy; the wind, northeast, and blowing a gale, sent feather-white spume along the coast; such a sea ran as would swamp an ill-appointed ship…I observed that two great tide-races made ahead, one very close to the point of land and one farther offshore. Between the two…went the Spray with close-reefed sails.” This is a gripping adventure story suffused with the salty tang of sea air and a palpable sense of the powers of Nature.
2005, Shambhala
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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
This memoir by Edward Abbey recounts his years as a park ranger working at Arches National Park in Utah. Abbey's keen eye and sharp writing clearly impart the beauty of the desert and the importance of preserving our limited natural resources. His reflections and rants on American environmentalism, the auto and mining industries, and the impact they have on our national park system ring just as true today as when the book was first published in 1968.
1990, Touchstone
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A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There
Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac is a classic and beloved book, remaining in print over 60 years for the strength of its ideas, its compelling stories, and the quality of its prose. Leopold honored the land, believing it to be a community of living things, to be loved and respected, the deepest source of all our cultural harvests. These beliefs lead ultimately to his Land Ethic, presented in the last sections of the book. Sand County Almanac begins by taking the reader through the seasons on Leopold’s farmed-out farmstead in central Wisconsin, providing a rich and detailed picture of the rhythm of life on the land. Everything matters: the simple act of cutting a dead tree for firewood becomes a lesson in the interweaving of natural history and social history. Each bite of the blade into an earlier ring of the tree gives us a story, both human and natural. As the "fragrant little chips of history" fall, we see the complex and ongoing interrelationship between the tree, other trees, and the humans living around them.
John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing 1977
1989, Oxford University Press
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The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes
Peter Matthiessen
National Book Award winner Peter Matthiessen, a self-professed "craniac," has been studying birds most of his life, but his pursuit of cranes is closer to a spiritual quest than a naturalist's exercise. These majestic, mythic and notoriously shy birds, capable of soaring at heights of 20,000 feet, are often fond of remote and rugged places. Matthiessen's search for cranes has taken him to hidden corners of Siberia, China, Mongolia, Tibet, Sudan, and Australia. Matthiessen observes that the cranes serve as an ecological warning: "Perhaps more than any other living creatures, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species - and ours too - must ultimately depend for survival."
2003, North Point Press
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The Island Within
Richard Nelson
The Island Within is a beautifully written tribute to the Pacific Northwest. Drawn from the author's journals, it is an account of the natural and cultural history of an island in the waters of the Haida Strait, focusing on geology, marine life, wildlife, habitats and Koyukon heritage. On frequent visits to the island, anthropologist Nelson describes his self-sufficient existence there, practicing a respect for the wilderness learned from the Alaskan native peoples. The Island Within is filled with epiphanies both small and large as Nelson opens all his senses to become immersed in the natural world of the island.
John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing 1991
1991, Vintage
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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Bill McKibben
In his introduction to this superb anthology, editor McKibben proposes that "environmental writing is America's most distinctive contribution to the world's literature." The collected pieces amply prove the point. Arranged chronologically, McKibben's selection of more than 100 writers includes great early conservationists, the early exponents of national parks and wilderness areas, writers who have borne witness to environmental degradation, visionaries, contemporary activist/writers, and many other eloquent nature writers. McKibben's trenchant introductions to the pieces sum up each writer's thoughts and form a running commentary on the progress of the conservation movement. The book can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing.
2008, Library of America
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The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
Barry Lopez, ed.
Since its inception in 1982, Orion magazine has been a forum for looking beyond the effects of ecological crises to their root causes in human culture. Less an anthology than a vision statement, this timely collection challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional environmentalism. Edited and introduced by Barry Lopez, The Future of Nature encompasses such topics as local economies, the social dynamics of activism, America’s incarceration society, naturalism in higher education, developing nations, spiritual ecology, the military-industrial landscape, and the challenges of wilderness designation.
2007, Milkweed Editions
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Nature Writing: The Tradition in English
Robert Finch and John Elder, eds.
This fine, well-annotated anthology offers selections from familiar writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez. It contains surprises as well, including George Orwell's little-known essay, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" and Herman Melville's musings on how the great white whale came to be so white in the first place, the fruit of the deep natural-historical research that underlies Moby-Dick. At more than 900 pages, The Norton Book of Nature Writing is too hefty to pack into the wild, but every page is an inspiration to take into the world outdoors.
2002, W. W. Norton
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The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
Lawrence Buell
The best writing about nature, literary scholar Buell suggests, has at its root an argument that humans are accountable to the environment. In the American literary canon, the work that best demonstrates this thesis is Thoreau's classic Walden, a memoir celebrating at once the virtues of voluntary simplicity and the quest for political liberty. It is from Walden that much contemporary writing about nature derives. In this study, Buell charts the growth of Thoreau's own environmental ethic and his lasting influence on writers of many kinds.
1996, Belknap Press
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Wilderness and the American Mind
Roderick Nash
Roderick Nash's classic study of America's changing attitudes toward wilderness has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times has listed it among the 100 most influential books published in the last 25 years; Outside Magazine has included it in a survey of "books that changed our world;" and it has been called the "Book of Genesis for environmentalists." Now a fourth edition of this highly regarded work is available, with a new preface and epilogue in which Nash explores the future of wilderness and reflects on its ethical and biocentric relevance.
2001, Yale University Press
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Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape
Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, eds.
National Book Award-winner Lopez and co-editor Gwartney assemble 45 writers, known for their intimate connection to particular places, and challenge them to draw on the polyglot richness of American English to collectively create a unique dictionary. This marvelous book, treating such words as arroyo, muskeg, kiss tank, vly, graded shoreline, and revetment, enlivens readers to the rich diversity of language that captures our complex relationship to the land.
2006, Trinity University Press
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Writing About Nature: A Creative Guide
John A. Murray
Originally published by the Sierra Club in 1995, this handbook has helped thousands of aspiring writers, scholars and students share their experiences with nature and the outdoors. Using exercises and examples, Murray covers genres, techniques, and publication issues. Many examples from the masters of nature writing are included. Recommended readings, a directory of creative writing programs and a directory of environmental organizations make this a comprehensive and useful book for writers.
2003, University of New Mexico Press
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The Diversity of Life
Edward O. Wilson
In this book a master scientist tells the story of how life on earth evolved. Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson eloquently describes how the species of the world became diverse and why that diversity is threatened today as never before. "The most important scientific book of the year." The Boston Globe
1999, W. W. Norton
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Precious Heritage: The Status of Biodiversity in the United States
Bruce A. Stein
This comprehensive book analyzes patterns of biological diversity in the U.S. The country's 200,000 species are not faring well. Roughly one-third are at risk: 500 are already extinct or missing. Precious Heritage identifies the first ever "hot spots" where conservation efforts would be especially important and challlenges us to consider the scale of habitat conservation that will be needed to protect entire ecological systems.
2000, Oxford University Press
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Contested Nature: Promoting International Biodiversity and Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century
Steven R. Brechin
How can the international conservation movement protect biological diversity, while at the same time safeguarding the rights and fulfilling the needs of people, particularly the poor? Contested Nature argues that to be successful in the long term, social justice and biological conservation must go hand in hand. The protection of nature is a complex social enterprise, and much more a process of politics, and of human organization, than ecology. Using case studies, the book shows that pursuing social justice enhances biodiversity conservation rather than diminishing it, and that the fate of local peoples and that of conservation are completely intertwined.
2003, State University of New York Press
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Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
Michael T. Klare
Demand by rapidly growing populations for scarce resources is the most likely cause of wars in the 21st century, Klare says. He describes rapidly increasing demand for resources as the world industrializes; the concentration of resources in unstable states; and the competing claims to ownership of these resources by neighboring states. He sees the potential for conflict over oil in the Persian Gulf and in the Caspian and South China Seas; over water in the Nile Basin and other multinational river systems; and over timber, gems and minerals from Borneo to Sierra Leone. Finite resources, escalating demand and the location of resources in regions torn by ethnic and political unrest all combine as preconditions of war. Klare presents a persuasive case for paying serious attention to these impending hostilities and furnishes the basic information needed to understand their danger and the importance of international cooperation in staving off conflict.
2002, Holt
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Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century
Dave Foreman
Activist Dave Foreman details human impacts on species survival, including direct killing, habitat loss and fragmentation, introduction of exotic species, and climate change. He shows how wildlands networks instead of isolated protected areas are the logical next step for the conservation movement. An inspiring and empowering call to action for scientists, activists and laypeople.
2004, Island Press
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The Unnatural History of the Sea
Callum Roberts
Marine conservation biologist Roberts presents a devastating account of the effects of fishing on the sea. Once-abundant acquatic life has declined to the point where we probably have less than 5% of the total mass of fish that once swam in Europe's seas. Industrial fishing has virtually eliminated entire species. He argues persuasively for the establishment of marine reserves - protected areas where fish stocks have a chance to recover. This book is a vivid reminder of what we've lost and a plea to save what is left.
2007, Island Press
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A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggle and Survival
Ken S. Coates
This book spans the period from the pivotal migrations which saw the peopling of the world to the present, and examines the processes by which tribal peoples established themselves as separate from surplus-based and more material societies. It considers the impact of the policies of domination and colonization which brought dramatic change to indigenous cultures.
2004, Palgrave Macmillan
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Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization
Jerry Mander
This book documents the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth's surviving indigenous peoples. Since many of the planet's dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities, they are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. In first-hand reports Paradigm Wars details the devastating impacts of extractive industries and bioprospecting, the degrading of cultural artifacts and languages, and even the damage done by some well-meaning conservation groups. The book highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting this onslaught, often with amazing success.
2006, Sierra Club Books
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Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit
Al Gore
Former Vice President Al Gore focuses on the threats that everyday choices pose to our climate, water, soil, and diversity of plant and animal life. A passionate, lifelong defender of the environment, Gore describes how human actions and decisions can endanger or safeguard the vulnerable ecosystem that sustains us.
2006, Rodale Books
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The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment - what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished? - Weisman has written a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. New York City subways would fill with water, forests would retake the buckled streets, and land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself. After thousands of years, the earth might revert to Eden. Thought-provoking.
2007, Thomas Dunne Books
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Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
Natural Capitalism shows how leading-edge companies are practicing "a new type of industrialism" that is more efficient and profitable while saving the environment and creating jobs. The authors write that in the next century, cars will get 200 miles per gallon without compromising safety and power, manufacturers will relentlessly recycle their products, and the world's standard of living will jump without further damaging natural resources. They call their approach natural capitalism because it's based on the principle that business can be good for the environment - and the tools are at hand to make it work. A fascinating and provocative read.
2000, Back Bay Books
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The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift
Andres R. Edwards
Edwards examines sustainability issues in five major sectors of society: community, commerce, natural resources, ecological design and the biosphere. Sustainability Revolution emphasizes the importance of an attitude of stewardship of the Earth's resources; the need for economic restructuring promoting no waste and equitable distribution of resources; an understanding and respect for the principles of nature; the restoration of life forms; and an intergeneratinal perspective on solutions. The book describes innovative sustainable projects and policies in Colombia, Brazil, India and the Netherlands.
2005, New Society Publishers
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Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
Allen D. Kanner
This pathfinding collection shows how the health of the planet is inextricably linked to the psychological health of humanity, individually and collectively. Ecopsychology is both a new beginning for environmentalism and a revolution in modern psychology.
1995, Sierra Club Books
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Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
Bill Plotkin
Psychologist, eco-therapist, and wilderness guide Plotkin presents a new model of the whole of human life and spirituality for a world in dire ecological need, spoiled by patho-adolescent society. Nature and the Human Soul calls us to a fresh conception of individual and collective evolutionary life genuinely reconnected to the wild of nature. Using the indigenous template of the four compass directions, Plotkin describes eight stages on the wheel of spiritual development - the Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master and Sage. The Wheel is a deep-structure portrait of nature-and-soul-oriented cultures, a portrait that encompasses child-raising practices, core values, stages of growth, rites of passage, community organization, and relationship to the greater Earth community. Graceful prose is counterbalanced with diagrams and clear chapter structure. Plotkin offers an essential, weighty book for our perilous times.
2007, New World Library
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Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Paul Hawken
Environmentalist Paul Hawken believes that we are in the midst of a world-changing rise of activist groups, all "working toward ecological sustainability and social justice." Neither ideological nor centralized, this coalescence of activism is a spontaneous and organic response to the recognition that environmental problems are social-justice problems. Hawken compares this gathering of forces to the human immune system as people are joining together to defend life on Earth. Hopeful and inspiring.
2007, Viking
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Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
The authors argue that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with global warming. In short, "environmentalism" must die so that something new can be born. Break Through articulates a new politics for a new century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints; human possibility, not limits. What the new ecological crises demand is that we unleash a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union - those break throughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future. The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.
2007, Houghton Mifflin
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Globalization and Its Discontents
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Nobel prize-winner Stiglitz, an experienced economist, explains what globalization means in practice and offers a reasoned critique of the main institutions that govern globalization: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. He strongly believes that globalization can be a positive force around the world, particularly for the poor, but only if the IMF, World Bank, and WTO dramatically alter the way they operate, beginning with increased transparency and a greater willingness to examine their own actions closely. This smart, provocative study contributes significantly to the ongoing debate and provides a model of analytical rigor concerning the process of assisting countries facing the challenges of economic development and transformation.
2003, W. W. Norton
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