Environment
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Books

• A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds, by Gary Snyder, 1995, and The Practice of the Wild, by Gary Snyder, 1990. Two collections of essential essays (there are others) by the poet and practicing ecologist.
• Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis-And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster, by Ross Gelbspan -- "a proper approach to climate change could solve many other problems in our social, political, and economic lives. It would dramatically reduce our reliance on oil, and with it our exposure to instability in the Middle East. It would create millions of jobs and raise living standards in poor countries whose populations are affected by climate-driven disease epidemics and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees. It would also expand the global economy and lead to a far wealthier and more peaceful world."
• Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- "charges that this administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy as we know it. In a headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, Kennedy writes, George Bush and his administration have eviscerated the laws that have protected our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife for the past thirty years, enriching the president's political contributors while lowering the quality of life for the rest of us."
• Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, 1995. The groundbreaking anthology that "redefines sanity on a personal and planetary scale." "...this affirmation...that the self does not stop at the skin...but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil..."Mary Catherine Bateson
• Nature and Madness, by Paul Shepard, 1982. "A major contribution to the possibilities of human and environmental liberation."--Morris Berman. For more information on Paul Shepard and all his books, his official memorial site is: http://home.earthlink.net/~frshepard.
• The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, by Andres R. Edwards -- "Sustainability has become a buzzword in the last decade, but its full meaning is complex, emerging from a range of different sectors. In practice, it has become the springboard for millions of individuals throughout the world who are forging the fastest and most profound social transformation of our time-the sustainability revolution. The Sustainability Revolution paints a picture of this largely unrecognized phenomenon from the point of view of five major sectors of society."
• Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning -- short, entertaining, and informative book about everyday things in our lives that we take for granted.
• The Death of Nature -- "Carolyn Merchant (born in Rochester, New York, USA) is an American ecofeminist philosopher most famous for her theory on the 'Death of Nature', whereby she identifies the Enlightenment as the period when science began to atomise, objectify and dissect nature, foretelling its eventual conception as inert. She writes, 'The female earth was central to organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture...for sixteenth-century Europeans the root metaphor binding together the self, society and the cosmos was that of an organism...organismic theory emphasised interdependence among the parts of the human body, subordination of individual to communal purposes in family, community, and state, and vital life permeate the cosmos to the lowliest stone./ (Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1990: 278)" wikipedia, 3/10/06
• The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley,1957. One of many important works by the godfather of the broader environmental view, who also showed the environmental value of graceful writing.
• The Island Within, by Richard Nelson, 1991. A personal exploration of psyche and nature that brings the author's added perspective of years living in a remote Native culture.
• The Only World We've Got: A Paul Shepard Reader, by Paul Shepard, 1996. "In this superb collection, Paul Shepard once again discovers the poetry that lies at the heart of biology. There is no question but that Paul Shepard is our premier environmental philosopher."--Theodore Roszak. For more information on Paul Shepard and all his books, his official memorial site is: http://home.earthlink.net/~frshepard.

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