Book picks similar to
Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us by David Whyte
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This Book Will Save You Time
Misir Mahmudov - 2020
Everything else can be made, bought or created. Our life is made up of around 600,000 hours and every second is of infinite value. We live in an attention economy where corporations are fighting for our time with the goal of monetizing our every second. The money we use loses value and devalues our time through inflation. When we work, we are exchanging our limited time for money whose quantity increases every year. It hasn’t always been this way. People used gold as money for a reason; it was also a limited resource. Now, what does the future hold?Valuing your time is the first step to improving your life. Knowing that your time is the only limited resource makes you more selective about the things you do, the people you spend your time with and the assets you choose to store your wealth in. Once you learn to appreciate your time, you will get busy doing the things you love and start making better financial choices.
The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply
Marie-Monique Robin - 2009
The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant--the world's leading producer of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)--and how its new "green" face is no less troubling than its PCB (and Agent Orange) -soaked past.Robin reports that, following its long history of manufacturing hazardous chemicals and lethal herbicides, Monsanto is now marketing itself as a "life sciences" company, seemingly convinced about the virtues of sustainable development. However, Monsanto now controls the majority of the yield of the world's genetically modified corn and soy, ingredients found in more than 95 percent of American households, and its alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly are the subject of worldwide concern.Released to great acclaim and controversy in France, throughout Europe, and in Latin America, The World According to Monsanto is sure to change the way we think about food safety and the corporate control of our food supply.
First Along The River: A Brief History Of The Us Environmental Movement
Benjamin Kline - 1997
environmental movement that covers the colonial period through 1999. It provides students with a balanced, historical perspective on the history of the environmental movement in relation to major social and political events in U.S. history. The book highlights important people and events, places critical concepts in context, and shows the impact of government, industry, and population on the American landscape. Comprehensive yet brief, First Along the River discusses the religious and philosophical beliefs that shaped Americans' relationship to the environment, traces the origins and development of government regulations that impact Americans' use of natural resources, and shows why popular environmental groups were founded and how they changed over time.
How To Live Off-Grid - Journeys Outside The System
Nick Rosen - 2007
Off-grid locations can range from private islands to yurts and tree-houses; the people living there might be back-packers, right wing survivalists, international business travellers or hippies; they may move around in buses or yachts, houseboats or 4-wheel drives. All are outside or in between the criss-crossing lines of power, water and phone that delineate the civilized world. Some are trying to save the planet, some live that way because it is all they can afford, some just want the freedom.This book is about that physical sense of off-grid. But it is also about taking the off-grid attitude into your local park or your own back garden. It is part travellogue as Nick Rosen, his wife and baby take off in a camper van to visit off-gridders representing every aspect of living off-grid, both part-time or permanent. And it is also a guide to avoiding the pitfalls and finding the best solutions - and the most appealing gadgetry - for going off-grid yourself.
Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence
Marc Bekoff - 2014
Marc Bekoff, one of the world’s leading animal experts and activists, here applies rewilding to human attitudes. Rewilding Our Hearts invites readers to do the essential work of becoming reenchanted with the world, acting from the inside out, and dissolving false boundaries to truly connect with both nature and themselves.
Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat
Howard F. Lyman - 1998
It not only led to Oprah's declaration that she'd never eat a burger again, it sent shock waves through a concerned and vulnerable public.A fourth-generation Montana rancher, Lyman investigated the use of chemicals in agriculture after developing a spinal tumor that nearly paralyzed him. Now a vegetarian, he blasts through the propaganda of beef and dairy interests - and the government agencies that protect them - to expose an animal-based diet as the primary cause of cancer, heart disease, and obesity in this country. He warns that the livestock industry is repeating the mistakes that led to Mad Cow disease in England while simultaneously causing serious damage to the environment.Persuasive, straightforward, and full of the down-home good humor and optimism of a son of the soil, Mad Cowboy is both an inspirational story of personal transformation and a convincing call to action for a plant-based diet - for the good of the planet and the health of us all.
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dina Gilio-Whitaker - 2019
As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
Life After the State
Dominic Frisby - 2013
In every instance where government gets involved in people's lives with a desire to do good, it can always be relied on to make the situation much, much worse. Yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we imagine that a world without the state would be a wild and terrifying place. With wit and devastating clarity of argument, Frisby shows in this book that human nature proves the opposite to be true. Welcome to Life After the State. "Dominic Frisby has gone and done something extraordinary: written a page-turner on the economy. It's both readable and radical, a serious book that is, by turn, fascinating, alarming and contentious. At times, the book makes you want to shout its message from the rooftops; at others, it just makes you want to shout. Life after the State challenges so much of what we take for granted. It is a wake-up call for politicians, economists and us all, written with clarity, verve and, more than that, the restless passion of an intelligent, inquisitive malcontent. Read it." - James Harding, once editor of The Times now Director of BBC News and Current AffairsReviewThought-provoking and original, anyone concerned how big and bloated government has become must read this book. Dominic Frisby asks the kind of questions that those in Westminster need to start asking. - Douglas Carswell, MP We can't go on as we are. All politicians know that. But if they read Life After The State they might also start to understand what they might do about it. A must read for any thinking man or woman. - Merryn Somerset Webb, FT columnist and editor Moneyweek Magazine Things are so bad that in our time only a comedian can make sense of an economy based on printing money. Dominic Frisby's Life After the State is an accessible contemporary anarcho-capitalist critique of the mess we're in with pointers for our escape. - Guido Fawkes, political blogger It's incredibly readable and incredibly thought-provoking. - Al Murray, The Pub Landlord An entertaining cogent attack on state power, which should topple the centralist Trots once and for all. - Tom Hodgkinson, The IdlerAbout the AuthorDominic Frisby is now mostly a writer but has been a comedian, actor, voice-over artist, TV presenter, boxing ring announcer, florist, removal man, camp theatrical agent's PA, sports commentator and busker. The Guardian called his stand-up comedy 'viciously funny and inventive'.
The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies
Guillaume Pitron - 2021
Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals — but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?The green-tech revolution will reduce our dependency on nuclear power, coal, and oil, heralding a new era free of pollution, fossil-fuel shortages, and cross-border tensions. But there is a hidden dark side to this seemingly utopian vision.Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, award-winning journalist and documentarist Guillaume Pitron reveals that, by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence — on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium.These are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels, as well as our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other technologies. But we know very little about how rare metals are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs; meanwhile, China has captured the lion’s share of the market and is using it to consolidate its position as a leading global power.The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order.
A Conservationist Manifesto
Scott Russell Sanders - 2009
How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What changes in values and behavior will be required? Ranging geographically from southern Indiana to the Boundary Waters Wilderness and culturally from the Bible to billboards, Sanders extends the visions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson to our own day. A Conservationist Manifesto shows the crucial relevance of a conservation ethic at a time of mounting concern about global climate change, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, and the economic inequities between rich and poor nations. The important message of this powerful book is that conservation is not simply a personal virtue but a public one.
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front
Joel Salatin - 2007
From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.
$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better
Christopher Steiner - 2007
Steiner, an engineer by training, sees how a simple but constant rise in oil and related prices will restructure our lifestyle. But what may surprise readers is that all of these changes may not be negative.
Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
Bernie Sanders - 2016
In the book, Sanders shares experiences from the campaign trail and outlines his ideas for continuing a political revolution to fight for a progressive economic, environmental, racial and social justice agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan - 2006
Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore's dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What's at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.The Omnivore's Dilemma is a groundbreaking book in which one of America's most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but, according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, ath the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather or grow ourselves?To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even mortal implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.
The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud: And Those Who Are Too Fearful to Do So
Lawrence Solomon - 2008
that the science is settled. Author Lawrence Solomon an internationally renowned environmentalist shows these men have faced a vicious campaign of intimidation by those who, like Al Gore, seek to pervert science and silence dissent to advance their own political agenda. Some have been intimidated into silence. Others have seen their funding denied and their labs shut down as a result of political pressure. But the testimony of their work remains too powerful to deny. Extensively footnoted including URLs to crucial scientific papers (and lively e-mails detailing the inside politics of global warming) and lavishly illustrated with charts and graphs, The Deniers will do more than spark controversy. The Deniers is destined to become the most reliable and provocative sourcebook on the real global warming debate.