Book picks similar to
Work, Health, and Environment: Old Problems, New Solutions by Charles Levenstein
environment
core
environment-ecology-food
global-development
The Minimalist Vegan: A Simple Manifesto On Why To Live With Less Stuff And More Compassion
Michael Ofei - 2017
A manifesto on why to live with less stuff and with more compassion. They explore the intersection of minimalism and veganism and all that each complimentary lifestyle has to offer. They dive deep into conscious living and what it actually means. With chapters on topics such as "The More Virus" and Courageously Simple to The Superior Species and A Plastic World, Masa and Michael cover every aspect to help challenge your way of thinking. Their hope is that by the end of it, you’ll have the thirst and passion to architect your life in a way that brings you purpose and joy each and every day. They have written this book to be read within a few hours. Yes, even if you’d consider yourself to be a slow reader! Each chapter can be read independently, so you can jump ahead to a section that resonates with you. However, reading the book from start to finish is a great way to build momentum as you manifest your ideas and dive into a more conscious way of living.
Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning)
Marion Nestle - 2015
Little more than flavored sugar-water, these drinks cost practically nothing to produce or buy, yet have turned their makers--principally Coca-Cola and PepsiCo--into a multibillion-dollar industry with global recognition, distribution, and political power. Billed as "refreshing," "tasty," "crisp," and "the real thing," sodas also happen to be so well established to contribute to poor dental hygiene, higher calorie intake, obesity, and type-2 diabetes that the first line of defense against any of these conditions is to simply stop drinking them. Habitually drinking large volumes of soda not only harms individual health, but also burdens societies with runaway healthcare costs. So how did products containing absurdly inexpensive ingredients become multibillion dollar industries and international brand icons, while also having a devastating impact on public health?In Soda Politics, Dr. Marion Nestle answers this question by detailing all of the ways that the soft drink industry works overtime to make drinking soda as common and accepted as drinking water, for adults and children. Dr. Nestle, a renowned food and nutrition policy expert and public health advocate, shows how sodas are principally miracles of advertising; Coca-Cola and PepsiCo spend billions of dollars each year to promote their sale to children, minorities, and low-income populations, in developing as well as industrialized nations. And once they have stimulated that demand, they leave no stone unturned to protect profits. That includes lobbying to prevent any measures that would discourage soda sales, strategically donating money to health organizations and researchers who can make the science about sodas appear confusing, and engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to create goodwill and silence critics. Soda Politics follows the money trail wherever it leads, revealing how hard Big Soda works to sell as much of their products as possible to an increasingly obese world.But Soda Politics does more than just diagnose a problem--it encourages readers to help find solutions. From Berkley to Mexico City and beyond, advocates are successfully countering the relentless marketing, promotion, and political protection of sugary drinks. And their actions are having an impact - for all of the hardball and softball tactics the soft drink industry employs to maintain the status quo, soda consumption has been flat or falling for years. Health advocacy campaigns are now the single greatest threat to soda companies' profits. Soda Politics provides readers with the tools they need to keep up pressure on Big Soda in order to build healthier and more sustainable food systems.
The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom
James R. Green - 2015
On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis verging on civil war that stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the US Senate. In The Devil is Here in These Hills, celebrated labor historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.The value of West Virginia’s coalfields had been known for decades, and after rail arrived in the 1870s, industrialists pushed fast into the wilderness, digging mines and building company towns where they wielded nearly complete control over everyday life. The state’s high-quality coal drove American expansion and industrialization, but for tens of thousands of laborers, including boys as young as ten, mining life showed the bitter irony of the state motto, “Mountaineers are Always Free.” Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent, then broken, and the violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of miners marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and told in vibrant detail, The Devil is Here in These Hills is the definitive book on an essential chapter in the history of American freedom.
Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours
Phillip Longman - 2007
This encouraging change not only has benefited veterans but also provides a blueprint for salvaging America's own deeply troubled healthcare system. "Best Care Anywhere" shows how a government bureaucracy, working with little notice, is setting the standard for best practices and cost reduction while the private sector is lagging in both areas. Author Phillip Longman challenges conventional wisdom by explaining exactly how market forces work to lower quality and raise prices in the healthcare sector, and how U.S. medical practices have a weak basis in science. The book, expanded from a widely praised article in the "Washington Monthly," mixes hard facts with author Philip Longmans' compelling human story of the loss of his wife to cancer. Part manifesto, part moving memoir, "Best Care Anywhere" offers new hope for addressing a major problem of contemporary society that affects all of us.
The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with 'climate change' turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?
Christopher Booker - 2009
It shows how the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is run by a small group of 'global warming' zealots, who have repeatedly rigged evidence to support their theory. But the politicians, pushed by the media, have so fallen for its propaganda that, short of dramatic change, our Western world now faces an unprecedented disaster.
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
Heather E. Heying - 2021
They distill more than 20 years of research and first-hand accounts from the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth into straightforward principles and guidance for confronting our culture of hyper-novelty.For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors' names. Differences between the sexes once served a necessary evolutionary purpose, but today many dismiss the concept of biological sex as offensive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us.
The Wellness Rebel
Pixie Turner - 2018
In recent months, however, there has been a backlash against certain healthy lifestyle brands, particularly those without scientific qualifications who promote ‘clean eating’. THE WELLNESS REBEL explores the aftermath of this, looking at where balanced healthy eating will go next and how we can get back to evidence-based basics and enjoy eating well.With each chapter themed around a common healthy food misconception such as 'The Alkaline Myth', 'Go Raw' and 'How Super are Superfoods?', THE WELLNESS REBEL explores the basics of nutrition in an accessible and entertaining way, with Pixie sharing her tips, tricks and tastiest recipes - including her much-loved Pixie Plates - for a truly healthy diet, with no detoxes, no elimination diets, no restrictions – and absolutely no BS.
Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet
Mia Birk - 2010
With only table scraps of funding, Birk led a revolution that helped grow Portland, Oregon, into the country's premier cycling city. She then hit the road, teaching communities how to incorporate cycling into their civic DNA to make their towns healthier, safer, and more livable. Through a panoply of hilarious and poignant stories, Birk takes readers on a rollercoaster journey of global and local discovery, while bringing into sharp focus some of the planet's most pressing and hotly debated energy and transportation issues, policies, shortcomings, and solutions. Her funny, touching, and instructive Joyride offers hope and experienced how-to advice to anyone interested in changing our world for the better—one pedal stroke at a time.
What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
Sara Hendren - 2020
Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider--or reconsider--the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it--from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture--Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body's stunning capacity for adaptation--rather than a rigid insistence on "normalcy"--look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.
Gristle: from Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)
Moby - 2010
Multiplatinum musician Moby and leading food policy activist and expert Miyun Park have brought together ten of the country's leading voices on this issue - including foodies, policy makers, food business leaders, and food activists - who together eloquently lay out how and why the overconsumption of industrially produced meat unnecessarily harms agricultural workers, communities, the environment, and human health, as well as animals. Combining hard-hitting facts with a light touch - and with fascinating charts and illustrations depicting the stark realities of America's industrial food system - Gristle is the first stop for everyone who wants to make informed choices about the food they consume.
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
Charles C. Mann - 2018
Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
John Milton Cooper Jr. - 1990
It was a trying time, however, for many Americans, including women who fought for the vote, blacks who began organizing to secure their rights, and activists on the Left who lost theirs in the first Red Scare of the century.John Cooper's panoramic history of this period shows us where we came from and sheds light on where we are.
Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture
Shannon Hayes - 2010
Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities. In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.
Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
Scott Gottlieb - 2021
As the pandemic unfolded, Gottlieb was in regular contact with all the key players in Congress, the Trump administration, and the drug and diagnostic industries. He provides an inside account of how level after level of American government crumbled as the COVID-19 crisis advanced.A system-wide failure across government institutions left the nation blind to the threat, and unable to mount an effective response. We’d prepared for the wrong virus. We failed to identify the contagion early enough and became overly reliant on costly and sometimes divisive tactics that couldn’t fully slow the spread. We never considered asymptomatic transmission and we assumed people would follow public health guidance. Key bureaucracies like the CDC were hidebound and outmatched. Weak political leadership aggravated these woes. We didn’t view a public health disaster as a threat to our national security.Many of the woes sprung from the CDC, which has very little real-time reporting capability to inform us of Covid’s twists and turns or assess our defenses. The agency lacked an operational capacity and mindset to mobilize the kind of national response that was needed. To guard against future pandemic risks, we must remake the CDC and properly equip it to better confront crises. We must also get our intelligence services more engaged in the global public health mission, to gather information and uncover emerging risks before they hit our shores so we can head them off. For this role, our clandestine agencies have tools and capabilities that the CDC lacks.Uncontrolled Spread argues we must fix our systems and prepare for a deadlier coronavirus variant, a flu pandemic, or whatever else nature -- or those wishing us harm -- may threaten us with. Gottlieb outlines policies and investments that are essential to prepare the United States and the world for future threats.
The End of Food
Paul Roberts - 2008
In The End of Food, Paul Roberts investigates this system and presents a startling truth—how we make, market, and transport our food is no longer compatible with the billions of consumers the system was built to serve.The emergence of large-scale and efficient food production forever changed our relationship with food and ultimately left a vulnerable and paradoxical system in place. High-volume factory systems create new risks for food-borne illness; high-yield crops generate grain, produce, and meat of declining nutritional quality; and while nearly a billion people are overweight, roughly as many people are starving. In this vivid narrative, Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us prepare to make the necessary decisions to survive the demise of food production as we know it.