Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future


Mary Robinson - 2018
    Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people--people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal.Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.“As advocate for the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world.” -Barack Obama

The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be


J.B. MacKinnon - 2013
    MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. What remains today is an illusion of the wild--an illusion that has in many ways created our world. In 3 beautifully drawn parts, MacKinnon revisits a globe exuberant with life, where lions roam North America and 20 times more whales swim in the sea. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. Finally, he calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. MacKinnon never fails to remind us that nature is a menagerie of marvels. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world," MacKinnon writes, "and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."

Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female


Tania Kindersley - 2009
    This title is a book for women who never got around to perfecting the art of domestic divinity but would quite like to be able to cook supper for six without having a nervous breakdown.

We Should All Be Feminists


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 2012
    With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike. Argued in the same observant, witty and clever prose that has made Adichie a bestselling novelist, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman today—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

Feminism and the Mastery of Nature


Val Plumwood - 1993
    In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women.

Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time


Lynn Margulis - 2007
    Co-editor Eduardo Punset--one of Spain's most loved personages for his popularization of the sciences--interviews an impressive collection of characters drawing out the seldom seen personalities of the world's most important men and woman of science. In Mind, Life and Universe they describe in their own words the most important and fascinating aspects of their research. Frank and often irreverent, these interviews will keep even the most casual reader of science books rapt for hours.Can brain science explain feelings of happiness and despair? Is it true that chimpanzees are just like us when it comes to sexual innuendo? Is there any hard evidence that life exists anywhere other than on the Earth? Through Punset's skillful questioning, readers will meet one scientist who is passionate about the genetic control of everything and another who spends her every waking hour making sure African ecosystems stay intact. The men and women assembled here by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset will provide a source of endless interest.In captivating conversations with such science luminaries as Jane Goodall, James E. Lovelock, Oliver Sachs, and E. O. Wilson, Punset reveals a hidden world of intellectual interests, verve, and humor. Science enthusiasts and general readers alike will devour Mind, Life and Universe, breathless and enchanted by its truths.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez


John Steinbeck - 1951
    The expedition was described by the two men in Sea of Cortez, published in 1941. The day-to-day story of the trip is told here in the Log, which combines science, philosophy and high-spirited adventure.Log from the Sea of Cortez includes the narrative of the journey and the essay “About Ed Ricketts.” It does not include pictures and detailed descriptions of the species collected by Steinbeck and Ricketts. (See also Sea of Cortez.)

Women & Power: A Manifesto


Mary Beard - 2017
    In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?

F*ck That Cape: The Grown Woman's Unapologetic Guide to Putting Herself First


Jennifer Arnise - 2018
    You’ll never read another self-help book ever again. The narrative around being strong has been a crown of thorns for African American women since shewe were brought to this country as slaves. Being smart and clever and efficient was a matter of life and death. Now in present time, being a smart, educated and successful African American woman doesn't determine if we live or die but it often creates an isolating and lonely world because more times than not she is we are hustling to prove herour worth to everyone. You’ve been accommodating all your life. You’ve been willing to set aside your own interests, needs and desires “for the greater good.” You’ve been playing the sacrificial lamb on the altar selflessness for far too long. It’s time to stop trying to be everyone’s hero, putting the needs of others above your own. It is making you miserable and you know it. Deep within you, you know your Superwoman complex leaves a bad taste in your mouth more often than not, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled, alone and angry at the world… and at the people you love. All your life you’ve been told to be a tough, strong, self-reliant, inscrutable Black woman without a chink in her armor, without an ounce of weakness, so you plod on, isolated and lonely because you’re not being true to yourself. You’re suffering, and whether you’re complaining or not. It’s time to stop. With soul-baring stories and anecdotes from her own life, Jennifer gives a detailed account of her journey to healing and shows you how stop “Caping” and begin to have a more compassionate view of yourself and begin making yourself the number one priority in your life and trust your own instincts and abilities without having to compromise to please anyone else. F*ck That Cape is a book that will show you how to trust your inner voice and intuition, a natural talent that we’ve crushed underneath the weight of societal expectations. Here’s what you’re going to learn in this no-fluff, definitive guide to self-care: • How to go from meeting everyone else's needs to getting your own needs met first • Figuring out what you really want, firmly asking for it and getting it without being an asshole • How to build an awesome support system of people that encourage you and boost your confidence • How to give yourself permission to relentlessly pursue your dreams and live the life you've always wanted • Why you should stop trying to please and make everyone happy and practical steps to go about it • …and much more! Deeply insightful, intuitive and even life changing, F*ck that Cape is the ultimate blueprint to crafting your life the way you want it. On your own terms.

A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning


Jakob Johann von Uexküll - 1934
    This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll "a high point of modern antihumanism."A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans advances Uexküll's revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species' morphology and behavior. A Theory of Meaning extends his thinking on the umwelt, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll's work for the first time will find that his concept of the umwelt holds out new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the whole framework of biopolitics itself.

The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood


Belle Boggs - 2016
    She searches the apparently fertile world around her--the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo--for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona; the depiction of childlessness in literature, from Macbeth to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making; the private and public expressions of iconic writers grappling with motherhood and fertility. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless or child-free lives.In The Art of Waiting, Boggs deftly distills her time of waiting into an expansive contemplation of fertility, choice, and the many possible roads to making a life and making a family.

A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul


Eric Maisel - 2006
    In this lively book, Eric Maisel gives writers the guidance they need to take a literal or figurative soul-renewing sojourn to San Francisco. Maisel, one of America’s foremost creativity coaches, explores the how and why of making an artistic pilgrimage to the city, including the pesky problem of finding the perfect pied-a-terre for writing that elusive masterpiece. Thirty individual essays profile the best sections of the city for pumping up the juices (“The View from Bernal Hill,” “South of Market”), noted literati of the past (“Mark Twain and the Onion”), how to find the perfect landlord, dealing with those inspiration-inhibiting earthquake fears, and much more.

Things That Are


Amy Leach - 2012
    In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals


Charles Siebert - 2009
    While researching a recent "New York Times Magazine" cover story about chimpanzees, Charles Siebert visited a retirement home for former ape movie stars and circus entertainers in Wauchula, Florida known as the Center for Great Apes. There Siebert encountered Roger, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ringling Brothers star who seemed convinced he knew the author from some other time and place. Haunted by Roger's response, Siebert takes up residence at the Center for Great Apes and, in the course of one late-night visit to a sleepless Roger's quarters, gets to the bottom of this mysterious connection between himself and his simian counterpart.The result is "The Wauchula Woods Accord," a strikingly written, wide-ranging physical and metaphysical foray into the increasingly fraught frontier between humans and other animals; a journey that encompasses many of the author's encounters with chimpanzees and other animals, as well as the latest scientific discoveries that underscore our intimate biological bonds not only with our nearest kin, but with far more remote-seeming life-forms. By journey's end, the reader arrives at a deeper understanding both of Roger and of our numerous other animal selves, a recognition--an accord-- that carries a new sense of responsibility for how we view and treat all animals, including ourselves.

Sightlines


Kathleen Jamie - 2012
    Her gaze swoops vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote. Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.