Book picks similar to
Culture, Architecture and Nature: An Ecological Design Retrospective by Sim Van der Ryn
sustainability
climate
phd-thesis
thesis
The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths That Hinder Progress
Mark Jaccard - 2020
How to Save Our Planet: The Facts
Mark A. Maslin - 2021
No beating around the bush. This brilliant book contains all the information we need to have in our back pocket in order to move forward' Christiana Figueres, Former Executive Secretary UN Climate Change Convention'A timely and important book, not only laying out the facts...but suggesting real solutions to the challenges facing us' Professor Alice Roberts, Anatomist, Professor of Public Engagement in Science, University of Birmingham_________________________ How can we save our planet and survive the 21st century? How can you argue with deniers? How can we create positive change in the midst of the climate crisis?Professor Mark Maslin has the key facts that we need to protect our future.Global awareness of climate change is growing rapidly. Science has proven that our planet and species are facing a massive environmental crisis. How to Save Our Planet is a call to action, guaranteed to equip everyone with the knowledge needed to make change.Be under no illusion the challenges of the twenty-first century are immense. We need to deal with: climate change, environmental destruction, global poverty and ensure everyone's security.We have the technology.We have the resources.We have the money.We have the scientists, the entrepreneurs and the innovators.We lack the politics and policies to make your vision of a better world happen.So we need a plan to save our planet...How to Save Our Planet is your handbook of how we together can save our precious planet. From the history of our planet and species, to the potential of individuals and our power to create a better future, Maslin inspires optimism in these bleak times.We stand at the precipice. The future of our planet is in our hands.It's time to face the facts and save our planet from, and for, ourselves._________________________'A handbook of clearly established, authoritative facts and figures about the terrible toll we as humans have taken of our planet, plus ways in which we can lessen the impact. For laypeople like me, who can see what is happening but haven't always got the precise statistics to hand, it's hugely valuable' John Simpson CBE, BBC World Affairs Editor, Broadcaster, Author & Columnist'Saving the world is no small thing, but picking up this book's a good start' Paris Lees, Contributing Editor at British Vogue, campaigner
Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Daniel Jaffee - 2007
But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.
Buyout
Ray Green - 2013
But it quickly becomes clear that nothing is as easy as it seems. The bid is quickly undercut as twisted corporate politics and personal vendettas take over. When the buyout becomes all or nothing for the management buyout team, it all spins out of control: marriages fall apart, dark secrets are discovered, life savings are spent on the stock market, illegal insider dealing becomes a matter of fact and blackmail, theft, betrayal and manipulation are the new rules of the game. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity turns into a lurid nightmare. Buyout is a gripping and compulsive page-turner about the power of money to unveil the deepest in human nature. It's also a story about chasing one extraordinary dream. At an extraordinary price. financial thrillers series, legal thrillers best sellers, blackmailed, corruption series, business thriller, financial thrillers, legal thrillers series
Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment
James Gustave Speth - 2004
What we can—and must—do to succeed. This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others—don’t work. He offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different government and citizen action are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as “essential,” this is it.
But Will the Planet Notice?: How Smart Economics Can Save the World
Gernot Wagner - 2011
Whatever you or I do personally--eat tofu in a Hummer or hamburgers in a Prius--the planet doesn't notice. In our confrontation with climate change, species preservation, and a planet going off the cliff, it is what several billion people do that makes a difference. The solution? It isn't science, politics, or activism. It's smarter economics.The hope of mankind, and indeed of every living thing on the planet, is now in the hands of the dismal science. Fortunately, we've been there before. Economists helped crack the acid rain problem in the 1990's (admittedly with a strong assist from a phalanx of lawyers and activists). Economists have helped get lead out of our gas, and they can explain why lobsters haven't disappeared off the coast of New England but tuna is on the verge of extinction. More disquietingly, they can take the lessons of the financial crisis and model with greater accuracy than anyone else the likelihood of environmental catastrophe, and they can help save us from global warming, if only we let them.
Human Caused Global Warming
Tim Ball - 2016
It explains how it was a premeditated, orchestrated deception, using science to impose a political agenda. It fooled a majority including most scientists. They assumed that other scientists would not produce science for a political agenda. German Physicist and meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls finally decided to look for himself. Here is what he discovered. Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data—first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.…scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob. This book uses the same approach used in investigative journalism. It examines the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.
The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming
Gabrielle Walker - 2008
Now one of the most dynamic writers and one of the most respected scientists in the field of climate change offer the first concise guide to both the problems and the solutions. Guiding us past a blizzard of information and misinformation, Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King explain the science of warming, the most cutting-edge technological solutions from small to large, and the national and international politics that will affect our efforts. While there have been many other books about the problem of global warming, none has addressed what we can and should do about it so clearly and persuasively, with no spin, no agenda, and no exaggeration. Neither Walker nor King is an activist or politician, and theirs is not a generic green call to arms. Instead they propose specific ideas to fix a very specific problem. Most important, they offer hope: This is a serious issue, perhaps the most serious that humanity has ever faced. But we can still do something about it. And they’ll show us how.
Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution
Charles Morris - 2014
The most trusted sources in the auto industry have called its Model S the most advanced, safest and best-performing car ever built - and it doesn’t use a drop of gasoline. Tesla has changed the way the public perceives electric vehicles, and inspired the major automakers to revive their own dormant efforts to sell EVs. However, even amidst the avalanche of media coverage that followed the triumph of the Model S, few have grasped the true significance of what is happening. Tesla has redefined the automobile, sparked a new wave of innovation comparable to the internet and mobile computing revolutions, and unleashed forces that will transform not just the auto industry, but every aspect of society. The Tesla story is one part of an ongoing tide of change driven by the use of information technology to eliminate “friction” such as geographic distance, middlemen and outdated regulations. Tesla is simply applying the new order to the auto industry, but the automobile is such a pervasive influence in our lives that redefining how it is designed, built, driven and sold will have sweeping effects in unexpected areas. Just as Tesla built the Model S as an electric vehicle “from the ground up,” it has taken an outsider’s approach to the way it markets its cars. Its direct sales model has drawn legal challenges from entrenched auto dealers, who fear that their outdated business model will be destroyed. Its systems approach to the software and electronics in its cars has highlighted how far behind the technological times the major automakers are. It’s easy to see why readers find Tesla irresistible. CEO Elon Musk is a superstar entrepreneur, a “nauseatingly pro-US” immigrant and the leader of two other cutting-edge companies. Tesla dares to challenge the establishment behemoths and, so far at least, has handily beaten them at their own game. In this history of the 21st century’s most exciting startup, Charles Morris begins with a brief history of EVs and a biography of Tesla’s driving force, Elon Musk. He then details the history of the company, told in the words of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who made it happen. There are many fascinating stories here: Martin Eberhard’s realization that there were many like himself, who loved fast cars but wanted to help the environment and bring about the post-oil age; the freewheeling first days, reminiscent of the early internet era; the incredible ingenuity of the team who built the Roadster; Tesla’s near-death experience and miraculous resurrection; the spiteful split between the company’s larger-than-life leaders; the gloves-off battles with hostile media such as Top Gear and the New York Times; and the media’s ironic about-face when the magnificent Model S won the industry’s highest honors, and naysayers became cheerleaders overnight. And the story is just beginning: Tesla has breathtakingly ambitious plans for the future.This book was updated May 1, 2015 to include the latest on the Gigafactory and the D package.
Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets
Joanna Blythman - 2004
Did you know...; Almost 50% of supermarket fruit and vegetables contain pesticide residues?* UK supermarkets make 40p on every GBP1 spent on bananas while plantations workers are paid just 1p?* Supermarkets operate a climate of fear amongst their suppliers?* Every time a supermarket opens the local community loses on average 276 jobs?In the 1970s, British supermarkets had only 10% of the UK's grocery spend. Now they swallow up 80%, influencing how we shop, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how much rubbish we generate, even the very look of our physical environment. Award-winning food writer Joanna Blythman investigates the enormous impact that these big box retailers are having on our lives. She meets the farmers who are selling food to supermarkets for less than they need to survive, the wholesalers who have been eliminated from the supply chain, travels to suburban retail parks to meet the teenagers and part-timers who stack our shelves and reveals the hoops third world suppliers must jump through to earn supermarket contracts. This thought-provoking, witty and sometimes chilling voyage of discovery is sure to make you think twice before you reach for that supermarket trolley quite so enthusiastically ever again.
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
Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown
Mathew Lawrence - 2021
Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond?In Beyond Barbarism, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global economy and offer a roadmap for tackling climate breakdown. Building on the debates surrounding the Green New Deal, debates that both authors have been central to, Lawrence and Laybourn argue that it is not enough merely to spend our way out of the crisis. Instead we need to rapidly reshape the shape and purpose of the economy, away from the emphasis on endless growth and towards creating a healthy and flourishing environment for everyone. This must be based on the principles of internationalism and the democratic ownership of the economy. Beyond Barbarism is a radical and achievable manifesto for a new politics and a new economics capable of tackling climate breakdown.
A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future
David Attenborough - 2020
Then make it better.I am 94. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity.I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake - and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited.All we need is the will to do so.
Climate Change: The Facts 2017
Jennifer MarohasyCraig D. Idso - 2017
At the same time as climate change has assumed this status, it has become a topic more likely to be included in a church sermon. Indeed, while once considered the concern of scientific institutions, climate change is now increasingly incorporated into faith-based initiatives with even Pope Francis weighing in, issuing an encyclical on the subject as explained in chapter 16 by Paul Driessen. There are those who believe Pope Francis, and admire another climate change exponent, Al Gore – who marketed An Inconvenient Truth with comment, ‘the fact of global warming is not in question’ and that ‘its consequences for the world we live in will be disastrous if left unchecked’. And then there are the die-hard sceptics who dare to doubt. Many claim that these climate sceptics and their support base have an undue political influence, successfully thwarting attempts to implement necessary public policy change. This book is a collection of chapters by so-called climate sceptics. Each writer was asked to write on an aspect of the topic in which they are considered to have some expertise. None of them deny that climate change is real, but instead, they point out how extremely complex the topic of Earth’s climate is, with some of the contributors also querying the, often generally accepted, solutions. As you will see, this is not a book with just one message, except perhaps that there is a need for more scrutiny of the data, and of our own prejudices. This book’s reason for being is to give pause for thought, and to throw some alternative ideas and considerations into the mix.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells - 2019
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.