Recommended Reading
Sustainability is a rapidly growing field with a diverse range of ideas and concepts.
Looking for some good books on environmental issues? Check out these recommendations from members of the University’s Sustainability Council.
Abbey, Edward. “Desert Solitaire.” Touchstone, 1968: A novel.
Berry, Wendell. “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.” San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977: A philosophical consideration of the relationship of human beings to agriculture and the natural world.
Burdick, Alan. “Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion.” New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005.
Calicott, J. Baird, ed. “The Great Wilderness Debate: An Expansive Collection of Writings Defining Wilderness from John Muir to Gary Snyder.” University of Georgia Press, 1998: The collection includes some of the “classic” pieces on environmental preservation.
Carson, Rachel. “Silent Spring.” 1994 ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962: The book on pesticide pollutants that triggered American environmentalism.
Conca, Ken, and G. Dabelko, eds. “Green Planet Blues”: Key selections concerning environmental politics.
Cronin, John, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “The Riverkeepers.” Scribner, 1997: An inspirational account of Kennedy’s efforts to protect river resources and halt industrial pollution in New York.
Cronon, William. “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.” New York: W. W. Norton, 1991: A scholarly but very readable environmental history of Chicago.
Cronon, William, ed. “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.” Essays arising from a seminar.
Diamond, Jared. “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” New York: W. W. Norton, 1997: Thought-provoking in its grandiosity, this book tackles the large “human-environment” question without succumbing to environmental determinism.
Dowie, Martin. “Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the 20th Century.” MIT Press, 1996: A concise historical treatment of the successes and failures of the environmental movement in the United States.
Goldfarb, Theodore. "Sources: Notable Selections in Environmental Studies.” 2nd ed.: Excerpts of important essays covering many environmental areas.
Goldsmith, Edward. “The Way: An Ecological Worldview.” University of Georgia Press, 1998: Brilliant values-based, eco-radical systems thinking.
Gore, Albert. “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992: An important book—the vice president’s personal effort to conceptualize the environmental crisis and recommend responses.
Graham, John, and Jennifer Hartwell. “The Greening of Industry.” Harvard University Press, 1998: A review of environmental technology and modern industry’s efforts to transform production processes.
Hawken, Paul. “The Ecology of Commerce.” New York: Harper, 1993: An industrial ecology/green business declaration.
Heat Moon, William Least. “PrairyErth.” New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991: A wonderful study of the ecology and culture of a county in Kansas.
Hecht, Susanna. “The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon.” Harper, 1990: By an anthropologist and environmental studies scholar from UCLA with more than two decades experience working with indigenous peoples in the Amazon; an interesting read.
Katakis, Michael, ed. “Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility.” 1993: A great collection of essays on environmental protection from many cultural/political perspectives.
Klinenberg, Eric. “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002: A book about the public health ramifications of summer heat waves in a large deindustrializing metropolitan area.
Kingsolver, Barbara. “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” New York: Harper Collins, 2007.
Leopold, Aldo. “A Sand County Almanac.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1966: A classic; full of insight and value.
Lerner, Steve. “Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today’s Environmental Problems.” MIT Press, 1997: Inspired after attending the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the author decided to chronicle the actions of “average” citizens doing extraordinary things to protect the environment.
McKibben, Bill. “The End of Nature.” New York: Random House, 1989: A scathing critique of human impact on the Earth.
McKibben, Bill. “Hope, Human and Wild.” Boston: Little Brown, 1995: Hopeful accounts of environmental recoveries—nice antidote to "The End of Nature."
Pellow, David Naguib. “Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.” Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002: An attempt within environmental sociology to explain the processes of environmental inequality.
Reisner, Marc. “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.” New York: Penguin Books, 1993: An exciting, true adventure story of the development of our West at the environment’s expense.
Pollan, Michael. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Sen, Amartya. “Development as Freedom.”: A Nobel welfare economist looks at the link between development and democracy.
Stegner, Wallace. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.” New York: Penguin Books, 1992: A biography of geographer and Western explorer John Wesley Powell.
Turner, B. L., ed. “The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press with Clark University, 1990: A big geographers’ symposium volume with chapters on the various kinds of impact humans have had on our habitat.
Winks, Robin. “Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation.” Island Press, 1997.
Worster, Donald. “Rivers of Empire.” Oxford University Press, 1985: A history of water use in the West.