Now Read This: Annotated Guide to Good Books, Articles About Climate

by Emily Gertz

Published October 05, 2008 @ 12:46PM PST

There are probably already enough good (even great) books, articles, and DVD'd tv shows and films about global warming to fill every one of the six large bookshelves in my apartment.  Here are some toeholds on this mountain of information:

The Cheeseburger Footprint (2006)

Jamais Cascio

Futurist Jamais Cascio demonstrates how a seemingly insignificant daily choice -- should I have a cheeseburger for lunch? -- can have a big effect on the climate. (National Geographic produced a video segment about the cheeseburger footprint, featuring Jamais -- who links to it on his own blog, Open the Future.)

The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold (2004)

Gretel Ehrlich

From Andean glaciers to ice pack around Greenland, Ehrlich travels through some of the globe's coldest landscapes, wondering in spare, poetic language whether we will lose an essential facet of our humanity if we lose the winter to global warming.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (2006)

Tim Flannery

Scientist Flannery takes an exacting look at how the profound impacts of human activity on the earth's atmosphere have made us all "weather makers." He makes a powerful case for using what we already know to change our environmental behavior for the better.

Soylent Green (1973)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Written by: Harry Harrison (novel, Make Room! Make Room! (1966) ) and Stanley R. Greenberg (screenplay)

Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson [[This alone earns it a spot on your Netflix queue.]]

This classic of 1970's Hollywood apocaphilia demonstrates that:

1. The greenhouse effect was well enough understood by the general public 35 years ago to be mentioned in a mainstream movie.
2. We could extrapolate even then how global warming might fundamentally disrupt human civilization.
3. We will end up eating each other as a result. 

    

Viridian Note 00497: Al's Unified National Grid (2008)

Al Gore; annotated by Bruce Sterling

The text of former Vice President Al Gore's July 17, 2008 speech, "A Generational Challenge to Repower America," annotated and clarified with acid wit by science fiction author/futurist/climate-and-design visionary Bruce Sterling: 

Gore: "We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change."

Sterling: (((I want to see the Murdoch Wall Street Journal and the K Street crowd disagreeing with this. "No, Al, no -- we're pro on mortaging the America's future to the Communists so as to enrich the Arabs! It's the all-American way!")))

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006)

Elizabeth Kolbert

With calm, elegant and economical writing, Kolbert -- a reporter for The New Yorker magazine -- brackets the science of climate change with examples that bring seemingly abstract facts and figures down to earth.  This is the best primer out there on global warming. 

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002)

William McDonough and Michael Braungart

A manifesto for transforming both traditional industrial processes and traditional environmentalism into eco-effectiveness: design and manufacture that combine environmental health and safety with cost-efficiency and profitability from the ground up, instead of as an afterthought.  Crucial to effective action on global warming.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007)

Bill McKibben

An environmental journalist and more recently an activist, McKibben persuasively argues that knocking "growth" off its economic pedestal in favor of more satisfying forms of prosperity -- notably, returning to more local food, energy, and cultural economies -- would improve our overall happiness and the health of the environment.

The Energy Challenge: an ongoing series by reporters of The New York Times (2006-present)

Periodic articles examining of the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy efficient, environmentally benign future.

A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check: A Pragmatic Program (2006)

Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala

Getting control of greenhouse gas pollution is a huge but achievable proposition, say the authors, using tools and technologies that already exist.  And they have a plan.

Forty Signs of Rain (2004)

Fifty Degrees Below (2005)

Sixty Days and Counting (2007)

Kim Stanley Robinson

This trilogy of science fiction/espionage/political thrillers is set in a near-near-future of freak floods, massive snowstorms, and other signs of abrupt climate change.  The heros are smart and determined scientists, a few good Washington, D.C. politicians, and crypto-Tibetan monks displaced from their drowning island nation -- and the villain is the Industrial World's collective lack of political will to do anything significant to stop global warming.   Not many writers could make a meeting of researchers at the National Science Foundation a gripping read, or meld chillingly accurate scenarios of post-Patriot Act domestic surveillance with good science about global warming; KSR pulls it off with this trilogy.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (2006)

Alex Steffen, editor

I'm biased, because I helped write this book, but I still think it's the best thing out there for exploring models, ideas, and tools for creating a sustainable and just world -- many already being used successfully around the world.