GOOD READS

Red Sky at Morning

America and the Crisis of the Global Environment:  A Citizen=s Agenda for Action

By James Gustave Speth

Yale University Press

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.

ARed Sky at Morning is an environmental tour de force B a penetrating look at why efforts to halt environmental degradation have failed and a compelling vision for what we much do about it.@ 

Kathryn S. Fuller, president and chief executive officer, World Wildlife Fund

Our Ecological Footprint

Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees

New Society Publishers

How much of the earth is necessary to support human activities?  Could everyone on the planet live like North Americans do today?  Has technology increased our ecological efficiency?  Can we reduce our resource consumption and still improve our quality of life?

Our Ecological Footprint cuts through the talk about sustainability and introduces a revolutionary new way to determine humanity=s impact on the Earth.  It presents an exciting and powerful tool for measuring and visualizing the resources required to sustain our households, communities, regions and nations.  Equipped with useful charts and thought-provoking illustrations, Our Ecological Footprint converts the seemingly complex concepts of carrying capacity, sustainability, resource use, waste disposal, and more into a graphic form that everyone can grasp and utilize.

Asphalt Nation

How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back

Jane Holtz Kay

University of California Press

Asphalt Nation is a powerful examination of how the automobile has ravaged America=s cities and landscape over the past 100 years, together with a compelling strategy for reversing our automobile-dependency.  Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation.  Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible.  This book is essential reading for e everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

Better, NOT Bigger

How to take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community

Eben Fodor

New Society Publishers

The paved paradise and put up a parking lot, in the words of Joni Mitchell.  And, according to the American Farmland Trust, the trend continues.  It estimates that the United States is losing about 50 acres an hour to suburban and ex-urban development. 

If you have had enough of endless growth, and want to do something about it, then Better NOT Bigger is the resource you've been searching for.  Exploding the myth that growth is good for us, this book clearly and convincingly shows how urban growth can, in fact, leave our communities permanently scarred, and saddled with very high costs.  Lively, accessible, and packed with insights, ideas, tools, and resources, Better NOT Bigger is for both the professional planner and the ordinary citizen.

Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update

D. Meadows, J. Randers, D. Meadows

Chelsea Green Pub. Co., 2004

In 1972 four young scientists at MIT wrote a book called The Limits to Growth, which shocked the world and became an international best-seller.  Using the World3 computer model, the authors looked toward the future and sounded an alarm, for the first time showing the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet.  Their book gained worldwide attention and became the cornerstone of a global debate o how to achieve a sustainable future.

Twenty years later the authors wrote Beyond the Limits, a follow-up volume that showed humanity was already overshooting Earth=s limits.  Beyond the Limits again provoked a national debate and galvanized scientific and environmental academic leaders to incorporate The Limits to Growth into the core environmental studies curriculum.

Now Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update brings data on overshoot and global ecological collapse to the present moment.  It provides a short course in the World3 computer model, types of growth, and the various kinds of over-shoot likely to occur in the current century.  While it remains to be seen whether public policy will respond effectively and in time to problems such as climate change, this book makes compellingly clear the vital need for a sustainability revolution.

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