Environmental Justice
Showing 1–32 of 49 results
-
It’s Not Just You
How to Navigate Eco-Anxiety and the Climate Crisis$21.99 – $49.00A timely edition of the book Greta Thunberg says, “the world is in desperate need of,” with a new foreword from TIME100 Next climate activist Leah Thomas, published in time for Earth Day
For anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by the climate crisis—you’re not alone. In a book that was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize on Writing and Global Conservatism, activist and mental health advocate Tori Tsui takes readers on a powerful journey through the emotional terrain of climate grief, anxiety, and burnout. Combining memoir, intersectional analysis, and activist storytelling, Tsui, named a Stella McCartney Agent of Change, redefines eco-anxiety as not just a personal response to planetary crisis, but a political and communal condition rooted in systems of oppression—racism, colonialism, capitalism, and ableism.
With clarity and heart, Tsui traces her lived experience as a queer woman of color navigating mental illness and activism on a global scale: from sailing across the Atlantic for a climate summit to finding healing with Indigenous communities in Colombia. Alongside personal reflections, she amplifies the voices of marginalized organizers, critiques the commodification of wellness, and insists that true climate action must also be mental health care. By refusing simplistic fixes, It’s Not Just You insists on justice, solidarity, and radical care as the antidotes to our present-day despair.
Featuring contributions from Mikaela Loach, author of Climate Is Just the Start; Vanessa Nakate, author of A Bigger Picture; and Talia Woodin, climate photographer for Atmos, Middle East Eye, i-D, and The Guardian, among others, this slim volume is a must-read for anyone reckoning with the emotional weight of the climate crisis. Whether you’re just learning the term “eco-anxiety” or you’ve been carrying it for years, Tsui offers validation, perspective, and most of all: community. Along with a foreword by Leah Thomas, named to the Ebony Power 100, Tsui reminds readers that they are most resilient when they lean on—and learn from—each other.
-
Shelter from the Storm
How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration$29.99A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
An urgent wake-up call about the coming large-scale human displacement caused by climate change, from one of the world’s leading experts
Mere decades from now, millions of people all over the world will be forced to move because of climate change. Entire islands will disappear into the sea. Once-in-a-century hurricanes will occur on a regular basis, decimating cities and wiping out peoples’ homes. Wildfires fed by prolonged drought will rage through communities. No one will be immune: in countries rich and poor, climate change will usher in a new era of migration.
In Shelter from the Storm noted journalist and migration researcher Julian Hattem tells the story of the massive human displacement that is already being caused by climate change. With hard-hitting journalism from the front lines of the environmental apocalypse, Hattem takes the reader on a journey from the South Pacific to the Indian subcontinent, the Mediterranean, and beyond, offering a shocking glimpse into the human geography wrecked by a warming planet.
Shelter from the Storm also provides rich historical perspective on how climate has impacted migration and a primer on cutting-edge climatological research, creating a multidimensional portrait of this uncertain new age. A work of profound expertise and storytelling, Shelter from the Storm gives a human face to the millions of climate migrants who are leaving their homes—and the millions more who will follow.
-
The Problem with Plastic
How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late$27.99A powerful investigation into plastic’s impact on human health and the environment, and how we can fight back
What if we said that the line between societal advancement and environmental degradation is as thin as a layer of plastic wrap? Once a marvel of modern science, plastic has become so inextricably woven into our lives that imagining a world without can seem impossible. Over the last seventy-five years, plastic has cradled our planet in a synthetic embrace.
The Problem with Plastic critically examines the paradox of this material, first celebrated for its innovations and now recognized for its devastating environmental and public health impacts. This compelling narrative reveals how plastic pollution contributes to poisoned oceans, polluted air, a warming planet, and overwhelming waste, particularly affecting marginalized communities, which bear the brunt of petrochemical pollution. The book highlights the pervasive presence of microplastics in the environment and the human body, challenging the belief that recycling can solve the crisis.
In addition to uncovering environmental racism and debunking industry claims, The Problem with Plastic emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy, and offers readers practical, actionable solutions, including a “household waste audit,” which empowers readers to track and reduce their own plastic consumption.
-
The Atlas of Disappearing Places
Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis$20.99 – $29.99A beautiful and engaging guide to global warming’s impact around the world
Our planet is in peril. Seas are rising, oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, coasts are flooding, species are dying, and communities are faltering. Despite these dire circumstances, most of us don’t have a clear sense of how the interconnected crises in our ocean are affecting the climate system, food webs, coastal cities, and biodiversity, and which solutions can help us co-create a better future.
“Engaging and . . . enraging” (San Francisco Chronicle), The Atlas of Disappearing Places depicts twenty locations across the globe under siege from four different climate impacts. Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” with beautiful, full-color illustrations to offer “suggestions for practical ways to reduce climate impact” (Foreword Reviews).
As the effects of climate change continue to become clearer, and the time to reverse it slips further away, The Atlas of Disappearing Places is “a striking and deeply researched work of art and environmental activism” (BookPage) that will inspire readers to take on the greatest fight of our lives.
-
The Sustainability Class
How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists$27.99An original argument that environmental sustainability has been co-opted by the urban elite, along with examples from around the world of ways we can save our planet
“Caring for the environment means reclaiming ecology for everyone.” —from the introduction
A sustainability apartheid is emerging. More than ever, urban residents want to be green, yet to cater to their interests, a green-tech service economy has sprung up, co-opting well-intentioned concerns over sustainability to sell a resource-heavy and exclusive “lifestyle environmentalism.” This has made cities more unsustainable and inaccessible to the working class.
The Sustainability Class is about those wealthy “progressive” urbanites convinced that we can save the planet through individual action, smart urbanism, green finance, and technological innovation. Authors Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan challenge many of the popular ideas about environmentalism, showing that it is actually the sustainability class itself that is unsustainable. The solutions they propose work to safeguard an elite minority, exclude billions of people, and ultimately hasten ecological breakdown, not reverse it.
From Venice Beach, Los Angeles, to Neom in Saudi Arabia and beyond, the authors explore with biting humor how investors around the world are rushing to capitalize on going green. By contrast, real-world examples of movements for housing and food production, transport, and waste management demonstrate how ordinary people around the world are building a more ecological future by working together, against all odds. In doing so, they show us how sustainability can be reclaimed for everyone. Sustainability isn’t about vibes and superficial green facades. It’s about building people power to reimagine the world.
-
From the Ground Up
The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture$27.99An award-winning author’s powerful exploration of the remarkable women driving transformative change in America’s food system
It’s well known that our industrialized food system has abandoned priorities of nutrition and environmental stability in the pursuit of profit—a model designed to fail, especially as climate change escalates. Yet this groundbreaking book describes a glimmer of hope: a green wave of diverse female farmers, entrepreneurs, community organizers, scientists, and political leaders who operate with the shared goals of combatting climate change through regenerative agriculture, redesigning the food system, and producing healthy, socially responsible food.
From the Ground Up, by award-winning author Stephanie Anderson, offers a journey into the root causes of our unsustainable food chain, revealing its detrimental reliance on extractive agriculture, which depletes soil and water, produces nutritionally deficient food, and devastates communities and farmers. Anderson then delivers an uplifting, deeply reported narrative of women-led farms and ranches nationwide, supported by women-led investment firms, farmer training programs, restaurants, supply chain partners, and advocacy groups, all working together to create a more inclusive and sustainable world.
From the Ground Up sheds light on a set of inspiring journeys, with stories that will transform the way we think about the food chain—one that can weather the storms of climate change, conflicts, and global pandemics.
-
Charging Forward
Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future$27.99A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy
California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. It is also ground zero for a new “lithium gold rush”—a race to extract a mineral critical to the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage markets. With enough lithium lurking beneath the surface to provide a third of global demand, who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?
A work of stunning analysis and reporting, Charging Forward shows that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the “green transition.” Weaving together movement politics, federal policy, and global supply chains, noted experts Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor stress that extracting lithium is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will address and overcome the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself.
What happens in Lithium Valley, the authors argue, will not stay there. This tiny patch of California is a microcosm of the broad climate challenges we face; understanding Lithium Valley today is the key to grasping the future of our economy and our planet.
-
Intertwined
Women, Nature, and Climate Justice$27.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
A powerful argument that greater inclusion of women in conservation and climate science is key to the future of the planetWomen are disproportionately impacted by climate change—floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures overwhelmingly affect women in the short and long term. In some cases, women make up almost 90 percent of casualties during dangerous climate events, and the majority of those displaced in the aftermath are women. Despite this disparity, women are underrepresented at every level of decision-making about the future of our planet: only 24 percent of CEOs in nonprofit conservation and around one-third of the representatives in national and global climate negotiating bodies have been women.
In Intertwined, writer and wildlife biologist Rebecca Kormos elevates the voices of women working to prevent the climate crisis, weaving together their stories to make a powerful case for why women are essential to changing our current trajectory toward catastrophic global warming and environmental degradation. Kormos argues that empowering women is one of the most important solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss: women’s leadership and equal representation is linked to lower CO2 emissions, better forest management, better land protection, less land grabbing, and fewer conflicts over resources.
For readers of All We Can Save and Braiding Sweetgrass, Kormos joins the ranks of recent breakthrough efforts to showcase women’s voices in the movement to combat climate change. Kormos takes this endeavor one step further with a global, intersectional narrative of how women and gender nonconforming individuals are doing the crucial work at the local and national levels to reframe how we think about environmental activism. Ultimately, Intertwined proves that climate justice is inextricable from gender equality.
-
Surviving Our Catastrophes
Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic$17.99 – $24.99From the National Book Award winner, a powerful and timely rumination that ”cuts through the existential fog to reveal something like hope” (The Washington Post)
In this moving and ultimately hopeful meditation on the psychological aftermath of catastrophe, award-winning psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton shows us how to cope with the lasting effects and legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the people of Hiroshima experienced the unspeakable horror of the atomic bombing, they responded by creating an activist “city of peace.” Survivors of the Nazi death camps took the lead in combating mass killing of any kind and converted their experience into art and literature that demonstrated the resilience of the human spirit. Drawing on the remarkably life-affirming responses of survivors of such atrocities, Lifton, “one of the world’s foremost thinkers on why we humans do such awful things to each other” (Bill Moyers), shows readers how we can carry on and live meaningful lives even in the face of the tragic and the absurd.
Now in paperback with a new epilogue by the author, Surviving Our Catastrophes offers compelling examples of “survivor power” and makes clear that we will not move forward by forcing the pandemic into the rearview mirror. Instead, we must truly reckon with COVID-19’s effects on ourselves and society—and find individual and collective forms of renewal.
-
Afterglow
Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors$16.99Hopeful and forward-looking futuristic short stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need
“This is a glorious book that challenges our conceptions of bookmaking as much as it questions our conceptions of world-building. We, as earthlings, will be better to the earth after experiencing this book. That is not hyperbole.”
—New York Times bestselling author Kiese Laymon
Afterglow is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world.Inspired by cutting-edge literary movements, such as Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunk, Afterglow imagines intersectional worlds in which no one is left behind—where humanity prioritizes equitable climate solutions and continued service to one’s community. Whether through abundance or adaptation, reform, or a new understanding of survival, these stories offer flickers of hope, even joy, as they provide a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Afterglow welcomes a diverse range of new voices into the climate conversation to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. A creative work rooted in the realities of our present crisis, Afterglow presents a new way to think about the climate emergency—one that blazes a path to a clean, green, and more just future.
-
We Are the Middle of Forever
Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth$20.99 – $28.99With a new afterword by the authors
A powerful, intimate collection of conversations with Indigenous Americans on the climate crisis and the Earth’s futureAlthough for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth—countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval—was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction—and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation.
An American Library Association Notable Book, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.
-
Waste
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret$17.99 – $25.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerableA Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020
Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.
In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
-
Empire of Rubber
Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia$18.99 – $40.00An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.
Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire.
Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.
A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
-
Planet Palm
How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World$26.99 – $27.99Finalist, Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
In the tradition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a groundbreaking global investigation into the industry ravaging the environment and global health—from the James Beard Award–winning journalist
Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations.
James Beard Award–winning journalist Jocelyn C. Zuckerman spent years traveling the globe, from Liberia to Indonesia, India to Brazil, reporting on the human and environmental impacts of this poorly understood plant. The result is Planet Palm, a riveting account blending history, science, politics, and food as seen through the people whose lives have been upended by this hidden ingredient.
This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.
-
The World We Need
Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement$19.99The inspiring people and grassroots organizations that are on the front lines of the battle to save the planet
As the world’s scientists have come together and declared a "climate emergency," the fight to protect our planet’s ecological resources and the people that depend on them is more urgent than ever. But the real battles for our future are taking place far from the headlines and international conferences, in mostly forgotten American communities where the brutal realities of industrial pollution and environmental degradation have long been playing out.
The World We Need provides a vivid introduction to America’s largely unsung grassroots environmental groups—often led by activists of color and the poor—valiantly fighting back in America’s so-called sacrifice zones against industries poisoning our skies and waterways and heating our planet. Through original reporting, profiles, artwork, and interviews, we learn how these activist groups, almost always working on shoestring budgets, are devising creative new tactics; building sustainable projects to transform local economies; and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement—changing its face along the way.
Capturing the riveting stories and hard-won strategies from a broad cross section of pivotal environmental actions—from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico—The World We Need offers a powerful new model for the larger environmental movement, and inspiration for concerned citizens everywhere.
-
Eating Tomorrow
Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food$26.99“A powerful polemic against agricultural technology.”
—NatureA major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert
Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.
Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.
-
The End of Ice
Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption$17.99 – $25.99Finalist for the 2020 PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Acclaimed on its hardcover publication, a global journey that reminds us “of how magical the planet we’re about to lose really is” (Bill McKibben)
With a new epilogue by the author
After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.
In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet’s wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.
Like no other book, The End of Ice offers a firsthand chronicle—including photographs throughout of Jamail on his journey across the world—of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile planet while we still can.
-
Sleepwalking to Armageddon
The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation$25.95 – $25.99A frightening but necessary assessment of the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century, edited by the world’s leading antinuclear activistWith the world’s attention focused on climate change and terrorism, we are in danger of taking our eyes off the nuclear threat. But rising tensions between Russia and NATO, proxy wars erupting in Syria and Ukraine, a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and stockpiles of aging weapons unsecured around the globe make a nuclear attack or a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility arguably the biggest threat facing humanity.
In Sleepwalking to Armageddon, pioneering antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott assembles the world’s leading nuclear scientists and thought leaders to assess the political and scientific dimensions of the threat of nuclear war today. Chapters address the size and distribution of the current global nuclear arsenal, the history and politics of nuclear weapons, the culture of modern-day weapons labs, the militarization of space, and the dangers of combining artificial intelligence with nuclear weaponry, as well as a status report on enriched uranium and a shocking analysis of spending on nuclear weapons over the years.
The book ends with a devastating description of what a nuclear attack on Manhattan would look like, followed by an overview of contemporary antinuclear activism. Both essential and terrifying, this book is sure to become the new bible of the antinuclear movement—to wake us from our complacency and urge us to action. -
Sleepwalking to Armageddon (Australian Edition)
The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation$17.95With the world’s attention focused on climate change and terrorism, we are in danger of taking our eyes off the nuclear threat. But rising tensions between Russia and NATO, proxy wars erupting in Syria and Ukraine, a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and stockpiles of aging weapons unsecured around the globe make a nuclear attack or a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility arguably the biggest threat facing humanity.
In Sleepwalking to Armageddon, pioneering antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott assembles the world’s leading nuclear scientists and thought leaders to assess the political and scientific dimensions of the threat of nuclear war today. Chapters address the size and distribution of the current global nuclear arsenal, the history and politics of nuclear weapons, the culture of modern-day weapons labs, the militarization of space, and the dangers of combining artificial intelligence with nuclear weaponry, as well as a status report on enriched uranium and a shocking analysis of spending on nuclear weapons over the years.
The book ends with a devastating description of what a nuclear attack on Manhattan would look like, followed by an overview of contemporary antinuclear activism. Both essential and terrifying, this book is sure to become the new bible of the antinuclear movement—to wake us from our complacency and urge us to action. -
The Climate Swerve
Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival$22.95Longlisted for the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
“Well worth the read. . . . [A] prescient handoff to the next generation of scholars.”
—The Washington Post
From “one of the world’s foremost thinkers” (Bill Moyers), a profound, hopeful, and timely call for an emerging new collective consciousness to combat climate changeOver his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, “presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind,” what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.
Thanks to the power of corporate-funded climate denialists and the fact that “with its slower, incremental sequence, [climate change] lends itself less to the apocalyptic drama,” a large swathe of humanity has numbed themselves to the reality of climate change. Yet Lifton draws a message of hope from the Paris climate meeting of 2015 where representatives of virtually all nations joined in the recognition that we are a single species in deep trouble.
Here, Lifton suggests in this lucid and moving book that recalls Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell, was evidence of how we might call upon the human mind—”our greatest evolutionary asset”—to translate a growing species awareness—or “climate swerve”—into action to sustain our habitat and civilization.
-
How the World Breaks
Life in Catastrophe's Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia$28.95We’ve always lived on a dangerous planet, but its disasters aren’t what they used to be. How the World Breaks gives us a breathtaking new view of crisis and recovery on the unstable landscapes of the Earth’s hazard zones. Father and son authors Stan and Paul Cox take us to the explosive fire fronts of overheated Australia, the future lost city of Miami, the fights over whether and how to fortify New York City in the wake of Sandy, the Indonesian mud volcano triggered by natural gas drilling, and other communities that are reimagining their lives after quakes, superstorms, tornadoes, and landslides.
In the very decade when we should be rushing to heal the atmosphere and address the enormous inequalities of risk, a strange idea has taken hold of global disaster policy: resilience. Its proponents say that threatened communities must simply learn the art of resilience, adapt to risk, and thereby survive. This doctrine obscures the human hand in creating disasters and requires the planet’s most beleaguered people to absorb the rush of floodwaters and the crush of landslides, freeing the world economy to go on undisturbed. The Coxes’ great contribution is to pull the disaster debate out of the realm of theory and into the muck and ash of the world’s broken places. There we learn that change is more than mere adaptation and life is more than mere survival. Ultimately, How the World Breaks reveals why—unless we address the social, ecological, and economic roots of disaster—millions more people every year will find themselves spiraling into misery. It is essential reading for our time. -
Frackopoly
The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment$27.95 – $27.99“The definitive story on how big oil and gas corporations captured our political system . . . and the growing grassroots movement to retake our democracy” (Mark Ruffalo).
Over the past decade a new and controversial energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, has rocketed to the forefront of US energy production. With fracking, millions of gallons of water, dangerous chemicals, and sand are injected under high pressure deep into the earth, fracturing hard rock to release oil and gas.
Wenonah Hauter, one of the nation’s leading public interest advocates, argues that the rush to fracking is dangerous to the environment and treacherous to human health. Frackopoly describes how the fracking industry began; the technologies that make it possible; and the destruction and poisoning of clean water sources with the release of harmful radiation from deep inside shale deposits, creating what the author calls “sacrifice zones” across the American landscape.
The book also examines the powerful interests that have supported fracking, including leading environmental groups, and offers a thorough debunking of its supposed economic benefits. With a wealth of new data, Frackopoly is an essential and riveting read for anyone interested in protecting the environment and ensuring a healthy and sustainable future for all Americans.
“A passionate history and critique of the energy industry, from Standard Oil to Enron . . . . [A] journalistic exposé of fracking outrages in which aggressive entrepreneurs in pursuit of profits wreak havoc on the land and poison the water.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A truly powerful manifesto about one of the greatest environmental fights on our planet today—from one of its greatest champions!” —Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Oil and Honey -
Out of Sight
The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe$25.95 – $25.99A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes.
In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice.
In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis—a historian of both the labor and environmental movements—follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable.
In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA—were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers’ hands.
“The story told here is tragic and important.” —Bill McKibben
“Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country—for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.” —Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
-
Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg
The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30$26.95 – $26.99The true story of Greenpeace activists imprisoned in Russia—and the fight to free them: “A gripping story of tremendous courage that reads like a thriller” (Naomi Klein).
“The most important prison motto is hope for the better, but every moment, literally every moment, be prepared for the worst. Don’t hope, don’t fear, don’t beg.” —Roman Dolgov, one of the Arctic 30
With rising temperatures, a military arms race, and a multi-national rush to exploit resources at any cost, the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. As the ice melts, Vladimir Putin orders Russia’s oil rigs to move further north. But one early September morning in 2013, thirty men and women from eighteen countries—the crew of Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise—decided to draw a line in the ice and protest Arctic drilling.
Thrown together by a common cause, they are determined to stop Putin and the oligarchs. But their protest is met with brutal force as Russian commandos seize the Arctic Sunrise. Held under armed guard by masked men, they are charged with piracy and face fifteen years in Russia’s nightmarish prison system.
Journalist and activist Ben Stewart spearheaded the campaign to release the Arctic 30. Now he tells their astonishing story—a tale of passion, courage, brutality, and survival. With wit, verve, and candor, Stewart chronicles the extraordinary friendships the activists made with their often murderous cellmates, their battle to outwit the prison guards, and the struggle to stay true to the cause that brought them there.
“With its colorful dialogue, moral dilemmas, and scenes of physical danger, Stewart’s book would make a great movie . . . the prison life the book reveals is eye-opening, and Stewart describes it with great verve.” —Foreign Affairs -
Fukushima
The Story of a Nuclear Disaster$18.95 – $27.95“A gripping, suspenseful page-turner” (Kirkus Reviews) with a “fast-paced, detailed narrative that moves like a thriller” (International Business Times), Fukushima teams two leading experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum and Edwin Lyman, with award-winning journalist Susan Q. Stranahan to give us the first definitive account of the 2011 disaster that led to the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl.
Four years have passed since the day the world watched in horror as an earthquake large enough to shift the Earth’s axis by several inches sent a massive tsunami toward the Japanese coast and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the reactors’ safety systems to fail and explosions to reduce concrete and steel buildings to rubble. Even as the consequences of the 2011 disaster continue to exact their terrible price on the people of Japan and on the world, Fukushima addresses the grim questions at the heart of the nuclear debate: could a similar catastrophe happen again, and—most important of all—how can such a crisis be averted?
-
Our Daily Poison
From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick$19.95 – $28.95Called “terrifying” by L’Express and “a gripping and urgent book for anyone concerned about democracy, corporate power or public health” by Stuffed and Starved author Raj Patel, Our Daily Poison takes award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across North America, Europe, and Asia. The book documents the many ways in which we encounter a shocking array of chemicals in our everyday lives—from the pesticides that blanket our crops to the additives and plastics that contaminate our food—and their effects over time.
“Full of facts, stories, and wisdom” (The Huffington Post), Our Daily Poison follows the trail of the synthetic molecules in our environment and our food, tracing the ugly history of industrial chemical production, as well as the shoddy regulatory system for chemical products that still operates today—to the detriment of consumers and factory workers alike. Mustering scientific studies, expert testimony, and interviews with farmworkers suffering from acute chronic poisoning, Robin makes a shocking case for how corporate interests and our ignorance may be costing us our lives.
-
Crisis Without End
The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe$24.99 – $26.99The world’s leading scientific and medical experts offer the first comprehensive analysis of the long-term health and environmental consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident
On the second anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts assembled at the prestigious New York Academy of Medicine. A project of the Helen Caldicott Foundation and co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility, this gathering was a response to widespread concerns that the media and policy makers had been far too eager to move past what are clearly deep and lasting impacts for the Japanese people and for the world. This was the first comprehensive attempt to address the health and environmental damage done by one of the worst nuclear accidents of our times.
The only document of its kind, Crisis Without End represents an unprecedented look into the profound aftereffects of Fukushima. In accessible terms, leading experts from Japan, the United States, Russia, and other nations weigh in on the current state of knowledge of radiation-related health risks in Japan, impacts on the world’s oceans, the question of low-dosage radiation risks, crucial comparisons with Chernobyl, health and environmental impacts on the United States (including on food and newborns), and the unavoidable implications for the U.S. nuclear energy industry.
Crisis Without End is both essential reading and a major corrective to the public record on Fukushima.
-
Fractured Times
Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century$27.95Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation.
Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the “free intellectual” and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy.
Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers. -
Blue Future
Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever$26.95 – $26.99Water is a human right: “A rousing case for what will be one of the key environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.” —Booklist
The United Nations has recognized access to water as a basic human right—but there is still much work to be done to stem this growing environmental crisis. In this book, water activist Maude Barlow draws on her extensive experience to lay out a set of key principles that show the way forward to what she calls a “water-secure and water-just world.”
Not only does she reveal the powerful players even now impeding the recognition of the human right to water, she argues that water must not become a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Focusing on solutions, she includes stories of struggle and resistance from marginalized communities, as well as government policies that work for both people and the planet.
At a time when climate change has moved to the top of the national agenda and the stage is being set for unprecedented drought, mass starvation, and the migration of millions of refugees in search of water, Blue Future is an urgent call to preserve our most valuable resource for generations to come.
“In a book as clear as a pristine mountain stream, Maude Barlow lays out a practical and inspiring vision for how we can defend water—the source of all life—from the forces of death.” —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine -
Any Way You Slice It
The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing$26.95. -
Foodopoly
The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America$19.95 – $26.95“A terrific primer on the corporate control of food in the United States, and the actions of those who fight back” (Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved), Foodopoly takes aim at the real culprit behind America’s food crisis: the ever-growing consolidation and corporatization of food production, which prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.
In the tradition of the bestselling The World According to Monsanto, Foodopoly tells the shocking story of how agricultural policy has been hijacked by lobbyists, driving out independent farmers and food processors in favor of companies such as Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra. “A meticulously documented account of how we have lost control of our food system” (Steve Gliessman, professor emeritus of agroecology, UC-Santa Cruz), the book demonstrates how the impacts ripple far and wide, from economic stagnation in rural communities at home to famines in poor countries overseas. In the end, author Wenonah Hauter argues that solving this crisis will require a complete structural shift, a grassroots movement to reshape our food system from seed to table—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.
-
Loving this Planet
Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World$17.95 – $17.99Conversations on sustainability, renewable energy, and other pressing issues: “A level of intellectual discussion all too absent in our national discourse.” —Booklist
A co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, named one of the most influential women of the twentieth century by the Smithsonian Institute, Helen Caldicott presents a valuable collection of her interviews with prominent figures and environmentalists—in which she:
*Scrutinizes our unsustainable dependence on nuclear energy
*Explores how the United States could transition to renewable energy
*Raises awareness about issues such as deforestation and sea-level rise
Extending well beyond the scope of conventional environmental discussions, this book gives us Martin Sheen on grassroots movements and unionized labor; Chris Hedges on the costs of standing up for your morals; and award-winning actress Lily Tomlin on contemporary politics, in a sarcastic and witty exchange at once hilarious and inspiring—and also includes interviews with Maude Barlow, Bill McKibben, Jonathan Schell, Daniel Ellsberg, Lester Brown, Frances Fox Piven, Bob Herbert, and more.
“A treasure trove of anecdotes featuring high-profile politicians, academics, and celebrities . . . Surprising statistics about nuclear waste storage, rising sea levels, and military spending serve as an alarm, but Caldicott and her collaborators also offer many innovative solutions.” —Publishers Weekly
“God bless Helen Caldicott.” —Los Angeles Times
Showing 1–32 of 49 results
