Environmental Politics

David Kirby
St. Martin's Press; 2010
Hardcover; 512 pages
9780312380588

• Derrick Jensen & Stephanie McMillan
• Seven Stories Press; 2007
• Paperback; 220 pages
• 978-1-58322-777-0

Two of America’s most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel. The U.S. government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal-testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn’t by using energy-efficient light bulbs or biodiesel fuel). As the World Burns will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it’s too late.

• Paul Hawken
• Penguin Books; April 2008
• Paperback; 352 pages
• 9780143113652

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

Paul Hawken has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries of hidden history. A culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire all who despair of the world’s fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself.

• Elizabeth Royte
• Bloomsbury Press US, 2009
• Paperback,
• ISBN: 9781596913721

In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to the supermarkets.

• Adria Vasil
• Random House; April 2007
• Paperback; 354 pages
• 0-679-31484-9

When the world’s environmental woes get you down, turn to Ecoholic – Canada’s best resource for practical tips and products that help you do your part for the earth. You’ll get the dirt on what not to buy and why, and the dish on great gifts, clothes, home supplies and more. Based on the popular and authoritative "Ecoholic" column that appears weekly in NOW, Ecoholic is a cheeky and eye-opening guide to all of life’s greenest predicaments.

Adria Vasil has been writing the Ecoholic column for NOW Magazine since the spring of 2004 and has covered environmental issues for NOW’s news section for four years. Vasil has a degree in development politics and cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto and a degree in magazine journalism from Ryerson. An advocate for the earth, women’s issues and human rights since her teens, Vasil has appeared on MTV Canada and CBC’s Newsworld to promote environmentalism.

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"This book is for people who want to do something to lighten their impact on the planet. The small steps cost us little in the way of effort, money or time, but the cumulative effects can be enormous."
—David Suzuki

"Everything you need to know to make green, non-toxic, Earth-friendly consumer choices – and to be a bang-up planetary citizen – is in this book. Its comprehensiveness is mind-boggling! My fondest hope is that a well-thumbed copy becomes a fixture in every Canadian home."

• John Bellamy Foster
• Monthly Review Press, 2009
• Paperback, 328 pages
• ISBN: 9781583671795

Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable—if business as usual continues. The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.</p><p>This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species.

• Michael Pollan
• Penguin, 2009
• Paperback, 140 pages
• 9780143116387

From the bestselling author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food" comes this collection of simple, sensible, and easy to use rules--the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food he or she eats.

• David Owen
• Riverhead Books, 2009
• Hardcover, 357 pages
• ISBN: 9781594488825

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, Owen argues that the greenest community in the U.S. is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.

• Wendy Rosenoff
• Krause Publications, 2009
• Paperback, 239 pages
• 9781440203671

This one-of-a-kind guide delivers 101 forward-thinking activities and projects that teach children sustainable living habits. Readers will discover hands-on projects in cooking, crafts and science that address global warming, saving energy, recycling and reusing packaging and bags, and growing and eating locally-grown foods, among others.

• Elton, Sarah
• Harper Collins; 2010
• Hardcover; 272 pages
• 9781554684182

Strawberries in January, fresh tomatoes year-round and New Zealand lamb at all times -- these well-travelled foods have a carbon footprint the size of an SUV. But there is a burgeoning local food movement taking place in Canadian cities, farms and shops that is changing both the way we eat and the way we think about food.

Locavore describes how foodies,100-milers, urbanites, farmers, gardeners and chefs across Canada are creating a new local food order that has the potential to fight climate change and feed us all. Combining front-line reporting, shrewd analysis and passionate food writing to delight the gastronome, Locavore shows how the pieces of a post-industrial food system are being assembled into something infinitely better.

We meet city-dwellers who grow crops in their backyards and office workers who have traded their keyboards for pitchforks. We learn how a group of New Brunswick farmers saved the family farm, why artisanal cheese in Quebec is so popular and how a century-old farm survives in urban British Columbia, bordered by the ocean on one side and by a new housing development on the other. We follow food culture activists as they work to preserve the genetic material of heritage plants to return once-endangered flavours to our tables. In recounting the stories of its diverse cast of characters, Locavore lays out a blueprint for a local food revolution.

From Locavore:

• Colin Beavan
• McLelland & Stewart, 2009
• Hardcover, 274 pages
• ISBN: 9780771010750

The riotous story of a guilty liberal who snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, turns off his power, and becomes a bicycle nut in an effort to make zero environmental impact.

Manhattanite Colin Beavan spent a year trying to live without a net environmental impact, and he dragged his baby daughter and Prada-loving wife along for the ride (bicycle-powered, of course). In other words, no trash, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no air conditioning, no television…What would it be like to try to live a no-impact lifestyle? Is it possible? Could it catch on? Is living this way more satisfying or less satisfying? Is it worthwhile or senseless? These are the questions at the heart of this whole mad endeavour, which ultimately challenges each of us to embrace green living.

The publisher has aimed for sustainability in all aspects of this book’s production. For example, the interior paper is 100% post-consumer recycled, processed without chlorine, and certified by both the Forest Stewardship Council and EcoLogo. Instead of a jacket, the cover boards are stamped directly with ink, and the boards themselves are made from 100% recycled and FSC-certified materials.

Colin Beavan is the author of Operation Jedburgh and Fingerprints. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and many other major magazines. He lives in New York City.

• Andrew Nikiforuk
• Greystone Books; October 2008
• Paperback; 208 pages
• 978-1-55365-407-0

While the world goes green, Canada has elected to go black into the tar. The frenzied development ($100 billion and counting) of the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the last six years has made Canada the world’s fifth greatest global exporter of oil and turned the country into “an emerging energy superpower.”

Combining extensive scientific research and compelling writing, Andrew Nikiforuk takes the reader to Fort McMurray, home to some of the world’s largest open-pit mines, and explores this twenty-first-century pioneer town from the exorbitant cost of housing to its more serious social ills. He uncovers a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, aimless bush workers, American evangelicals, and the largest population of homeless people in northern Canada. He also explains that this micro-economy supplies gasoline for 50 percent of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. demand. Readers will learn that oil sands:

    * burn more carbon than conventional oil,
    * destroy forests and displace woodland caribou,
    * poison the water supply and communities downstream,
    * drain the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada’s largest watershed, and
    * contribute to climate change.

The book does provide hope, however, and ends with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem.

• Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
• Vintage Canada, 2007
• Paperback, 266 pages
• 9780679314837

The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment.

When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet was born.

The couple’s discoveries sometimes shook their resolve. It would be a year without sugar, Cheerios, olive oil, rice, Pizza Pops, beer, and much, much more. Yet local eating has turned out to be a life lesson in pleasures that are always close at hand. They met the revolutionary farmers and modern-day hunter-gatherers who are changing the way we think about food. They got personal with issues ranging from global economics to biodiversity. They called on the wisdom of grandmothers, and immersed themselves in the seasons. They discovered a host of new flavours, from gooseberry wine to sunchokes to turnip sandwiches, foods that they never would have guessed were on their doorstep.

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating tells the full story, from the insights to the kitchen disasters, as the authors transform from megamart shoppers to self-sufficient urban pioneers. The 100-Mile Diet is a pathway home for anybody, anywhere.

• Rose George
• Henry Holt and Company, 2008
• Paperback, 288 pages
• 9780805090833

"In the early twenty-first century, when surgery can be done microscopically and human achievement seems limitless, 2.6 billion people lack the most basic thing that human dignity requires. Four in ten people in the world have no toilet. They must do their business instead on roadsides, in the bushes, wherever they can. Yet human feces in water supplies contribute to one in ten of the world’s communicable diseases. A child dies from diarrhoea – usually brought on by fecal-contaminated food or water – every 15 seconds.

• Thomas F. Pawlick
• Greystone Books, 2006
• Paperback, 256 pages
• ISBN: 9781553651697

An in-depth expose of how the modern food system is putting our food supply in serious danger-with startling new evidence and guidance on what we can do to reclaim control of what we eat.

In THE END OF FOOD, award-winning Canadian journalist and part-time farmer Thomas F. Pawlick documents the impending food crisis and traces its direct cause to the harmful methods of food production and processing currently used by the so-called agri-food industries-a corporate-run factory farm system that increasingly values profits over nourishment-to the detriment of everyone's health and well-being. It's a bleak picture, backed by hard-hitting evidence and true stories, but Pawlick makes it abundantly clear that it is not too late and devotes the latter part of the book to the many ways that ordinary citizens can take back control of the food supply by becoming active on a local level. This is an essential handbook for informing ourselves about the frightening but real decline of the quality of the food we eat and a self-defense guide to what everyone can do to put a stop to it.

• Eds. Martin Reynolds, Chris Blackmore and Mark J. Smith
• Zed Books, 2009
• Paperback, 360 pages
• 9781848133174

This book is for anyone involved with managing environmental decisions making. The book promotes innovative ways of understanding and taking responsibility for actions in the context of our 'natural' world through a selection of classic and contemporary edited readings accompanied with an editorial narrative. It provides sense-making tools for appreciating and doing something about seemingly intractable modern-day environmental dilemmas--including global warming, fossil fuel consumption, fresh water quality, industrial pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. The book draws on contemporary ideas associated with environmental ethics, social learning, communities of practice, systems thinking, ecological citizenship, corporate responsibility, fair trade, and the connections between environmental and social justice; configuring these ideas into practical notions for responsible action.

• Charles Emmerson
• Public Affairs; 2010
• Hardcover; 448 pages
• 9781586486365

Long at the margins of global affairs and at the edge of our mental map of the world, the Arctic has found its way to the center of the issues which will challenge and define our world in the twenty-first century: energy security and the struggle for natural resources, climate change and its uncertain speed and consequences, the return of great power competition, the remaking of global trade patterns…

In The Future History of the Arctic, geopolitics expert Charles Emmerson weaves together the history of the region with reportage and reflection, revealing a vast and complex area of the globe, loaded with opportunity and rich in challenges. He defines the forces which have shaped the Arctic’s history and introduces the players in politics, business, science and society who are struggling to mold its future.

The Arctic is coming of age. This engrossing book tells the story of how that is happening and how it might happen—through the stories of those who live there, those who study it, and those who will determine its destiny.


Discovery Magazine
“As the Arctic thaws, nations around the globe are jockeying for access to its mineral resources and potentially lucrative new shipping routes. With considerable on-site reporting, Emmerson surveys the environmental and geopolitical changes under way.”

National Interest

• Barry Sanders
• AK Press, 2009
• Paperback, 183 pages
• 9781904859949

"Here's the awful truth: even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the earth would still be headed, head first and at full speed, toward total disaster for one major reason. The military produces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction." —from the Introduction  This new investigation by Barry Sanders examines in detail the environmental impact of US military practices. In a period of unprecedented scrutiny of the social and economic impacts of the US defense policies, Sanders explores a completely different aspect of the situation, declaring military activity, from fuel emissions to radioactive waste to defoliation campaigns, as the single-greatest contributor to the worldwide environmental crisis.  Based on research culled from documents released or leaked by the military, The Green Zone is the first book to provide a comprehensive examination of the relationship between militarism and ecological destruction. Includes a powerful Foreword by Mike Davis.

• Wayne Roberts
• New Internationalist; September 2008
• Paperback; 192 pages
• 978-1-904456-96-4

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

With spiralling food prices and spreading social unrest this is a timely guide to the instability of industrialized food systems. Wayne Roberts traces the history of food production and consumption, and shows that in a system dominated by supermarkets and agri-business real food choices are becoming harder to make.

This book asks all the right questions, and provides some of the answers, in a real, democratic debate about food. It shows how people and communities can take control from governments and corporations to organize themselves creatively to achieve ‘food sovereignty’ – a balanced, just and sustainable food system.

About the author: Wayne Roberts is a leading North American writer, activist and practitioner in community food security. Author and columnist for NOW Magazine, he’s on the board of the Community Food Security Coalition and Food Secure Canada, and coordinates the Toronto Food Policy Council, the most respected city food group in the world.

• Thomas F. Pawlick
• Greystone Books, 2009
• Paperback, 344 pages
• ISBN: 9781553653400

Rural life in North America has changed dramatically since the days of the family farm, when people worked the same land for generations, let their cows graze in pastures and their chickens scratch in dirt, and sold their produce locally. The few remaining small farmers now struggle to survive, strangled by debt and a rash of complex regulations designed to drive them out of business. In their place are corporate-backed factory farms with little understanding of, or sympathy for, rural life. But the corporate and political interests determined to make this life extinct are meeting with fierce resistance. In this passionate and persuasive book, writer and farmer Thomas Pawlick uses his own rural community as a microcosm for the battle between industrial agriculture and local farming -- a clash whose outcome will determine the future of rural life in North America -- and also the quality and sustainability of our food, water, soil, and air.

• Jamie Linton
• UBC Press; 2009
• Hardcover; 336
• 9780774817011

We all know what water is and many of us take it for granted. But because it seems so natural, the way we see water is seldom given critical attention. This book provides a much-needed analysis of how we view water, showing that modern understandings have given rise to a global crisis. Jamie Linton argues that modern Western society tends to understand water as a scientific abstraction - as merely H20 or the substance occurring in the hydrologic cycle. We have lost sight of its essential fecundity and stripped it of its wider environmental, social, and cultural contexts. This removal, or abstraction, has given modern society license to treat water as something that may dammed, diverted, and manipulated with impunity. The water crisis can be averted, Linton concludes, by deliberately reinvesting water with social content.


The book demonstrates, in a clear and concise fashion, the ways in which contemporary social relationships with water have constituted a crisis ... The subject is of fundamental importance and the author's emphasis on the need to posit environmental concerns within a socio-natural understanding is vital. - Alex Loftus, Department of Geography, University of London


Jamie Linton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

• Alex Steffen, editor
• Harry Abrams; April 2008
• Paperback; 596 pages
• 978-0-8109-7085-4

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-3 weeks).

Worldchanging is packed with information, resources, reviews, and ideas that give readers access to the tools they need to build a better future. Written by a diverse collaborative of innovators, Worldchanging demonstrates that the means for making a difference lie all around us.

This team of top-notch writers, brought together by Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen, includes Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity, Geekcore founder Ethan Zuckerman, and sustainable food expert Anne Lappé, among many others.

Each chapter offers practical answers to important questions, such as: Why does buying locally produced food make sense? What steps can we take to influence our workplace toward sustainability? How can we travel, live, work, and learn in world-changing ways? How, in short, can we participate in building a better future locally and globally?

Worldchanging proves that a life that is sustainably prosperous, thoughtful and democratic, dynamic and peaceful, is not just possible, it’s here.