You need to read these books, 21st century environmentalists
Some people travel to better understand the world. Others read to get a better sense of the planet Earth. Author and environmentalist Ken Ilgunas did both.
In his new book Trespassing Across America, Ilgunas hiked the length of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline -- all 1,700 miles of it, between Alberta, Canada and Port Arthur, Texas -- to better understand what the proposed pipeline would do to the communities and ecosystems it would intersect.
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But traveling wasn't the only thing that helped Ilgunas explore the environment. Both during his journey and while writing it up, Ilgunas read several books to better understand nature and its systems.
Check out Ilgunas' reading recommendations for the 21st century environmentalist -- along with Ilgunas' explanation for why he chose that book.
The Energy of Slaves by Andrew Nikiforuk
Ken Ilgunas: "I can't praise this book enough. Nikiforuk, borrowing from countless disciplines, takes us on an odyssey through our atmospherically-challenged 21st century world.
"We learn that food, obesity, social relationships, population, and, needless to say, the health of the environment are all very much connected to our use of fossil fuels.
"It’s full of fascinating studies, philosophical theories, and jaw-dropping statistics. Should be required reading for our species."
The Conundrum by David Owen
Ken Ilgunas: "The conundrum is this: green technologies fail to do what they’re supposed to do -- lower consumption -- because these energy-efficient technologies end up enabling us to drive and fly and eat and buy more and more and more.
"Owen’s book is quietly heretical. Our problems cannot all be solved by recycling and innovating. What we really need is a revolutionary reduction in how much we consume."
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Ken Ilgunas: "Getting to the end of an environmental book is almost always a difficult and depressing slog. It’s hard to give a weighty subject a light touch, but Foer finds a way to make this book about the meat industry — a subject as unpalatable as any — readable and entertaining.
"What makes the book work is its amalgam of styles: memoir-ish reflections, philosophical musings, hard research, fresh writing, with a little eco-adventuring thrown in. In the end, the book is not just about how to eat, but how to think."
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
Ken Ilgunas: "While most of us already know that our consumption-dependent and materially-wasteful economic system is to blame for our countless environmental problems, Klein’s book is an eloquent and forceful reminder.
"It is a bit ponderous, as it tries to capture the whole 21st century environmental movement, but the first few chapters are wonderfully insightful with brutal, no-nonsense lines like this:
And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time… Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests.
After Nature by Jedediah Purdy
Ken Ilgunas: "As a history of environmental thinking in the U.S., After Nature is pretty great and a nice update to Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind. The juiciest morsels of Purdy’s book, though, are toward the end, when he talks about how our thinking must change in order to grapple with the challenges of an epoch -- the Anthropocene -- in which mankind has altered Earth’s natural forces.
"Reading it is like looking over a fun playground of ideas, like 'post-humanism,' and 'new animism,' and how we might broaden our 'environmental imaginations,' skip and bound across the page.
"The book is full of these sky-tilted musings, but Purdy, who believes that law, politics, and democracy are, at bottom, our only hope, always has his feet on the ground."
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Ken Ilgunas: "Given the extent of the mess we’ve made of the Earth in just the past hundred years, we tend to forget that humankind has always been a destructive species. Harari’s book, which takes us back to our very beginning, reminds us that we, as mere hunter-gatherers with primitive technologies, helped kill off countless mammalian species from the planet before we could even write and grow crops.
"Sapiens suggests that, before we look to the future, it may be a good idea to first look deep into our past."
Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
Ken Ilgunas: "Who’d have thought that a boring term like 'zoning code' could have far-reaching implications on the quality of our lives? The authors of Suburban Nation discuss how the planning of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities can destroy our civic, spiritual, and physical lives, not to mention our fast-vanishing green spaces."
What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel
Ken Ilgunas: "Kerry Emmanuel is a professor of climate science at MIT, who wrote this short and sweet (it’s a little over 100 pages) book on what we know about climate change. It’s an easy-on-the-eyes read for the layman, neither technical nor muddled with scientific jargon.
"It simply compiles everything we know about climate change in a book that can be read in a day --and used to take down your libertarian uncle’s argument that manmade climate change is a leftwing hoax."
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