Environmental Economics

The New York Times bestselling examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change 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...

Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to fast fashion chains like H&M now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they've turned clothing into a disposable good.

A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change “Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book...

From the author of the #1 bestselling and Governor General’s Literary Award-winning The Ingenuity Gap – an essential addition to the bookshelf of every thinking person with a stake in our world and our civilization. This is a groundbreaking, essential book for our times. Thomas Homer-Dixon...

A high-octane polemic against cars—which are ruining the world, while making us unhappy and unhealthy—from a talented young writer at the Economist The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather...

Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganize our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

In The Environmentalist’s Dilemma, award-winning journalist Arno Kopecky zeroes in on the core predicament of our times: The planet may be dying, but humanity’s doing better than ever. To acknowledge both sides of this paradox is to enter a realm of difficult decisions: Should we take down the government or try to change it from the inside? Is it okay to compare climate change to Hitler? Is hope naive or indispensable? How do you tackle collective delusion? Should we still have kids? And can we take them to Disneyland?

The conservation of natural resources, like that of any other asset, involves trade-offs. Yet, in a world faced with the harsh realities of climate change, crafting the right environmental policies is an increasingly urgent task. In Conservation, Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig bring together new research in economics and biodiversity to investigate conservation decisions and the theory behind them.

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Boccaletti, of The Nature Conservancy, “tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity” (Kelly...

Outsourcing and a trim corporate profile enabled Coke to scale up production of a low-price beverage and realize huge profits. But the costs shed by Coke have fallen on the public at large. Coke now uses an annual 79 billion gallons of water, an increasingly precious global resource, and its reliance on corn syrup has helped fuel our obesity crisis. Bartow J. Elmore explores Coke through its ingredients, showing how the company secured massive quantities of coca leaf, caffeine, sugar, and other inputs.

From the New York Times best-selling journalist, the staggering, hidden story of an unlikely band of mothers who discovered the deadly secret of Love Canal, and exposed one of America’s most devastating environmental disasters. Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their...

An entertaining and accessible listen with profound implications for the future, Teeming takes us on a journey through nature’s most ancient and successful R&D labs, and gives practical prescriptions for redesigning organizations to flourish far into the future. Evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Dr. Woolley-Barker weaves poetic vision and deep scientific expertise to illustrate how flat, agile, and adaptive societies like ants, termites, and underground fungal networks self-organize for resilience and value.

An investigative narrative that dives into the waste embedded in our daily lives—and shows how individuals and communities are making a real difference for health, prosperity, quality of life and the fight against climate change, by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist What happens to our trash?...

In the early twenty-first century, environmental risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, large-scale migrations, and conflicts over critical resources have become our lived reality in a world where nearly 8 billion people struggle to thrive. These crises have proven impossible to address without fundamental transformations of our economic institutions—exactly as predicted in this groundbreaking work. First published in 1994, Taming the Dragon offers a careful investigation of the processes that have led to global environmental change.

This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on. It has become impossible to deny that the planet is warming, and that governments...

Rejecting the old Left/Right ideologies, Rand develops a more pragmatic view capable of delivering practical solutions to this critical problem. A renewed capitalism harnessed to the task is the only way we might replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate severe climate risk. If we leave our dogma at the door, Rand argues, we might just build an economy that survives the century.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence The “closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted” (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky) story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement...

“Lucid, quietly urgent, and relentlessly logical . . . this is Bigthink with a capital B.” —The New York Times Book Review “Common Wealth explains the most basic economic reckoning that the world faces.” —Al Gore, winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and former vice president of...

An extraordinary investigation into shade, this “compelling . . . conversation-starter draws examples from history, city-planning and social policy” (NPR) to change the way we think about a critical natural resource that should be available to all. “Thought-provoking . . . Bloch, an...