Environmental Engineering

Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting the economic interest of the American people first.

In 1996, the first independent national report on the state of Australia’s environment found that we faced serious problems. With increasing urgency, five subsequent reports declared those problems were all getting worse, each calling for immediate action to protect our future. In Australia on the Brink, Ian Lowe argues that the essential first steps in addressing these threats are stabilizing the global climate and protecting our local biota. We must also change the emphasis of resource extraction from a damaging reliance on trade to improving our capacity to meet our own needs.

Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now details, step-by-step, what we need to do right now to avert disaster, showing that there is still hope for solving climate change. This award-winning book hopes to instill the passion and clarity for overcoming such a major problem. Author Dr. Samuel M. Goodman provides a tool to help you gain the understanding needed to advocate for a future free of this looming catastrophe in this thought-provoking work. Beyond Carbon Neutral speaks to everyone concerned about climate change.

China is setting an example for the US - and the world - to follow. We should all take note. China has been able to manage the difficult task of reducing pollution without slowing down economic growth. What can the US take away from China’s unique experience? Although the world often pits the US against China, when it comes to saving the planet, any progress by any country in reducing emissions is good for everyone. China has presided over the fastest industrialization and the fastest cleanup in history - it is worth taking a closer look to see how we can do better.

Naomi Klein gilt weltweit als eine Führungsfigur des Green New Deal, des Plans zur Rettung unserer Gesellschaft vor den Verwerfungen des Klimawandels. "How to change everything" erklärt einer jungen Leserschaft die Hintergründe des Kampfes gegen die Umweltzerstörung und für eine bessere Gesellschaft. Naomi Klein zeigt, wie die Lage so dramatisch werden konnte, vor welchen Herausforderungen wir jetzt stehen und wo Regierungen jetzt handeln müssen. Anhand vieler Mut machender Beispiele wird dabei deutlich, wie viel gerade junge Menschen bewegen können, wenn sie sich zusammenschließen und engagieren.

In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan's expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.

Four decades ago, the areas around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks sheltered the last few hundred surviving grizzlies in the lower 48 states. Protected by the Endangered Species Act, their population has surged to more than 1,500, and this burgeoning number of grizzlies now collides with the increasingly populated landscape of the 21st-century American West. Montana journalist Robert Chaney chronicles the resurgence of this charismatic species against the backdrop of the country's long history with the bear.

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future?

In Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism, Schwartz shows how now, perhaps more than ever, veganism offers a pathway for all of us of whatever faith (or no faith) to reduce hunger, conserve the environment, save water, reinstitute justice, and care for animals and the Earth. It is no coincidence, as Schwartz demonstrates, that many of these ideas are mandates in Jewish scripture, and that reincorporating a care for the world (tikkun olam) can itself reinvigorate the spirit of a faith and galvanize its practitioners to act.

Beginning in the vast North American Boreal Forest that stretches through Canada, and roving across the continent, from the Northern Sierra to Alabama's Paint Rock Forest, from the Appalachian Trail to a ranch in Mexico, Tony Hiss sets out on a journey to take stock of the "superorganism" that is the earth: its land, its elements, its plants and animals, its greatest threats - and what we can do to keep it, and ourselves, alive.

“Relax”, writes author Mary DeMocker, “this isn’t another light bulb list. It’s not another overwhelming pile of parental "to dos" designed to shrink your family’s carbon footprint through eco-superheroism.” Instead, DeMocker lays out a lively, empowering, and doable blueprint for engaging families in the urgent endeavor of climate revolution.

As climate change becomes an international crisis, more and more industries are looking for a sound model for creating successful environmentally friendly companies, and a new generation of young leaders are eager for inspiration and guidance on creating sustainable businesses. Mid-Course Correction Revisited advocates why we need to create prototypical green companies and a new economy - not based on non-renewable resources, but on renewable energy, aggressive recycling, innovative technology, and sustainable business practices.

We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.

Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What's more, its potential is nearly limitless. But in Taming the Sun, energy expert Varun Sivaram warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar's current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.

In Green Hell, Steven Milloy shows how the government and environmental elites will soon have you under their Green thumb, controlling the speed you drive, the temperature of your home, even when you can retire - and that's just the tip of their melting iceberg. Milloy argues that our hasty Green policies are more harmful to society than helpful to the environment and shows how we can counter the Green agenda. We all want a healthy planet, but we don't need to live in a Green nanny state to have one.

The environment, and the movement that grew up to protect it, is under attack, concerted and purposeful. Yet the need for solutions to pressing environmental problems grows more urgent each day. Teresa Heinz Kerry and Senator John Kerry traveled across the country in a national campaign to see at first hand how these issues unite people across party and ideological lines.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.

Imagine living without clean air. For the people who lived on the doorstep of Monkton Coke Works, their daily reality was a horrendous nightmare of hazardous and acrid sulfur dioxide emissions, all-pervading soot, and clamorous tannoys. Over decades, the facility grew unflaggingly, converting ever-increasing quantities of coal into coke without concern for the residents’ well-being.

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.