The Reader's Advisor

Paradise Lost:
The Consequences of Squandering the Earth’s Resources

Jonathan S. Adams
The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World. Beacon, 2006.
[333.9516 Adams]
A conservation biologist advocates using the latest in conservation science along with the desires of local communities to protect the places where people live and work.

Susanne Antonetta
Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. Counterpoint, 2001.
[615.902 Antonetta]
How the American Dream became a nightmare for two immigrant families who built summer homes in rural New Jersey on land near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation.

Maude Barlow
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis & the Coming Battle to the Right to Water. New press, 2007.
[333.91 Barlow]
In this follow-up to Blue Gold the authors outline both the global response to their revelations about Earth's dwindling water supple and how corporations are seizing control of the world's water supply, and the emergence of a grassroots movement to have water declared a basic human right not subject to profit.

Cynthia Barnett
Mirage: Florida & the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.. Univ. of Michigan, 2007.
[333.91 Barnett]
Reveals how the once water-blessed eastern U.S. has squandered so much of its abundant freshwater that it now faces shortages from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard.

Harvey Blatt
America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade? MIT, 2005.
[363.700973 Blatt]
Focuses on the environmental issues that polls show are most important to Americans today, such as the potential health dangers of tap water, global warming, and the disposal of radioactive waste.

Rachel Carson
Silent Spring. HM, 2002, 1962.
[363.7384 Carson]
The landmark work that gave an early warning alarm about the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, one that spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.

Marla Cone
Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic. Grove Press, 2005.
[363.73840911 Cone]
This exhaustive study of the Arctic's contaminated and deteriorating environment will shock those who think of it as the last great unspoiled territory on Earth.

Jacques Yves Cousteau & Susan Schiefelbein
The Human, the Orchid & the Octopus: Exploring & Conserving Our Natural World. Bloomsbury, 2007.
[333.95 Cousteau]
In this book, written 10 years before his death, the legendary French adventurer and environmental activist shares his lament at the plundering of the world's natural resources and his philosophy about protecting the Earth for future generations.

John Cronin & Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right. Scribner, 1997.
[363.7 Cronin]
From drinking water tainted with hospital waste to fish populations contaminated by freely dumped PCBs, two environmental advocates take aim at the powerful corporate and government polluters of the Hudson River.

Devra Davis
When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution. Basic Books, 2002.
[615.902 Davis]
A leading epidemiologist on environmentally linked illnesses discusses the very real dangers of industrial pollution.

Jared M. Diamond
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking, 2005.
[304.28 Diamond]
Traces the ecological collapse and subsequent decline of past societies and the fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril.

Michael D'Orso
Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galapagos Islands. HarCol, 2002.
[304.28 D’Orso]
How a migrant population of nomads, grifters, wealthy tour operators and desperately poor South American refugees, have brought crime, over-crowding, poaching, pollution and political warfare to the once pristine and idyllic islands.

Jack Doyle
Taken For a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.
[363.73921 Doyle]
If this story outlining how General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler spent 50 years denying there was anything they could do about air pollution and blocking all attempts to address the problem (such as using catalytic converters, alternative fuels, and emissions standards doesn't’t enrage you, nothing ever will.

Newt Gingrich & Terry L. Maple
A Contract with the Earth. JH, 2007.
[333.720973 Gingrich]
Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and Maple, an eminent conservationist, discuss what Americans need to know about the environmental crisis, including the nature of the problem and how to fix it, the cost of inaction, and the many benefits that follow if action is taken.

Al Gore
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming & What We Can Do About It. Rodale, 2006.
[363.73874 Gore]
Documents the fast pace and wide scope of global warming.

Thomas E. Homer-Dixon
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton University Press, 1999.
[303.6 Homer-Dixon]
Rapid growth in global population and economy results in an ever-increasing demand for natural resources, and as a consequence we face growing scarcities of such vital renewable resources as cropland, fresh water, and forests which Thomas Homer-Dixon predicts will cause insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence, especially in developing countries.

Valerie Kuletz
The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. Routledge, 1998.
[363.1799 Kuletz]
After decades of secret nuclear testing and toxic dumping in America's southwest, another ecological crisis now looms: the storage of thousands of tons of contaminated waste.

James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.
[303.4973 Kunstler]
Offers a warning that the depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically alter life as we know it and how we must prepare for the inevitable economic, political, and social changes.

Bill Lambrecht
Big Muddy Blues: True Tales and Twisted Politics Along Lewis and Clark's Missouri River. T. Dunne, 2005.
[333.9162078 Lambrecht]
The 200 year fight between conservation, development, farm, barge, American Indian, and government interests over the river made famous by Lewis and Clark.

J. E. Lovelock
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis & the Fate of Humanity. Basic, 2006.
[333.7 Lovelock]
The Gaia Theory posits that the Earth functions as a single living super-organism. But according to Lovelock, the theory’s originator, that organism is now sick thanks to greenhouse gases and it is already too late to prevent the global climate from “flipping” into an entirely new equilibrium that will threaten civilization as we know it.

Jeffrey K. McKee
Sparing Nature: The Conflict Between Human Population Growth and Earth's Biodiversity. Rutgers University Press, 2003.
[333.95 McKee]
Explores the cause-and-effect relationship (i.e mass extinction) between the richly diverse living world of wild plants and animals and a rapidly expanding number of people.

Alanna Mitchell
Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
[304.28 Mitchell]
Chronicles the courageous efforts of dedicated men and women in the world’s environmental hotspots (such as extraordinary as the island of Madagascar, the rain forests of Suriname, the parched oases of Jordan, the Arctic desert of Banks Island, the volcanic crests of Iceland, and, ultimately, the Galapagos archipelago) as they try to convince governments to turn the world's hotspots into environmentally protected areas.

Ted Norhaus & Michael Schellenberger
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. HM, 2007.
[333.72 Nordhaus]
Environmental insiders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus examine the failures of environmentalism and offer a provocative manifesto for political change that incorporates modern-day American values and is capable of dealing with the most important challenges confronting American society.

Stuart L. Pimm
The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth. McGraw-Hill, 2001
[363.7 Pimm]
We use 50 percent of the world's freshwater supply. We consume 42 percent of the world's plant growth. We are liquidating animals and plants 100 times faster than the natural rate of extinction. Such numbers should make it clear that the human impact on our planet has been, and continues to be, extreme and detrimental. Yet even after decades of awareness of our environmental peril, there remains passionate disagreement over what the problems are and how they should be remedied. Pimm, Professor of conservation biology at the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University, balances the raw numbers of what the earth produces against what humans take away annually.

Erik Reece
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness—Radical Strip Mining, and the Devastation of Appalachia. Riverhead Books, 2006.
[on order]
Exposes how an uncaring coal industry and radical strip mining is destroying the mountain of Appalachia--one of America's most precious natural resources and--the communities that depend on it.

Adam Rome
The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
[333.7315 Rome]
A scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States following World War II and the subsequent and the rise of the environmental movement.

David Seideman
Climate Change. Chelsea, 2005.
[YA 363.73874 Climate]
Covers a variety of topics on climate change, including greenhouse gases and the ozone layer, and the effects of climate change on wildlife and water.

William Stolzenberg
Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death & Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators. Bloomsbury, 2008.
Explains how the endangered statuses of predatory animals has upset the delicate balance of the environment, and what their disappearance portends for the future.

Bridget Stutchbury
Silence of the Songbirds: How We Are Losing the World's Songbirds and What We Can Do About It. Walker, 2007.
[598.8 Stutchbury]
A distinguished scientist reveals the alarming decline of the numbers of songbird species as their natural habit is destroyed, why this predicts widespread environmental problems, and what we all can do to save the birds and their habitats.

Mike Tidwell
Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast. Pantheon Books, 2003.
[976.300946 Tidwell]
Describes the gradual disappearance of the Cajun coast of Louisiana, which is losing two dozen square miles per year.

J.E.N. Veron
A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End. Belknap, 2008.
[578.77 Veron]
A historical, geological and biological study of the world's largest coral reef and its now threatened future due to the effects of climate change.

Jonathan Waterman
Where Mountains are Nameless: Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Norton, 2005.
[333.95160979 Waterman]
Details the importance of, and the on-going fight between conservationists, developers and politicians over, the nineteen-million-acre Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and its potential to yield billions of barrels of crude oil.

Adam Werbach
Act Now, Apologize Later. Cliff Street, 1997.
[363.7 Werbach]
The president of the Sierra Club--North America's oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization—stresses the importance of protecting the environment.

Joy Williams
Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. Lyons Press, 2001.
[179.1 Williams]
From vanishing wetlands to species extinction, William decries the abuses of the natural world by a greedy, consumer-culture society.

Edward O. Wilson
The Future of Life. Knopf, 2002.
[333.9516 Wilson]
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard assesses the precarious state of our environment, examining the mass extinctions occurring in our time and the natural treasures we are about to lose forever if we continue on our present destructive course.

Charles P. Wohlfort
The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. North Point Press, 2004.
[305.897 Wohlfort]
Discusses the very real problem of climate change and how it has already dramatically altered daily life, especially that of the native peoples in the Far North who still live largely off the land and sea.

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