I developed my love for landscape growing up in Sussex and studying at Oxford University. For several decades, I have worked as an academic geographer in New Zealand. It’s a country dramatically transformed from forest and wetland to introduced grasslands. These were created originally to supply British consumers with primary products, although nowadays, markets in East Asia are important. Living at the edge of the world has long turned my interests toward environmental histories and global environmental futures. How can we live and eat more sustainably, how can we use the land and water we have more responsibly, and how can we restore biodiversity in ravaged landscapes for future generations?
I wrote...
The New Biological Economy: How New Zealanders are Creating Value from the Land
Michael Pollan made his name writing about eating and drinking as ecological and political acts. In this—one of his best-known books—he explores the wider questions that arise from our food choices as omnivores. He dissects three food chains, the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer, as different ways of connecting us through what we eat to the sun’s energy and soil fertility.
Industrial food, however, also draws much energy from fossil fuels, which he demonstrates by exploring the impacts on the earth and our bodies of the use of industrial corn products. Significantly, however, the other food chains are also not problem-free, hence the ‘omnivore’s dilemma’.
What shall we have for dinner? Such a simple question has grown to have a very complicated answer. We can eat almost anything nature has to offer, but deciding what we should eat stirs anxiety. Should we choose the organic apple or the conventional? If organic, local or imported? Wild fish or farmed? Low-carb or low-cal? As the American culture of fast food and unlimited choice invades the world, Pollan follows his next meal from land to table, tracing the origin of everything consumed and the implications for ourselves and our planet. His astonishing findings will shock all who care…
Like Pollan’s book, this one offers a sharp critique of the increasingly standardized and vulnerable global food system. After a paean to the attributes of the soil on which that system depends, Monbiot draws on practical experiments that seek to produce fruit and nuts, cereals, and protein and fats in less damaging ways.
These include regenerative forms of horticulture, no-drill agriculture, and growing microbial protein by precision fermentation. His main concern is to avert climate and ecological breakdown by exploring alternatives to ‘agricultural sprawl’. In turn he argues that this could open space for biodiversity recovery through rewilding, the subject of one of his earlier books.
The Sunday Times bestseller *Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize* A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year
'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth
From the bestselling author of Feral, a breathtaking first glimpse of a new future for food and for humanity
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
The author and her husband are pioneers of one of the best-known rewilding schemes in Britain at their estate at Knepp in West Sussex. They began a quarter century ago, after financial losses from conventional farming of their heavy clay soils, with its reliance on expensive oil-derived inputs, became unsustainable.
She describes rewilding as restoration by letting go, although with the help of grazing animals such as pigs, ponies, and longhorn cattle. The book is a rich evocation of a landscape evolving as a remarkable array of wild species flourish. It is also a valuable record of the debates about rewilding. In 2023, it was made into a documentary film.
'A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope' - Chris Packham
In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.
Ritchie’s book is often counterintuitive, a quality it shares with others in this list. It is also strongly evidence-based. She argues that we have the agency to avert climate and ecological disaster. Her analysis highlights the ways in which this is being exercised, ranging from deforestation and energy to fishing and waste.
Like Monbiot, Tree, and Pollan, she identifies dietary change as critical. Rethinking our relationship with meat is necessary, given the huge amounts of land being converted for pasture and animal feed. But she also shows that palm oil, much maligned, is a far more efficient source of vegetable oils per hectare than fashionable alternatives such as soybeans, almonds, or coconuts.
This "eye-opening and essential" book (Bill Gates) will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems—and explains how we can solve them.
It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.
But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
Amitav Ghosh is one of the most original writers on the climate crisis, both in fiction and nonfiction. Here, he takes as his starting point the early seventeenth century Dutch trade in spices from the Banda Islands in what is now Indonesia. He charts how colonialism as an early expression of globalisation ripped apart indigenous vitalistic relations with plants, animals and place, as distant discoveries were pillaged for use as inert ‘resources’.
With a range of such stories, or ‘parables,’ from different places and times, he explores how we have arrived at the dilemmas that each of the books in this list ponders and the ways in which, nonetheless, the more-than-human remains stubbornly alive.
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh's narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The…
For a century or more, New Zealand has exemplified those countries that have built economies and landscapes through a series of commodity-based booms. Wool and meat production have been overlain by more recent increases in plantation timber, dairying, and tourism. But by dealing in volume rather than value, the reputational edge on which its trade has depended risks being undermined by polluted waterways, industrialised landscapes, and greenhouse gas emissions.
So, how can a small country make a living in a competitive world where market access is not guaranteed? And when consumers increasingly desire foods and fibres that have a clear value proposition in terms of provenance and sustainability? Drawing on particular products and places, this book explores how New Zealand producers are meeting these challenges.
