100 Books Like Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them

This is it. The book that launched the environmental justice movement.

Scientists today frequently talk about environmental racism, about the way that harmful substances in our environments are not distributed randomly but instead disproportionately on communities of color, which in turn takes an enormous toll on the health of people living in those communities.

It was this book that forcefully made the case for seeing this phenomenon through the lens of civil rights. It exposed the widespread and systemic nature of environmental racism and made the case for responding to it with all the concepts, collective action, and policy strategies of the civil rights movement.  

Gender is a major axis of disparities in power and wealth.

In this pioneering book, Indian economist Bina Agarwal mapped women’s access to land in South Asia, lifting up the key role of rights to natural resources in human well-being.

Her account of the Bodhgaya movement, a struggle by peasant women against inequity and patriarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, has special resonance for me because I Iived there and saw firsthand the cruelties of semi-feudal landlord rule.

Universal property – property that is inalienable, individual, and belongs in equal measure to all – is a game-changing idea whose time is coming.

Introduced alongside conventional (private and state) property, it can serve the twin goals of reducing inequality and protecting the environment.

For example, by treating the biosphere’s limited capacity to recycle carbon emissions as universal property, and charging for use of this resource, we can both protect climate stability and provide universal basic income via climate-protection dividends.

Peter Barnes has been a leading voice for universal property, following in the footsteps of Tom Paine and Henry George. Do yourself a favor: read this thought-provoking book, and share it with your family and friends.

Economist Eloi Laurent’s book is a long-overdue introduction to the political economy of the environment.

In contrast to standard environmental economics textbooks that disregard interpersonal conflict by analyzing aggregate costs and benefits – disembodied from those who experience them – Laurent embeds our treatment and maltreatment of nature in our treatment and maltreatment of other people.

This book puts sustainability across generations and justice within them at center stage, where they belong.

As a non-scientist, I love reading books written by scientists in language that the rest of us can understand. This is one of the best – and it addresses many of the most urgent questions scientists will keep worrying about through the 21st century, about the interaction between oil production and use, the atmosphere, the oceans, and freshwater systems. Catherine Gautier writes in a clear, accessible style. She is well aware that we can not fence off the study of physical phenomena such as climate change and contamination of water sources from the study of society, economics, and politics.  

I find reading this book like sitting with a wise friend who gently tells you you’re making a big mistake, but you can still fix it, and it can be OK.

Recent climate policy has gone off the rails with the idea of “net zero,” a sleight-of-hand that makes it look much easier: We don’t actually have to stop emitting; we can just offset emissions by removing them from the atmosphere later to pay back the debt. Yeah, right. This is true in theory but deeply problematic in practice: risky, and prone to error and deception. Some emissions can continue to be offset by removals to get to global net zero or net negative. But the current net-zero bandwagon, with everyone pretending their emissions can continue, is dangerous madness.

Buck brings her clear insight and ruthless honesty to this deeply confused area. She gently holds the popular delusions up for… show more.

Yergin is a master at weaving together geopolitics, economics, science and technology, policy, and culture to teach us about the critical role energy plays in defining the world around us. He is one of the few experts who puts energy at the center of his work, and he uses his understanding of history to inform his interpretation of the present.

Among other things, this book reveals the role global climate change plays in geopolitics today and will play in the future, and it reveals fascinating insights into the emerging Cold War between China and America. The nations with the most innovative technology in the energy sector are poised to remain dominant world powers in the future.

Nordhaus was one of the first economists to explain the nature of climate change and why dealing with it is of economic importance.  In this book, he uses his DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate and Economy) model to help explain --- at a textbook level --- how unrestricted GHG emissions can cause climate change to occur and lead to serious problems in the future. He also utilizes the model to illustrate some of the uncertainties we face when thinking about the climate system and when trying to predict the changes to expect under different policies. The book thereby provides students (and others) with a good introduction to climate change policy.

To understand our present plight with climate change we have to get our minds around the history of steam power, and why it came to dominate and supersede wind and water, despite its equal horsepower and greater expense.

Malm’s study is brilliant and while it focuses on labour relations moreso than race the reader only has to think of cotton and slavery, and wool and the colonial frontier to build in the global implications for the transition to steam power. 

White Skin, Black Fuel is the most clarifying book I’ve read explaining the rise of the far right and how it made climate change an issue of politics rather than physics, of ideology rather than environment.

It has many light touches and is accessible in style, so the reader is guided through the postwar progression of the far-right as principally an anti-immigration platform that then gained, once they had acquired some electoral credibility, the support and funding of fossil fuel corporations to advance their extractivist business models and scuttle any transition to renewables.

It made connections I’d been grasping at for years.