Here are 100 books that Believers fans have personally recommended if you like
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I want to live in a future where all life can thrive. Toward that end, I spend my days teaching and writing about how we can solve the problems we face in our communities and world and build such a future. No surprise then that I read extensively about solutions to problems, looking for those that are visionary while being practical and which truly strive to do the most good and least harm for everyone. As a systems thinker, I’m always looking for books that recognize how interconnected our political, economic, production, food, legal, energy, and other systems are and that offer ideas that will have the fewest unintended negative consequences.
I’m not a fan of either Doomsday or Pollyanna-ish books, especially in relation to climate change. I’ve read lots of books on this subject, and this is my favorite.
It doesn’t shy away from explaining what’s at stake and what is likely to happen if we don’t stop the escalation of climate-heating gases in our atmosphere, but it offers us a path toward solving this potential catastrophe that we can and must take together.
'Everyone should read this book' MATT HAIG 'One of the most inspiring books I have ever read' YUVAL NOAH HARARI 'Inspirational, compassionate and clear. The time to read this is NOW' MARK RUFFALO 'Figueres and Rivett-Carnac dare to tell us how our response can create a better, fairer world' NAOMI KLEIN
*****
Discover why there's hope for the planet and how we can each make a difference in the climate crisis, starting today.
Humanity is not doomed, and we can and will survive. The future is ours to create: it will be shaped by who we…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve been trying to balance a need to help make the world a better place with my own small expertise as a musician and teacher. So I’ve played music with birds, whales, and bugs, taught philosophy to engineers for decades, written many books and released many albums, and traveled all over the world learning what people are doing to improve things. I need to find words to read that encourage me and lift me out of the looming pull of depressing statistics and real suffering that we all read about every day. I hope change is possible, and I urge everyone to work toward it in their own specific and unique ways.
From the 1960s but still one of the greatest books on how being creative means trying everything, trusting no one, and listening to everybody and everything. After you read this you will know that you can be an artist, that is, if you are meant to be one.
Silence, John Cage's first book and epic masterpiece, was published in October 1961. In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching. Fifty years later comes a beautiful new edition with a foreword by eminent music critic Kyle Gann. A landmark book in American arts and culture, Silence has been translated into more than forty languages and has…
I’ve been trying to balance a need to help make the world a better place with my own small expertise as a musician and teacher. So I’ve played music with birds, whales, and bugs, taught philosophy to engineers for decades, written many books and released many albums, and traveled all over the world learning what people are doing to improve things. I need to find words to read that encourage me and lift me out of the looming pull of depressing statistics and real suffering that we all read about every day. I hope change is possible, and I urge everyone to work toward it in their own specific and unique ways.
From the guy who came up with the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” is a manifesto for questioning authority and turning the tools of advertising and persuasion against the man. Lasn understood what memes really are before the internet trivialized the concept. He reminds us of the transformational power of simple, clear, addictive ideas.
"Engrossing, exciting [...] This book compels us to rethink our approaches to economics ..." —Literary Review of Canada
"Thought-provoking and creative" — Julie Nelson, author of Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics
"Meme Wars is a Molotov cocktail tossed into the boardroom. "— Calgary Herald
From the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is an articulation of what could be the next steps in rethinking and remaking our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Born in England but living now in America’s mountain west, I am sucker for landscapes that dance with unusual plants and animals. I have been a commercial fisherman, a tool librarian, and a back-country park ranger. These days, I’m an award-winning public philosopher and author. I have written books and articles about powerful emerging technologies. However, I realized a few years ago that wild animals are an antidote to the technological and commercial forces that can flatten our world. From art painted on cave walls millennia ago to the toys we still give to our children, animals are an important part of human identity. I celebrate this in my work.
We are such a visual species that it is easy to forget how the other senses contribute to the colorful world we share. Moore’s elegant account of the sounds that rumple the aether through which we move opened my eyes (and especially my ears).
Moore is known for her ability to wrap beautiful words around important concepts. Like me, she is trained as a philosopher. Her blend of poetry and insightfulness is fully displayed in this rare homily for nature’s sounds.
Moore worries about their loss as the noise of industry drowns out nature’s own voice. But I would read a chapter before bed each day and drift off to sleep accompanied by lullabies sung by the remarkable kin who share our world.
At once joyous and somber, this thoughtful gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore's distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change.
In this meditation on the music of the natural world, Moore celebrates the call of loons, howl of wolves, bellow of whales, laughter of children, and shriek of frogs, even as she warns of the threats against them. Each group of essays moves, as Moore herself has been moved, from celebration to lamentation to bewilderment and finally to the determination to act in defense of wild songs and…
I’m deeply concerned about the health of the planet and am puzzled by our failure to act. As someone who thinks a lot about museums and heritage (aka the stories we tell about ourselves), I’m intrigued by how we think about places of environmental harm as heritage and how we pay attention to the environmental impact of heritage sites like WWI battlefields, English ironworks, and Appalachian coal mines. Interrogating what we remember and what we forget illuminates the systems of power that benefit from ignoring environmental and social costs. My hope is that understanding the history of toxic harm points us to a more sustainable, just future.
A clear, detailed account of human’s relationship to the biosphere since WWII tracing the accelerating use of coal and oil. If carbon dioxide is one of the most significant pollutants affecting the planet, this book documents how we pumped it into the atmosphere and the resulting ecological disruption.
The Earth has entered a new age-the Anthropocene-in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.
More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became…
I am Sumit Lodhia, a Professor of Accounting at the University of South Australia who has a primary research interest in sustainability accounting and reporting. Sustainable development is something that I am very passionate about, and I consider myself lucky enough to research in this area and to teach a course on this subject matter to third year undergraduate accounting students. I am a former resident of the beautiful Fiji Islands, and my lived experiences here and in my current country of residence, Australia, have shaped my worldview that focuses on equity, transparency, democracy, morality, and compassion.
I found this book to be an excellent read which conveyed the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to address this issue immediately. I watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and it was riveting. I noted that there was a companion book and read this as a top priority.
I found the book to be written in layman’s terms–making it quite an easy read for anyone to understand why addressing climate change is fundamental to our future survival on this planet. I came across this book while I was close to finishing my PhD thesis on sustainability accounting and reporting, and it reassured me that what I was doing as a PhD topic played a part, albeit small, in addressing one of the most critical challenges for mankind.
An Inconvenient Truth—Gore's groundbreaking, battle cry of a follow-up to the bestselling Earth in the Balance—is being published to tie in with a documentary film of the same name. Both the book and film were inspired by a series of multimedia presentations on global warming that Gore created and delivers to groups around the world. With this book, Gore, who is one of our environmental heroes—and a leading expert—brings together leading-edge research from top scientists around the world; photographs, charts, and other illustrations; and personal anecdotes and observations to document the fast pace and wide scope of global warming. He…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I am a philosopher and writer, but I have equally been a soldier, designer, educator, and farmer. Thus, I am a product of this history. At the center of my gravity are concerns with environmental and climatic issues, conflict reduction, social justice, and political change predicated upon conditions of sustainability. I live in Australia but have worked in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. I have written over twenty books because I am driven to understand the complexity of the world in which I live. I am an activist, and so I strive to act affirmatively based on the knowledge I have gained.
Ailton Kranek is a well-known Indigenous Rights activist, environmental campaigner, activist, and journalist in and beyond Brazil. His modest seventy-three-page book looks at, and beyond, life in the Krenak village in Minas Gerais on the Doce River, in southeast Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon. What I so like about this book is it confronts the horror of the prospect of extinction without turning away to the present culture as a force of resistance.
The members of the Krenak nation call the river Watu—our grandfather—a person. His story, the story of his village, and of the river are one. Watu winds its way 853 kilometres through the Amazon to the coast. In 2015, the collapse of a dam released highly contaminated water from mining into the river, causing an ecological disaster. But the plight of the village needs to be seen in a wider context…
"Ailton Krenak's ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book." - Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers
Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.
From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society's flawed concept of "humanity" - that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it…
We are social epidemiologists trying to understand how the societies we live in affect our health. Together, we try to communicate our scientific research to politicians and policy-makers, but even more importantly to everyone who is curious about how our worlds shape our wellbeing and who want to work together for positive change. We co-founded a UK charity, The Equality Trust, to build a social movement for a more equal society, and we are Global Ambassadors for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, an international collaboration of organisations and individuals working to transform economic systems.
You probably view any connection to nature that you feel as a purely emotional and/or intellectual experience.
But what if we’re not individuals disconnected from other people and nature, but instead connected to nature and one another by biology and evolution in ways that have powerful implications for our ability to create societies that sustain both us as people and the planet we live on?
Like all our book picks, this one chimes with our own research – the more we learn about our real place in the world and how our world creates our realities, the better able we’ll be to change the world.
We are much more connected to nature and each other than it seems. We perceive ourselves as autonomous, discrete individuals with an unchanging inner self that persists throughout our lifetime, but this is an illusion.
On a physical, psychological and cultural level, we are all much more intertwined than we know: we cannot use our bodies to define our independent existence because most of our 37 trillion cells have such a short lifespan that we are essentially made anew every few weeks; the molecules that make up our bodies have already been component parts of countless other organisms, from ancient…
Chris Fitch is a writer, geographer, and storyteller. Formerly a senior staff writer at Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, he has reported from Australia to Kenya, Arizona to the Galápagos Islands, covering global stories on climate change, ecological urbanism, wildlife conservation, cultural revitalisation, sustainable development, geopolitics, science, travel, and more.
A profoundly depressing but important explanation of the paradox that the more power humans gain over the Earth, the more the planet we call home will turn against us, a fundamental shift in humanity's relationship with nature, and making our existence ever more precarious.
Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch the Anthropocene one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'. The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival of civilisation itself. What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history and Earth history collide? Some…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
The world as we know it is coming to an end, so humanity can take a quantum leap into a new consciousness. The books we recommend offer information on why this is happening and how to become part of the change to a New Earth. Humanity is living in an amazing time. We feel we have something to say on this based on our combined experiences as psychologists, therapists, trainers, and authors, and giving new consciousness workshops internationally since 2012.
Why this book is recommended is that it suggests the human brain is not suited for detecting many of the gradually escalating world dangers, such as overpopulation and world chaos that threaten our very existence as humans.
The threats being faced are of our own making, so they can be unmade. Understanding this makes it easier to restore hope for the future and a new consciousness.
Although it was first published nearly twenty years ago, what we like is that it is still relevant today and identifies various ways to minimize the problem, including the importance of educating children differently.
Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich explain that we are causing our own problems because we have created a world where our basic mental functions are no longer suitable. We evolved over a period of millions of years to survive in small tribal families on the wild grassy plains of East Africa. Now the way we live has nothing to do with that time and place, but the mental tools that were developed to survive on the savanna have remained unchanged. These instincts were wonderfully adapted to the environment that shaped them. But that world, the world that made us, is…
