27 Books Like Cows Save the Planet

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. 

This book sounds the alarm on an often overlooked and misunderstood aspect of modern agriculture: the cost and availability of fertilizer. Our soils have become severely depleted by overuse, but the artificial fertilizers that have kept them going for the last 70 years are running out.

This leaves animal "waste" as an option, but serious problems exist due to the modern system of confining and feeding animals in remote feeding pens. Mr. Logsdon's back-to-the-future solution seems like the only one available, but one wonders if it can be implemented quickly enough.

A highly innovative book on the why and how of keeping chickens and other poultry without dependence on buying chicken feed from the feed store. 

There is nothing new about keeping chickens to process your weeds and leftovers into human food—people have relied on them for thousands of years—but purchasing large volumes of expensive feed to produce eggs is not sustainable or practical. This book will solve that problem for you.

Joann considered the chapter "Your Child Has the Right to Be Beautiful" one of the most important essays ever written. It shows the relationship between diet, bone structure, and beauty. At a time when she had five children under five, this book completely changed her approach to nutrition and motherhood. It turned her into the iconoclast she very much became, known for putting all accepted wisdom through the crucible of common sense.

For instance, despite the conventional wisdom of the ’50s and ’60s, she was one of the very earliest to challenge the idea that you should eat margarine in preference to butter. She never believed that processed food was a healthier choice. Many of Joann’s strongly held and fiercely defended convictions about the positive health effects of unprocessed grains, fats, and whole milk and cream have been vindicated, and it all started with this book. 

This is a different type of book than the ones listed above but is nonetheless essential for the gardener who wants to enrich rather than deplete their soil. Once you learn about the beneficial fungi, bacteria, and other critters that make up the soil food web, you'll think twice about tearing up their landscape with a rototiller.

I encountered the work of Geoffrey Ozin, a distinguished, award-winning chemist, some years ago, and was delighted to see him writing on this subject.

There are many angles to the story of CO2, and Ozin approaches the question as one of chemical engineering. Chemical engineers have known for decades how CO2 might be the basis of many industries that currently rely on fossil feedstocks.

This pioneering book on CO2, published back in 2020, starts from the premise that fossil feedstocks lie behind far more consumer products than most people imagine and that carbon dioxide can be used to replace them.

Since writing the book, Ozin has developed a significant new technique to enhance the economic viability of turning carbon dioxide into fuel, chemicals, and materials technologies. 

I found this book just about the most dazzling and gripping book I had ever come across about science. It kept on opening up new vistas as I read on. Full of surprises and unexpected dramas, it cast a vivid light on a wide range of issues. I finished it breathless with admiration.

It is about photosynthesis, the process whereby plants “eat” sunlight to form oxygen and sugar from carbon dioxide and water. This process is basic to almost all life on Earth. The book is about the development of photosynthesis on Earth and also about the development of our scientific knowledge about it.

As a climate activist and lover of glaciers and glaciation, I took a special interest in David Archer’s book, The Long Thaw. Archer takes us in and out of ice ages, explaining with surprisingly understandable prose just how ice ages are formed, their predictable cycles, why they’re important, and how with current climate change trends and impacts, we just may have missed the onramp to the next one. That could put us into a Hothouse Earth scenario not seen since the times of the dinosaurs. Archer masterfully brings science to the layperson. If we think that the year 2100 is a marker in the sand for climate change, think again. Archer reveals that the chilling (or heating) reality of climate change just might be forever. 

I have spent a lifetime researching the deep history of life.

All the books I’ve chosen demonstrate a convergence of exciting ideas, and I love the way Peter Brannen’s book joins the dots in a totally fresh way, showing how life gained energy at key stages, all involving CO2. It is the starting point for every living thing on the planet; it has regulated the climate throughout 4 billion years, and through the fossil remains of ancient photosynthesis has powered our world since the Industrial Revolution.

In a world seeking answers to deep-rooted problems, this is the most powerful message for the future that we need. I have never before been so mindblown by a book.

In clear, evocative prose, Barnett describes the world of seashells and humans’ relationship to them. Her book was laced with “Who knew?” moments for me. For example, until recently people considered seashells a kind of rock, giving little thought to the creatures that built and inhabited them. Barnett explains the threat that rising carbon dioxide levels present to the formation and very existence of shells, but she never carps; and although she interjects some of her own experiences—and sense of wonder—she never lapses into making this book about her, rather than her subject.