100 Books Like Life Cycle Assessment

A must read for exploring the qualitative, cultural, and social sensations of heat and coolth and understanding the thermodynamics of building design that elicits ways that we use, remember, and care about the energy that provides comfort (or discomfort) for building occupants.

Often in our environmental systems courses, we ask students to write down their most memorable thermal experience. Responses range from very hot to very cold and include many contrasting events, such as skiing, then sitting around a campfire. Thermal Delight gives experience after experience for us to consider how our comfort might be tempered or enjoyed and sets the foundation for designing with climate.

As designers, should we make our buildings not-uncomfortable or make them delightful?

Likely the first energy “guidebook” for architects. Published during the 1970s oil crises, Mazria lays out a design process for saving energy through passive solar design.

The book is full of foundational knowledge, core principles, concepts, early data on material properties based on research done at the University of Oregon, clear definitions, and lots of black and white hand drawings showing solar positions, angles, and access for buildings. Though no longer in print, copies are still available, and the content is still relevant today.

As more design process is relegated to blackbox software that “may” consider many of the same variables dealt with in the Handbook, it is wise to refer to Mazria to conceptually back up important design decisions. [As an aside, Ed Mazria is currently the CEO of Architecture 2030.]

Fitch is best known as a city planner—not as an architect or engineer. Perhaps it is this perspective that allowed him to prepare a delightful introduction to the various sensory dimensions—the environmental forces—we engage as building users.

These dimensions, which constitute much of our holistic experience with architecture, include air quality, light, sound, and heat. None are truly shown on architectural plans. All affect us for better or worse. This is a great introductory read bereft of equations. 

Architecture is often referred to as an art and a science. This is a reasonably accurate statement in the abstract. In practice, we often assess architecture visually (artistically) and assume (hope) that the science is there (even if hidden). In fact, physics always has the last word.

Fire and Memory reminds us that thermodynamics matters and that buildings are essentially anti-entropic constructs. Who can resist a proposition such as “whether to use the wood to build a small shelter or as firewood for a bonfire. An entire theory of architecture is encapsulated in this simple question.” Or a chapter titled “Energy as the Currency of Nature.”

Colm describes his book as a ‘hypocrite’s guide to saving the planet’ and he is very honest about the contradictions in his own life as he tries to live sustainably.

He uses humour and storytelling to engage the reader and to help all of us feel overcome by the scale of the climate challenge to give ourselves a break and keep on going. 

A welcome corrective to the trend of X number of things you can do in your personal life to save the Earth that won't threaten the rule of greedy polluters over the economy and government, Price's lighthearted book welcomes the reader with a smile but strikes hard against propaganda from corporate polluters while she stands up for climate justice. To help readers make a real difference, as opposed to doing things that feel helpful but really aren't like buying a Prius, Price does actually offer a few personal life changes, like buying less stuff or buying higher quality stuff at lower quantity. But most of her ideas are about thinking differently about the environment--such as Redefine Economy or even Redefine Extremism (greedheads, not environmentalists, are the real extremists). Or getting active in public policy--from the strikingly simple "Vote!" to "Join up locally--government & economy R us."

Former president Trump’s evisceration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments kept all of us canyon country activists busy for years with protests and op-eds. The backstory leading to President Biden’s restoration of both monuments pretty much outlines the history of conservation in America. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, as well as Capitol Reef, were part of an enormous Escalante National Monument proposed in the 1930s that likely would have prevented the tragic flooding of Glen Canyon by Lake Powell. Jonathan Thompson recounts these historic fights over public lands by focusing on San Juan County, home to Canyonlands National Park and Bears Ears—the first preserve proposed by Native nations—bringing us right up to the 2020s. Controversies abound, and Thompson is an engaging storyteller and careful journalist.

This anthology makes the case that an empire of extraction has existed from the dawn of the colonial era until deep into the 21st Century. The essays in the “Health and Environmental Justice” section are both fascinating and disturbing. And how could they not be disturbing with such words as these in chapter titles? “Uranium Mine and Mine Tailings.” “Arsenic Pollution.” “Quebec Asbestos.” Nearly every chapter in this section emphasizes the impact on indigenous populations with the chapter title on the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, being particularly stark. It opens with this: “If the Rivers Ran South.”

McCook traces the global devastation of coffee trees around the world that began in 1869. His work is not just about coffee, but about the ways in which pathogens are spread by air, ships, birds, and even by humans tracking it into remote sites on their boots. So the book is about coffee but about much more:  why do certain pathogens explode all of a sudden; how have farmers tried to cope with the fungus, which destroys entire trees and whole farms; what is the genetic stock of coffee now; why has rust suddenly appeared in Latin America in recent years; and what experiments are going on to try to defeat rust? Stuart, by the way, is a wonderful guy to meet and talk to about coffee and its pests. His book is absolutely readable!

Should one species dominate half the entire planet? To some that seems greedy, but others think it’s not enough.

This book suggests a middle way: half the planet for us, but no more. It’s the most sumptuous book on my list, and even comes with an online game (which my students enjoyed playing in class). The book blends fictional passages with socio-ecological analysis. One fantasy paints a disturbingly plausible eco-dystopia, another portrays an attractive utopia—a future where people develop forms of democratic planning to enable rich human lives amidst flourishing fauna and flora.

Along the way, Vettese and Pendergrass introduce us to a galaxy of visionaries—from William Morris to Otto Neurath to Ursula Le Guin—who have developed ideas and planning techniques that could make that utopia real.