Books like Life Cycle Assessment — picked by fans

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.”

The impending doom of climate change has been stressing me out for over a decade. It feels like my son will inherit a world that resembles the dystopian futures of Mad Max or Blade Runner. But the future we’re entering into will be more nuanced than that. 

This book helped me realize that the future may not be as bleak as I had once imagined. The environmental alarmists may have good intentions, but their efforts might be causing more harm than good.

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."

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!

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.”

It has become very fashionable to talk about capitalism and how it grinds us down as individuals. But this singular view of ourselves as lone victims is arguably its biggest trick. The truth is that the unchecked greed and growth that hurt us are hurting the planet most of all.

No one understands and can explain this, like journalist (and my hero) Naomi Klein. She’s always reported on the dangers of greed, consumption, globalization, and unchecked growth. But in recent years, she’s centered on how all these big, scary ideas converge to harm the planet. This book is tiny and it’s a digestible introduction to her writing and ideas.  

It’s a book about the environment you will not only understand but actually finish reading.

A basic foundation for Collapse 2020 is the collapse timetable presented in the Limits to Growth model. A key assumption is that, as the world population increases, there will be related extractions of natural resources. If not controlled, many of those resources will run out. This book reports the status of world resources as of 2014. The “good news” – if we can call it that – is that the rates of resource depletion track closely with the Limits to Growth model. This is “good news” because it confirms that the model is sound. That’s “good” because it means we can rely on that model to plan for the future. On the other hand, it’s actually “very bad news”, because it shows the world is already in very bad condition.