100 Books Like Ravenous

I love the grittiness of this—an account of a walk along the South West Coast path, when terminal illness and poverty haunt the walkers and everything is in a state of flux.

It doesn’t glamorize the walk; it’s often uncomfortable with lots of biting wind and pouring rain. At times, there are even threats from others they come across who are sleeping rough. Overall, it’s a description of nature at its most raw and authentic.

Although we glimpse moments of inspiration and beauty, I like the fact, as well, that it doesn’t have a big, blowsy Hollywood ending—at the close, the future appears uncertain, although there is a definite sense that a new energy has been discovered.

It ends on a simple, perfect moment as the author describes her and her husband as “lightly salted blackberries hanging in the summer sun” and adds significantly that’s “all that is… show more.

When I started reading this book, I thought, ‘I don’t even care if it’s a load of rubbish, because it feels so good just to read something nice about our species for a change’. A bonus is that, far from rubbish, it turns out to be extremely well-grounded and evidence-based.

I found this challenge to the negative stories we tell about human nature to be so refreshing and uplifting.

Raworth articulates something I'd felt but couldn't express: that our current economic models are fundamentally flawed, simultaneously transgressing planetary boundaries whilst leaving billions below social foundations.

Her doughnut framework—depicting the safe and just space between social foundations and ecological ceilings—clarifies the "why of work.”

I love how she challenges conventional economic thinking with such clarity and wit. When she explains why GDP growth can't be our goal, or why economies are embedded within society and nature (not the other way around), it feels both radical and obvious.

As a member organization of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how this framework helps businesses understand their purpose beyond profit.

This book provides the destination; my work explores the organizational navigation, the concrete patterns and structures that enable businesses to actually operate in that safe and just space.

I love this thoughtful, personal, and exceptionally well-informed narrative about doing the right thing on a beautiful piece of land quite near my own home.

Through this book, I learned so much about what good farming looks like and the sensitivities around livelihoods and communities. 

Like Pollan’s book, this one offers a sharp critique of the increasingly standardized and vulnerable global food system. After a paean to the attributes of the soil on which that system depends, Monbiot draws on practical experiments that seek to produce fruit and nuts, cereals, and protein and fats in less damaging ways.

These include regenerative forms of horticulture, no-drill agriculture, and growing microbial protein by precision fermentation. His main concern is to avert climate and ecological breakdown by exploring alternatives to ‘agricultural sprawl’. In turn he argues that this could open space for biodiversity recovery through rewilding, the subject of one of his earlier books.

If you were ever curious about where your food comes from, the strain and effort and environmental costs associated with it, boy is this the book for you! I learned so, so much from reading this, and I assign chapters to my class every year. It is thoroughly researched, and addresses all the vulnerable points of the current food system—especially in industrial countries. I guarantee you will have a different perspective of where your food comes from after reading this book. It is nothing less than a call to change the current food system if we are to deal with climatic uncertainty.

The importance of this book is less about human diets, and more about the food system itself. Keith explains in great detail that agriculture — the growing of annual monocrops — is the single most destructive activity humans have ever undertaken. Much of the planet’s surface, formerly teeming with wildlife, has now been cleared, drained, plowed, fertilized, and dedicated to one species: humans.

This doesn’t mean all food production is destructive; Keith distinguishes between agriculture and other methods of growing food, like horticulture, wild-tending, and pastoralism. But the conclusion is simple. We’re in overshoot, and agriculture is a big part of the problem.

Jackson has devoted his career to reforming agriculture by applying ecological principles garnered from prairie lands of the Bread Basket of North America. Based in Kansas, Jackson has worked toward generating perennial crops that don’t need to be seeded annually, and could be grown in mixtures (a grain, an oil seed, and a legume), to support healthy soils that will sustain food production for many generations. This book lays out the arguments for his approach and challenges the basis of our agricultural systems. 

The Rise of Conservation in South Africa is an innovative contribution to the growing comparative field of environmental history. Beinart's major theme is the history of conservationist ideas in South Africa. He focuses largely on the livestock farming districts of the semi-arid Karoo and the neighboring Eastern Cape grasslands, conquered and occupied by white settlers before the middle of the nineteenth century. Concerns about environmental degradation reached a crescendo in the early decades of the twentieth century, when a Dust Bowl of kinds was predicted, and formed the basis for far-reaching state intervention aimed at conserving natural resources. Soil erosion, overstocking, and water supplies stood alongside wildlife protection as the central preoccupations of South African conservationists.

The book traces debates about environmental degradation in successive eras of South African history. It offers a reinterpretation of South Africa's economic development, and of aspects of the Cape colonial and South African states.… show more.

This is the real title of the book, referring to the year 1493 AD.

Even as a plant biologist, I had no idea how much Columbus’ trips across the Atlantic Ocean scrambled the world's living species. The flora and fauna of the world today look nothing like they did beforehand.