Here are 100 books that Unsustainable Inequalities fans have personally recommended if you like
Unsustainable Inequalities.
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Many believe the planet's energy needs can be provided carbon-free, with solar, wind, and water carrying the load. Coal, oil, and natural gas use will fade away. It’s an appealing vision. But the numbers don’t back it up for seven billion people, many looking in on the comfortable lifestyles of the wealthy countries and thinking: “What about us?”. Humanity needs a mix of energy sources, and nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source that can deliver at scale. I’m a nuclear physicist by training, recently retired from North Carolina State University, with interests in cosmology, energy research and policy, science education, and neutron and neutrino physics.
Putting in the numbers is what Gates does in his book. Climate change is real, no question. How to address it is where the controversy comes in. I really like that from the outset, Gates proposes five questions to consider whenever climate change is discussed: what fraction of the annual carbon dioxide emission are you removing? What’s your plan for cement? How much electrical power will be needed, what’s the cost, and how much space will it take up?
But he’s optimistic that zero emissions can be reached. He argues there are many options to explore, including nuclear, and says, contrary to much of the news reporting, don’t focus on 2030; focus instead on 2050 to give the best solutions time to emerge.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I've spent over 15 years as an organizational coach, watching businesses struggle with challenges nature has solved and been fine-tuning over billions of years. This frustration led me to a six-month biomimicry programme where I researched and studied how natural systems actually organize themselves. As a circular economy professional and organization in action of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how businesses attempting sustainability transitions often fail not from lack of technical knowledge but from organisational structures that impede evolution. These books have been my companion on my journey from recognizing the problem to discovering nature's proven solutions, and ultimately writing my own book to share those research insights with others facing similar challenges.
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.
800-CEO-Read "Best Business Book of 2017: Current Events & Public Affairs"
Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times.
Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.
That's why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth,…
As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
All of McAfee’s work is a testament to the power of human ingenuity and technology in changing the world.
This important book marks no exception, addressing the key problem of managing scarce natural resources in spite of a growing human population and economy. In the process, McAfee challenges some widely-held views, such as the idea that ‘you cannot have an ever-growing economy on a finite planet.’
As a matter of fact, you can and the book shows that since the mid-1990s the US economy has continued to expand while extraction of the 72 raw materials tracked by the US Geological Survey, from aluminum to timber, has diminished (even when considering imports).
To me, More from Lessis a testament to the power of technical progress.
'Everyone knows we're doomed by runaway overpopulation, pollution, or resource depletion, whichever comes first. Not only is this view paralysing and fatalistic, but, as Andrew McAfee shows in this exhilarating book, it's wrong... More from Less is fascinating, enjoyable to read, and tremendously empowering' Steven Pinker Bestselling author and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee says there's a new reason for optimism: we're past the point of 'peak stuff' - from here on out, it'll take fewer resources to make things, and cost less to lead a comfortable life.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
Because the speed at which the atmosphere is warming is unprecedented in human history, we are prone to assume we are facing an unprecedented climatic challenge. However, this is not entirely true.
Archeologists Fagan and Durrani remind us that, at least locally, the climate has changed several times in the past, profoundly affecting the history of civilizations that were less advanced than ours. Some societies were able to deploy technical and social innovation to buffer environmental shocks. Others proved too rigid, slow and eventually collapsed.
To me the lesson is clear: history can be an important ally when charting the policy path ahead in a warming world.
Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.
The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we…
My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
I love a book with a mix of big wonder and big sorrow. I read this book; no, I gobbled this book in one day, looking out over the Atlantic.
I cried big salty tears into the sea and laughed out loud with the ocean breeze. I learned about the untold histories of Guam and the constellation of people and experiences that make up a rich life. I felt the beauty and power of the indigenous culture of Guam and I grieved the many deaths caused by the collision of climate crises, politics and greed.
A Michelle Obama Reach Higher Fall 2022 reading list pick
A Library Journal "BEST BOOK OF 2022"
"Aguon's book is for everyone, but he challenges history by placing indigenous consciousness at the center of his project . . . the most tender polemic I've ever read." -Lenika Cruz, The Atlantic
"It's clear [Aguon] poured his whole heart into this slim book . . . [his] sense of hope, fierce determination, and love for his people and culture permeates every page." -Laura Sackton, BookRiot
Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection…
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
The environmental justice movement grew out of recognition of the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by low-income communities, including many communities of color. Zimring provides a detailed and compelling analysis of the long history of environmental racism that the environmental justice movement seeks to remedy. He reveals how ideas about race, hygiene, and waste have shaped where and how people (including Native Americans, immigrant groups, and African Americans) have lived and worked.
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a scholar of environmental history with a focus on human-animal relationships. I’ve also studied the histories of slavery and the African Diaspora, and in my book I’ve fused approaches from these two fields to look at how human-animal relations and networks shaped the expansion of slavery and slave trading from West Africa to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My scholarship is also an outgrowth of my teaching, and I regularly teach American environmental and cultural history at California State University, Northridge. I finished my PhD in history at Rutgers University, and my research has recently been funded by the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary.
Pests like cockroaches, rats, ants, and fleas are social constructions, meaning they are only pests to humans because they often outcompete humans for space, food, and shelter.
Dawn Day Biehler’s book further shows that pests and urban infestations of animals categorized as pests reinforced racist ideas about “dirty” communities in cities like New York and Chicago.
From tenements to alleyways to latrines, twentieth-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler argues that the urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space.
Community activists and social reformers strived to control pests in cities such as Washington, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Milwaukee, but such efforts fell short when authorities blamed families and neighborhood culture for infestations rather than attacking racial segregation or…
I have been engaged as a teacher of religion and ecology since the first Earth Day 50 years ago. That has entailed writing some prize-winning books,Earth Community, Earth Ethics(1996) and Earth-honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key(2013). Now I want to pass along distilled learnings to my grandchildren as they face a planet in tumult. The form—love letters—and the audience—future generations as represented by my grandkids—moves me to focus on effective communication of a highly personal sort to young people on matters vital to their lives. It’s a nice bookend near the end of my own life.
This work is one in the series of Explorations in Theology, Gender, and Ecology. Its distinction is a deep dive into the religious, ecological and gender dimensions of the modern fossil-fuel extractive economy that has become destructive of nature’s economy and human well-being at the same time that it has captured our way of life. Rowe takes the reader into the gender and theological underpinnings of corporate capitalism, thereby contributing to an emerging field of study, the Energy Humanities.Of Modern Extraction is cutting-edge work by a lucid writer who rewards anyone patient enough to take on this vital but complex topic.
Predominant climate change narratives emphasize a global emissions problem, while diagnoses of environmental crises have long focused a modern loss of meaning, value, and enchantment in nature. Yet neither of these common portrayals of environmental emergency adequately account for the ways climate change is rooted in extractivisms that have been profoundly enchanted.
The proposed critical petro-theology analyzes the current energy driven climate crisis through critical gender, race, decolonial, and postsecular lenses. Both predominant narratives obscure the entanglements of bodies and energy: how energy concepts and practices have consistently delineated genres of humanity and how energy systems and technologies have shaped…
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
Schlosberg covers the environment as an important sphere for societal inequalities, including those along racial lines.
People of color bear a disproportionate share of air, water, and land pollution and risk being left behind as the United States transitions to renewable energy in response to climate change.
Much of the inequality is anchored in stratified places. The author not only summarizes the existing literature on this, but also provides a very useful overview of the major justice paradigms as it applies to the environment.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in environmental politics, environmental movements, and justice theory.
The basic task of this book is to explore what, exactly, is meant by 'justice' in definitions of environmental and ecological justice. It examines how the term is used in both self-described environmental justice movements and in theories of environmental and ecological justice. The central argument is that a theory and practice of environmental justice necessarily includes distributive conceptions of justice, but must also embrace notions of justice based in recognition, capabilities, and participation. Throughout, the goal is the development of a broad, multi-faceted, yet…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have been a historian of the Indigenous world for more than two decades, but I have learnedso much since I expanded my perspective from Mesoamerica and the Aztec-Mexica into the wider history of Native peoples. There are literally hundreds of Indigenous communities across the world and so there is always more to learn. I have been incredibly privileged to learn by listening to Indigenous people – in person, in print, and on digital and social media. I hope these books can offer some starting points to set you on a similar journey of discovery, opening up some new ways of thinking and of seeing both the past and the present.
Combining personal memoir and scrupulous history, this traces the long history of Indigenous resistance in the United States, showing it as a story of self-defence and struggles for sovereignty.
Starting with the remarkable Indigenous resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, Estes’s work manages to combine a readable introduction to complex history with an urgent recognition of the stakes involved in the fight for land, water, and natural resources today.
One of my favourite recommendations to anyone who wants to start understanding the deep roots of contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan "Mni Wiconi"-Water is Life-was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.
In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions…
