Why am I passionate about this?

I have long been fascinated by history – and by the future. As a Boomer, born in 1949, I have surfed successive environmental, green, and sustainability waves. Since 1978, I have co-founded four businesses in the field, all of which still exist. I am now Chief Pollinator at Volans. I have served on some 80 boards and advisory boards and spoken at nearly 2000 major events worldwide. And I have authored or co-authored 20 books, including the million-selling Green Consumer Guide series from 1988. Science fiction has been a constant inspiration. The books I have picked are generally optimistic, in contrast to dystopias like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Finally, given the richness of this area of fiction, we can be sure that there are many many other green sci-fi shortlists out there waiting to be published, including ones featuring women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.


I wrote

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

By John Elkington,

Book cover of Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

What is my book about?

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people,…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Dune

John Elkington Why did I love this book?

I first read Dunin 1969. Rated by some as the best sci-fi novel of all time—and the start in a long line of sequels. Oddly, perhaps, it was a set book in a sociology of religion course I took. The author, Frank Herbert, had based the religious worldview in the book on that of Africa’s Dinka people. At a time when I was experimenting with psychedelic drugs, this felt like another drug – although it took me 40 pages to fully inhabit the new reality. I was so taken that I contacted Frank, who lived on the Olympic Peninsula, north of Seattle. I was based in London but tried to link up a couple of times when I was in Seattle. We finally did meet, several years later. This time, I was flying back to London (from Seattle, as it happened) and he and his then-wife Bev were in London, getting ready to fly back to Seattle. It turned out that my family and I had unknowingly visited the beach in Oregon, near a place called Dune City, that in 1944 had first inspired the idea of a desert planet. Our conversation was published in 1981. Am very much looking forward to what looks likely to be the first film to capture the book’s spirit, made by Denis Villeneuve, due out later in 2021.

By Frank Herbert,

Why should I read it?

62 authors picked Dune as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.

Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.

Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.

When the Emperor transfers stewardship of…


Book cover of Earth

John Elkington Why did I love this book?

Earth, published in 1990, had me dog-earing many, many pages. A sense of our responsibility to the planet is shot through the book. For me this novel was very much in the spirit of a near – but warped – future that I had so enjoyed early on in books like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. When I wrote to Brunner to say that his dystopian view of the future struck me as likely, he replied that he was disappointed, having written it as a warning, to minimize the risk of the future being driven off the rails by over-population. 

Earth, overall, is more optimistic. Another novel on related themes by Brin was The Postman, made into a film starring Kevin Costner. Again, I interviewed David early in 2021 for our new Green Swans Observatory—and a key theme was his inspiration by the Judaic concept of Tikkun Olam. David noted that we need to expand our understanding of the scope of the implied responsibility, from simply encouraging people to be good to persuading them to repair the world.

By David Brin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Earth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It's fifty years from tomorrow, and a black hole has accidentally fallen into the Earth's core. A team of scientists frantically searches for a way to prevent the mishap from causing harm, only to discover another black hole already feeding relentlessly at the core - one that could destroy the planet within two years.


Book cover of American War

John Elkington Why did I love this book?

As someone with strong American family roots, though I’m technically British, I was fascinated at school by the American Civil War. In part this interest was spurred by Margaret Mitchell’s extraordinary book Gone With The Wind, which I read in the school sanitorium while enduring a cataclysmic dose of chickenpox – but which serendipitously helped me get dazzling results in my History O-levels a few weeks later. Later, I read extensively around the subject, fascinated by Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy and by Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS series, Civil War. Which is a long way of building up to the reason I found American War so compelling. The central thesis is that, instead of falling out over slavery, this time the American states go to war over oil – amid attempts to rein in fossil fuels to tackle climate change. I think we are very much closer to such a war than most people realize.

By Omar El Akkad,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked American War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Best Book of the Year: The Guardian, The Observer, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post.

2074. America's future is Civil War. Sarat's reality is survival. They took her father, they took her home, they told her lies . . .

She didn't start this war, but she'll end it.

Omar El Akkad's powerful debut novel imagines a dystopian future: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague and one family caught deep in the middle. In American War, we're asked to consider what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and…


Book cover of The Wandering Earth

John Elkington Why did I love this book?

Countries tend to produce great science fiction when they are developing fast  like Britain and France did in Victorian times — think HG Wells and Jules Verne—and the US did in the post-WWII era (from Asimov to Zubrin). Given how fast China has been developing, it should come as no surprise that sci-fi has been booming there. And given how central a role China will play in the rest of the 21st century, we should be reading more of it. Like many people, I came across Liu Cixin through his novel, The Three-Body Problem. The Wandering Earth, by contrast, started out as a novella and was turned into a smash-hit film of the same name.

By Cixin Liu,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wandering Earth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NOW A #1 BLOCKBUSTING FILM.

The Sun is dying. Earth will perish too, consumed by the star in its final death throes. But rather than abandon their planet, humanity builds 12,000 mountainous fusion engines to propel the Earth out of orbit and onto a centuries-long voyage to Proxima Centaurai...

Cixin Liu is one of the most important voices in world Science Fiction. A bestseller in China, his novel, The Three-Body Problem, was the first translated work of SF ever to win the Hugo Award.

Here is the first collection of his short fiction: ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners.…


Book cover of The Ministry for the Future

John Elkington Why did I love this book?

I came to Kim Stanley Robinson late, but in the past year I have devoured: New York 2140, a story set in a world where a massive sea-level rise has inundated many of the world’s greatest cities; The Ministry for the Future, which tracks efforts to rein in climate change into the 2050s; and Red Moon, a wide horizon detective novel moving between a China-dominated Moon and Earth. I find dystopias more plausible than utopian visions, but our Green Swans Laboratory scans the world – and the future – for ideas and solutions that could help us towards a truly Regenerative Economy.

By Kim Stanley Robinson,

Why should I read it?

26 authors picked The Ministry for the Future as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
 
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…


Explore my book 😀

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

By John Elkington,

Book cover of Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

What is my book about?

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, the planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century.

If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swans are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then Green Swans are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthroughs. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second.

Book cover of Dune
Book cover of Earth
Book cover of American War

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Book cover of Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink

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Ethan Chorin Author Of Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Story-lover Middle East expert Curious Iconoclast Optimist

Ethan's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.

So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you…

By Ethan Chorin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans.  The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent. 

Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…


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