Here are 100 books that Cowed fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been fascinated with plants. Their shapes, their colors, their beauty, even the plants that are known to be harmful to humans (poison ivy, puncture vine) had appeal to me. Plants are, by far, the most prolific, the biggest, the oldest, the most complex of organisms. And yet, as a pre-med student, classes on botany were never recommended. Sad. These books delve into the complexity, the wonder of plants, and how they interact with humans. From the sheer poetic pronouncements of Michael Pollan to the straightforward prose of Richard Manning, here is a chance to see the breadth and depth; our rewards and struggles with the plant kingdom.
Well-researched with on-the-ground examples of climate change, this provides a food systems outlook that anyone who has ever stepped foot on a farm can relate to. Easily read and understandable, it provides a global perspective of climate risks from fisheries to the role of GMOs in addressing shortages, it is an excellent primer for anyone interested in the future of food.
In the fascinating story of the sustainable food revolution, an environmental journalist and professor asks the question: Is the future of food looking bleak—or better than ever?
“In The Fate of Food, Amanda Little takes us on a tour of the future. The journey is scary, exciting, and, ultimately, encouraging.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction
Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to…
Innovators long have fascinated me. I helped launch a clean-energy startup and advance legislation promoting environmental entrepreneurs. I’ve written biographies of Nikola Tesla (who gave us electric motors, radio, and remote controls) Jacques Cousteau (inventor of the Aqua Lung and master of undersea filming) and George Fabyan (pioneer of modern cryptography and acoustics), as well as a history of electricity (From Edison to Enron). I love reading (and writing) about ingenious and industrious individuals striving to achieve their dreams.
I was inspired by Horn’s observation that many of the men and women doing today’s most consequential environmental work would not call themselves environmentalists. Debunking the pervasive myths that conservation innovators must be bicoastal, political activists, Horn profiles a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman—all stewards of the land offering creative ways to restore soils and protect wildlife.
Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work-restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans-would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land: the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth, to ensure that their families and communities will continue to thrive.
Unfolding as a journey down the Mississippi River, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman…
Innovators long have fascinated me. I helped launch a clean-energy startup and advance legislation promoting environmental entrepreneurs. I’ve written biographies of Nikola Tesla (who gave us electric motors, radio, and remote controls) Jacques Cousteau (inventor of the Aqua Lung and master of undersea filming) and George Fabyan (pioneer of modern cryptography and acoustics), as well as a history of electricity (From Edison to Enron). I love reading (and writing) about ingenious and industrious individuals striving to achieve their dreams.
I first “met” Shapiro during one of his fascinating TEDx presentations. His book only adds to my fascination with the race among entrepreneurs to create and commercialize cleaner, safer, sustainable meat—without slaughtering animals. Shapiro offers a front-row seat to that race to create enough food for the world’s ever-growing, ever-hungry population. Meet the innovators offering clean meat—real, actual meat grown (or brewed) from animal cells.
Paul Shapiro gives you a front-row seat for the wild story of the race to create and commercialize cleaner, safer, sustainable meat—real meat—without the animals. From the entrepreneurial visionaries to the scientists’ workshops to the big business boardrooms—Shapiro details that quest for clean meat and other animal products and examines the debate raging around it.
Since the dawn of Homo sapiens some quarter million years ago, animals have satiated our species’ desire for meat. But with a growing global population and demand for meat, eggs, dairy, leather, and more, raising such massive numbers of farm animals is woefully inefficient and…
Innovators long have fascinated me. I helped launch a clean-energy startup and advance legislation promoting environmental entrepreneurs. I’ve written biographies of Nikola Tesla (who gave us electric motors, radio, and remote controls) Jacques Cousteau (inventor of the Aqua Lung and master of undersea filming) and George Fabyan (pioneer of modern cryptography and acoustics), as well as a history of electricity (From Edison to Enron). I love reading (and writing) about ingenious and industrious individuals striving to achieve their dreams.
Here’s another engaging tale of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring lab-grown, cell-cultured meat to the world. I appreciated Purdy’s description of this competition as an “edible space race,” and unlike my other highlighted book, Billion Dollar Burger highlights the “difficult regulatory landscape” concocted by Big Meat lobbyists trying to keep protein alternatives off the shelves. He outlines ways to overcome that opposition and create healthier, more sustainable, and more humane food options.
A fast-paced, gripping insider account of the entrepreneurs and renegades racing to bring lab-grown meat to the world.
The trillion-dollar meat industry is one of our greatest environmental hazards; it pollutes more than all the world's fossil-fuel-powered cars. Global animal agriculture is responsible for deforestation, soil erosion and more emissions than air travel, paper mills and coal mining combined. It also depends on the slaughter of more than 60 billion animals per year, a number that is only increasing as the global appetite for meat swells. The whole world seems to be sleepwalking into a food crisis.
Catherine McNeur is an award-winning historian, interested in the ways that issues of power impact how humans understand and transform their environments. She has long found the books, art, and other creative expressions that mischievously push at the edges of what we consider “nature” compelling, whether it’s a celebration of the beauty of weeds in an abandoned lot or nature writing on the flora in our guts. After having written about social and environmental battles in New York City, she is now researching the lives, work, and erasure of two forgotten female scientists from nineteenth-century Philadelphia. She lives in Oregon where she is a professor at Portland State University.
While some of us like to imagine humans as separate from nature, one moment where that boundary dissolves is with death. Inescapably, we will all eventually decompose and become a part of our environment. In Aaron Sach’s book, nineteenth-century Americans reckon with death through the creation of carefully landscaped cemeteries. What I particularly love about Arcadian America is how Sachs weaves his own memoir about his encounters with mortality in with the history he’s telling, making it a gripping page-turner.
How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civil War era may prove powerfully useful to us now
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much…
I have spent my career studying how we can make our world more nurturing for every person. We can build a society that ensures that every child has the skills, interests, values, and health habits they need to lead a productive life in caring relationships with others. I created Values to Action to make this a reality in communities around the world. We have more than 200 members across the country who are working together to reform our society so that it has less poverty, economic inequality, discrimination, and many more happy and thriving families.
Its central thesis is that the deficiencies and environmental harm of major efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being ignored, so that the privileged and elite can continue to live in comfort and affluence. The authors present evidence that advocates for alternative energy such as wind and solar greatly overestimate the potential of these sources to replace fossil fuel energy. At the same time, the development of wind and solar power has harmful environmental impacts, including the mining necessary to obtain rare earth minerals, the decimation of wilderness both in the process of obtaining minerals, and widely implementing wind and solar installations. The undue optimism associated with these activities makes it unnecessary for those who are already privileged to consider adopting a much less consumptive lifestyle.
“This disturbing but very important book makes clear we must dig deeper than the normal solutions we are offered.”―Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Works
"Bright Green Lies exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of leading environmental groups and their most prominent cheerleaders. The best-known environmentalists are not in the business of speaking truth, or even holding up rational solutions to blunt the impending ecocide, but instead indulge in a mendacious and self-serving delusion that provides comfort at the expense of reality. They fail to state the obvious: We cannot continue to wallow in hedonistic consumption and industrial expansion and survive as…
Ever since my childhood growing up off-grid in rural Maine, I’ve been fascinated by the natural world. Out of that fascination grew an abiding interest in weaving people and the landscape back together, something I’ve focused on and explored for over two decades, both personally and in my capacity as a landscape designer. The books I’ve shared here all provided me with know-how and perspective that has inspired me to pursue ecological regeneration. If you’re interested in these topics you won’t be disappointed!
John Todd is one of the preeminent ecologists on the planet. Over the course of his 5-decade career, he has been innovating and exploring ways in which we can work with nature to find solutions for major environmental conundrums. In this book, Dr. Todd explains the theory behind ecological design while also sharing inspiring examples of his work, ranging from restoring ocean fisheries, cleaning wastewater in hopelessly polluted ponds, to providing inexpensive access to sewage treatment in shantytowns with open, untreated sewers. This book shows that with the right mindset and commitment, ecological solutions are readily available for almost any situation.
A true pioneer and respected elder in ecological recovery and sustainability shares effective solutions he has designed and implemented.
A stand-out from the sea of despairing messages about climate change, well-known sustainability elder John Todd, who has taught, mentored, and inspired such well-known names in the field as Janine Benyus, Bill McKibben, and Paul Hawken, chronicles the different ecological interventions he has created over the course of his career. Each chapter offers a workable engineering solution to an existing environmental problem: healing the aftermath of mountain-top removal and valley-fill coal mining in Appalachia, using windmills and injections of bacteria to…
My passion is life, hence why I became an environmental scientist, and why I became a conservationist at age 18, leading the campaign to protect Wollemi National Park in Australia. My sense of wonder towards nature has transformed my life. As Aldo Leopold observed, we ‘live in a world of wounds’ as the ‘more-than-human’ world is rapidly declining. But it doesn’t have to be this way, positive if challenging solutions exist. Hence why I write about environmental science, ecological economics, ecological ethics, denial, human dependence on nature, meaningful sustainability, and what we each can do to give back to Nature.
Society has to face up to the fact that there are far too many people on planet Earth, probably several times more than is ecologically sustainable. It is no use denying it and making it taboo. Sure we need smaller ecological footprints – but we also need fewer feet. Overpopulation means that life on Earth is indeed on the brink of extinction. This is probably the best book I know that tackles the population issue with both science and compassionate ethics for all life.
Life on the Brink aspires to reignite a robust discussion of population issues among environmentalists, environmental studies scholars, policy makers, and the general public. Some of the leading voices in the American environmental movement restate the case that population growth is a major force behind many of our most serious ecological problems, including global climate change, habitat loss and species extinction's, air and water pollution, and food and water scarcity. As we surpass seven billion world inhabitants, contributors argue that ending population growth worldwide and in the United States is a moral imperative that deserves renewed commitment.
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
I had the opportunity to hear Paul Stamets speak at SOMA, a sleep-away camp for mushroom nerds in Northern California. Believe me when I say, it was as if the Beatles had descended when he stepped onstage. Short of screaming and the tearing off of t-shirts, the crowd hung on his every word, not a soul blinking or talking for fear of missing something. The word “visionary” is often used to describe Stamets, and I would add “architect”, for he maps out for the world in Mycelium Running how mushrooms can help save our planet. I used to think he wielded his immense knowledge of the environmental powers of mushrooms like a hammer always seeing a nail, but with time I’ve learned that people are considered visionaries when the majority of people aren’t listening to the truth even when it’s put right in front of them. Paul Stamets 1: World…
Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.
The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”--the fruit of which are mushrooms--recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and…
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
How could you not love a book that explores the at times hilarious, at times tragic, but always fascinating impact of the banana in the United States and Latin America?
From the changing faces of Chiquita Banana to cookbooks and popular jingles like, “Yes, we have no bananas!” Soluri shows us how the banana became one of the most common fruits in the US diet. At the same time, he shows how US importers and marketers took control over, manipulated, and expanded, much of the production in tropical areas like Honduras.
On the production side, Soluri explores ironies like the fact that the United Fruit Company created the perfect breeding ground for pathogens by shrinking banana gene pools and shoving the same type of banana trees all in a row... or the tragic fact that “macho” banana workers became sterile after refusing to wear protective clothing.
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores-everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.
Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in…
