Love Down to Earth? Readers share 100 books like Down to Earth...

By Bruno Latour,

Here are 100 books that Down to Earth fans have personally recommended if you like Down to Earth. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802

Rupert Read Author Of Parents for a Future

From my list on eco-philosophy.

Why am I passionate about this?

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where he works alongside some of the worldā€™s leading climate scientists. He is a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales, a former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion, and co-founder of the Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN.

Rupert's book list on eco-philosophy

Rupert Read Why did Rupert love this book?

Why did Wordsworth and Coleridge decide to produce this book, together? Well, basically, it was because they regarded themselves as having something to say, something to contribute that went way beyond the sphere of pleasing or thought-provoking in a purely literary sense.

The form of the poetry was very shocking at the time and they were also bringing a new point to poetry. And that point is what really brings this very close to eco-philosophy. What they tried to do in the Lyrical Ballads was to produce a sort of poetic manifesto for thinking about nature in a different way, in a more serious way, than was customary at the time.

By William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fiona Stafford

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

'Listen, Stranger!'

Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to define their age and which have continued to delight readers ever since, including 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the 'Lucy' poems, 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', 'A Slumber did my Spirit seal' and many more. Wordsworth's famous Preface is a manifesto not just for
Romanticism but for poetry in general.

This is the only edition to print both the original 1798ā€¦


Book cover of Letters From A Young Poet: 1887-1895

Rupert Read Author Of Parents for a Future

From my list on eco-philosophy.

Why am I passionate about this?

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where he works alongside some of the worldā€™s leading climate scientists. He is a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales, a former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion, and co-founder of the Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN.

Rupert's book list on eco-philosophy

Rupert Read Why did Rupert love this book?

While not one of his best-known books, in my opinion, it is one of his very best. Itā€™s a collection of letters to his niece. And when he wrote these, in most cases, there would have been absolutely no thought of publication, which makes their quality all the more remarkable. You might think of this book as an eastern epistolatory nature philosophy. It contains passages of astounding beauty about the natural world that Tagore was inhabiting, which was basically the river deltas around Calcutta. It also contains his reflections on how these give us a very different sense of whatā€™s important and of how to live than one gets in the city. Itā€™s a sort of Eastern counterpart, as I see it, of Romanticism, and again, very visionary.

By Rosinka Chaudhuri,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Letters From A Young Poet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As a young man, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a series of letters to his niece during what he described as the most productive period of his life. By turns contemplative and playful, gentle and impassioned, Tagoreā€™s letters abound in incredible insightsā€”from sharply comical portrayals of English sahibs to lively anecdotes about family life, from thoughts on the nature of poetry to spiritual contemplation and inner feeling. And coursing through all these letters, like a ceaseless heartbeat, is Tagoreā€™s deep love for the natural splendour of Bengal. In this manner, this volume also serves as a prose companion to his magnificent workā€¦


Book cover of The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age

Rupert Read Author Of Parents for a Future

From my list on eco-philosophy.

Why am I passionate about this?

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where he works alongside some of the worldā€™s leading climate scientists. He is a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales, a former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion, and co-founder of the Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN.

Rupert's book list on eco-philosophy

Rupert Read Why did Rupert love this book?

This book is more classically within the philosophical canon. The Imperative of Responsibility is probably Jonasā€™s masterpiece. He wrote this book in 1979. Itā€™s a contemporary classic, in the sense that itā€™s really foundational, in my view (but not just in my view), for environmental ethics because itā€™s a bookā€”and this is over 40 years ago nowā€”that really takes seriously, as very few had before, the change that needs to come to philosophy. We need to start taking seriously the change that has come to us as a species as a result of industrialism, as a result of our growing technological power.

By Hans Jonas,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorā€”and only womanā€”on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route upā€¦

Book cover of Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation

Rupert Read Author Of Parents for a Future

From my list on eco-philosophy.

Why am I passionate about this?

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where he works alongside some of the worldā€™s leading climate scientists. He is a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales, a former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion, and co-founder of the Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN.

Rupert's book list on eco-philosophy

Rupert Read Why did Rupert love this book?

My next book is by far the least well-known of my authors, and itā€™s by far the least well-known book. Itā€™s by my friend and colleague, Samuel Alexander, with whom Iā€™ve co-written a couple of books now, including This Civilisation is Finished.

Itā€™s a splendid read. For philosophers, itā€™s charming, because Sam is continually bringing in implicitly, and most explicitly, the great philosophers. Heā€™s quoting or talking about Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and the rest. His characters sometimes offer lines of one of them to each other. And, in that sense, itā€™s very much a novel of ideas in the tradition of utopias and dystopias.

By Samuel Alexander,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

When industrial civilisation collapsed in the third decade of the 21st century, a community living on a small island in the South Pacific Ocean found itself permanently isolated from the rest of the world. With no option but to build a self-sufficient economy with very limited energy supplies, this community set about creating a simpler way of life that could flourish into the deep future. Determined above all else to transcend the materialistic values of the Old World, they made a commitment to live materially simple lives, convinced that this was the surest path to genuine freedom, peace, and sustainableā€¦


Book cover of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Author Of Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: On Decoloniality

From my list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.

Jeremy's book list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Why did Jeremy love this book?

I love how Dipeshā€™s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe ā€œprovincialā€. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.

By Dipesh Chakrabarty,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Climate of History in a Planetary Age as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider-from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.

Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work-theā€¦


Book cover of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Liz Conor Author Of Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women

From my list on climate change and race.

Why am I passionate about this?

I became a climate activist and later a researcher after my sister and her family lost their home in the Black Saturday fires of 2009 in Victoria. Their bravery and survival is a daily reminder for me, that climate change is upon us, and we are fighting for our lives as well as our children and future generations. Because my research has been focused on colonialism and race their story has opened many questions for me around the history of colonialism and whether it was coal-fired. Iā€™m thinking about what it means for settlers to lose their homes on stolen land, and whether this recognition could prompt us to rethink land ownership, custodianship, and coexistence.

Liz's book list on climate change and race

Liz Conor Why did Liz love this book?

Taking the exploitation of the Nutmeg as a parable for the logic of extraction that precipitated our current planetary crisis, Ghoshā€™s book draws the direct historical connections that have upended so many worlds and now threatens to do the same to us all.

Climate change becomes the present manifestation of Western colonialism, with its deeply entrenched antipathy to vitalism, animism, and all the living entities that make up this precious home, Earth. Ghosh explains how our very survival depends now on the respect for and inspiration of Indigenous knowledge of ecologies.

His writing is pure with moral clarity and urgency, and the scholarship is wide-ranging and erudite. An exquisite and indispensable book for these frightening times.

By Amitav Ghosh,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Nutmeg's Curse as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.

A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh's narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. Theā€¦


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. BrenƩ Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,ā€¦

Book cover of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Author Of Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: On Decoloniality

From my list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.

Jeremy's book list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Why did Jeremy love this book?

Steveā€™s book is analytically challenging, but he has great examples and a knack for conceptualizing the core problems that are making it so hard for our world to grapple with climate change and things like mass extinction. He shows how there are three interlocking problems that all go back to how the modern state system was created as something competitive and uncoordinated, abstract from the land itā€™s on, and short-sighted with its politics.

By Stephen M. Gardiner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Perfect Moral Storm as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Climate change is arguably the great problem confronting humanity, but we have done little to head off this looming catastrophe. In The Perfect Moral Storm, philosopher Stephen Gardiner illuminates our dangerous inaction by placing the environmental crisis in an entirely new light, considering it as an ethical failure. Gardiner clarifies the moral situation, identifying the temptations (or "storms") that make us vulnerable to a certain kind
of corruption. First, the world's most affluent nations are tempted to pass on the cost of climate change to the poorer and weaker citizens of the world. Second, the present generation is tempted toā€¦


Book cover of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

Debra Hendrickson, M.D. Author Of The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change

From my list on environmental health or climate change.

Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€˜m a pediatrician in Reno, the fastest-warming city in the US. I also have a background in environmental science. Iā€™ve seen the impacts of climate change on children first-hand, especially the impact of worsening wildfire smoke from ā€œmega-firesā€ in California. It is impossible for me to look at babies and children suffering the impacts of worsening smoke, smog, allergies, heat, natural disasters, and infectious diseases and not see that the most powerful industry in history has unloaded the cost of their business onto the least powerful. I am passionate about this topic because I see climate change as a crime against children, who are especially vulnerable to its effects.

Debra's book list on environmental health or climate change

Debra Hendrickson, M.D. Why did Debra love this book?

I love this book because of its moral clarity and historical detail. Itā€™s an essential book for anyone trying to understand the politics that have paralyzed action for so long.

Dr. Mann describes how, for decades, the fossil fuel industry has waged war on the planet and humanity (not to mention climate scientists) through propaganda, lobbying, and purchasing politicians, even though theyā€™ve known for 50 years what they were doing.

It changed how I interpret many things I see on social media; I feel better equipped to recognize bots from the industry and petrostates.

By Michael E. Mann,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The New Climate War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year award

A renowned climate scientist shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change, and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet.

Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we've been told can slow climate change. But the inordinate emphasis on individual behavior is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.

Fossil fuelā€¦


Book cover of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Nada Orlic

From my list on deepen our understanding of the world around us.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am passionate about the selected books because they have a unique way of broadening one's horizons and inspiring change in life. Their diverse narratives and profound insights invite all of us to discover new perspectives, challenge our beliefs, and deepen our understanding of the world.

Nada's book list on deepen our understanding of the world around us

Nada Orlic Why did Nada love this book?

This book resonated with me deeply.

Klein focuses on the most crucial issue we face today, climate change, fueled by a system obsessed with profits and constant growth, which resonated very deeply with me. This book is imperative because it shows how the consumption of resources and materials is what drives powerful states around the world to dominate and make modern colonies of weaker countries in the name of profit and at any cost. 

I really liked how Klein breaks down ways that show us how our current economic system is at the heart of this crisis and that change will have to be made. I loved the insights she gave, and they made me think about how we can truly turn things around and create a sustainable world. I like how she explains clearly why late capitalism cannot be sustainable. This book is must read, especially by those whoā€¦

By Naomi Klein,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked This Changes Everything as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Naomi Klein, author of the #1 international bestsellers, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, returns with This Changes Everything, a must-read on how the climate crisis needs to spur transformational political change

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: theā€¦


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Book cover of Why We Hate: Understanding the Roots of Human Conflict

Why We Hate by Michael Ruse,

Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.

Beingā€¦

Book cover of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth

David Schweickart Author Of After Capitalism

From my list on climate change and seeing it through new eyes.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have a certain degree of scientific expertise deriving from the education leading to my Ph.D. in mathematics and a deep interest in ethical issues, which led to my pursuing a second Ph.D. in philosophy. I am passionate about the issue of climate change, because (among other reasons) I have four grandchildren who will be living in the new world that is being created now. As I often said to my students during my last few years of teaching, ā€œYou are living at the time when the most momentous event in human history is unfolding. Historians of the futureā€”if there are any remainingā€”will write extensively about this period, about what happened and why, about what those of us alive today did or did not do.ā€

David's book list on climate change and seeing it through new eyes

David Schweickart Why did David love this book?

I was drawn to this powerful, contemporary, Marxian analysis, which fits so well with After Capitalism. It opens with a section on ā€œCapitalism and Unsustainable Development,ā€ followed by ā€œEcological Paradoxes,ā€ then ā€œDialectical Ecology,ā€ (which includes evidence of Marxā€™s own concern with what we now call ā€œecologyā€). It concludes with ā€œWays Out.ā€ Itā€™s a long read, but well worth the effort.

By Richard York, Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collisionā€”if we donā€™t alter course.
In The Ecological Rift: Capitalismā€™s War on the Earth environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of bothā€¦


Book cover of Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802
Book cover of Letters From A Young Poet: 1887-1895
Book cover of The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age

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Interested in climate change, globalization, and equality?

Climate Change 226 books
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