100 books like Dumping In Dixie

This book is a classic—the book that launched the modern environmental movement in 1962. Rachel Carson’s 1962 warning about the dystopian future we faced from inappropriate use of chemical pesticides (such as DDT) and herbicides was groundbreaking, as the public had been told these substances were safe.

I love it because it is an intricate and beautifully woven tale about humanity’s relationship with nature and our own hubris. It shattered commonly held views and created a new way of viewing the world and our role in it.

This book is the classic study that you must read if you’re going to understand how fossil fuel interests set out to create climate denial. Taking their playbook from the tobacco lobby, these interests hired unscrupulous researchers to do work that inspired doubt about climate science.

This book documents a core truth: climate change isn’t a tragedy; it’s a crime. This book will introduce you to the criminals and show you their MO. 

Gender is a major axis of disparities in power and wealth.

In this pioneering book, Indian economist Bina Agarwal mapped women’s access to land in South Asia, lifting up the key role of rights to natural resources in human well-being.

Her account of the Bodhgaya movement, a struggle by peasant women against inequity and patriarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, has special resonance for me because I Iived there and saw firsthand the cruelties of semi-feudal landlord rule.

Universal property – property that is inalienable, individual, and belongs in equal measure to all – is a game-changing idea whose time is coming.

Introduced alongside conventional (private and state) property, it can serve the twin goals of reducing inequality and protecting the environment.

For example, by treating the biosphere’s limited capacity to recycle carbon emissions as universal property, and charging for use of this resource, we can both protect climate stability and provide universal basic income via climate-protection dividends.

Peter Barnes has been a leading voice for universal property, following in the footsteps of Tom Paine and Henry George. Do yourself a favor: read this thought-provoking book, and share it with your family and friends.

Fifty million years ago, alligators lived north of the Arctic Circle.

We humans evolved in a much cooler world. Today Earth’s climate is changing radically, to our own peril, as we spew long-buried carbon into the sky by burning fossil fuels.

In this sophisticated yet readable book, Peter Dorman lays out the political economy of climate change, explaining why to address this unprecedented threat we must redress the inequalities of wealth and power that plague modern society.

The bad news is that this will be hard work; the good news is that it is possible. Dorman’s book is a tour de force, a sobering call to action graced with rays of hope.

Economist Eloi Laurent’s book is a long-overdue introduction to the political economy of the environment.

In contrast to standard environmental economics textbooks that disregard interpersonal conflict by analyzing aggregate costs and benefits – disembodied from those who experience them – Laurent embeds our treatment and maltreatment of nature in our treatment and maltreatment of other people.

This book puts sustainability across generations and justice within them at center stage, where they belong.

In 1973, Smeltertown was razed to the ground. For the vibrant community of Mexican Americans who had lived there for generations, that meant abandoning their homes, their social gathering spaces, and their way of life.

Smeltertown was destroyed because public health research revealed that the industrial smelter around which the town formed was spewing tons of toxic lead into the air and poisoning the developing brains of the Mexican-American children who lived there.

This book tells the heartbreaking story of how that community first took shape on the Texas-Mexico border, how it grew to become a bustling suburb of El Paso, and how the lead poisoning ultimately spelled its destruction. The concept of environmental racism wouldn’t come along until decades later; but in hindsight, this town was a textbook example of how environmental threats to health disproportionately impact communities of color.   

The United States spends far more on healthcare than any other wealthy nation; and yet, on basic measures of health, infant mortality; life expectancy; and rates of chronic illness, Americans have some of the worst outcomes. Why?

In his book, Sandro Galea answers that question. The problem, he shows, is that the nation invests enormous amounts of money in the treatment and search for cures for diseases after those health conditions are already quite advanced, which is both extremely expensive and limited in efficacy.

Meanwhile, the nation invests relatively little in fostering a healthy environment, giving people free and easy access to preventive healthcare; providing economic security; ensuring children have nutritious diets; and prioritizing the cleanliness of air and drinking water.

This book shows how that is a formula for making people sick and then throwing money at the problem after it’s too late to help those most in need.  

Cane is an experimental, modernist work combining poetry, fictional vignettes, and dramatic dialogue as it portrays Black life in the sugar cane fields of the South and in the urban neighborhoods of recent migrants. I first read Cane while I was living in an apartment on the south side of Chicago, a destination for hundreds of thousands of Black migrants in the mid-twentieth century; the tracks of the Illinois Central railroad, their main transit route from the South, were just steps away from my home. The book drew my attention to the forces shaping my neighborhood, while it also led me to begin thinking about the connections between art and migration. It is a very lyrical and powerful book—and the subject of the second chapter of my book.

This magnificent history of the South’s landscape, an unexpected one-off from a historian of military medicine, looks at how humans have shaped the Southern land and vice versa. It debunks the romantic view of pre-Columbian Indians as “natural ecologists” living in harmony with nature, showing how they radically altered their environment by hunting and burning. Europeans were even more exploitative and brought with them diseases that loved their new home. Later developments like flood control, wildlife protection, and anti-pollution measures have had profound and sometimes unanticipated consequences. The book is richly detailed and unusually well-written—not surprising, since Cowdrey has also written award-winning science fiction and fantasy.