Fans pick 100 books like Extracted

Limits To Growth summarized the first major computer simulation of world society. It was comprehensive, including the influence of: human population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. The results were sobering! It showed that, if major limits were not established for human population, pollution, and resource depletion, a severe collapse of human society would follow in the near future. What most people do not know is, the report was so disturbing it was accepted by the United Nations for action. It was so well received by world leaders that, by 1974, almost every world nation agreed to take major steps to set such limits. China, for example, established its one-child family policy. Ironically, the U.S. refused any commitment. By 1978, carbon industry disinformation killed all the commitments.

Reading that once upon a time in my birthland, male dominance was not the natural order of things was liberating.

In this historical book that’s based on critical facts, one learns of the true nature of women as Goddess in the Middle East. She held prestigious positions and had a fairly peaceful lifestyle until religion and patriarchy changed all that.

Over the centuries, her stories were deleted out of history and also distorted in an attempt to strip her of her power. An attempt that has caused a hell on earth in that region.

Unravelling the confusion of our time always begs the question, “how could such confusion happen with the greatness of human thinking?” Allman has a simple answer: maybe our notion about “modern intelligence” isn’t so obvious. His point is: biological evolution is extremely slow. The time from the stone age to now is extremely short on evolutionary scales. Instead of focusing just on modern marvels like jet planes, what if we first compare our image of a “stone age man,” with the thinking ability of “modern” miners during the 1849 California gold rush? Hmmm… not “all” that different. Then compare a current apartment designer with the designers of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 3,000 BC? Are modern brains actually going backward? This book will really challenge your “stone age” brain.

When I stumbled on the new brain model that finally explained human consciousness, it set me on a lonely journey. The model was such a simple mechanism. How could no one else have found it? Well, I wasn’t actually the only one. As I discuss in Collapse 2020, the combination of complexity and the inability of ancient communication “styles” to manage modern complexity, even with the internet, has created a modern Tower of Babel. Dr. Tyrrell envisioned the same explanation: there was a large jump in human brain ability about 20,000 years ago due to a simple biological event. But, not very many humans have it – just as only a few people have red hair or 6 fingers.

This anthology makes the case that an empire of extraction has existed from the dawn of the colonial era until deep into the 21st Century. The essays in the “Health and Environmental Justice” section are both fascinating and disturbing. And how could they not be disturbing with such words as these in chapter titles? “Uranium Mine and Mine Tailings.” “Arsenic Pollution.” “Quebec Asbestos.” Nearly every chapter in this section emphasizes the impact on indigenous populations with the chapter title on the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, being particularly stark. It opens with this: “If the Rivers Ran South.”

This one challenged me to get out of my historian’s bubble and confront the impacts of mining in the present and near future, especially those associated with the looming energy transition. Pollon blew me away with sobering facts, such as the need to mine 3 billion tons of minerals to stay below 2 degrees of global temperature increases.

I was also captivated by the author’s accounts of his travels to the front lines of the critical minerals boom, which paint a vivid portrait of the vast scale of development associated with lithium, copper, and nickel development. Pollon’s book reminded me that technological solutions to climate change (important as they are) come with their own environmental and human costs.  

As an environmental activist, I often run into the problem of popular politics. Consumption of certain goods, like oil or meat, drives the environmental crisis, but they also are popular—or, at least, people would feel it as a loss if they were limited. Worse, people’s livelihoods often depend on industries that are hurting the planet.

To understand possible ways forward, I turned to Thea Riofrancos. This book guided me through Ecuador's complicated environmental politics. A left-wing president won power, promising prosperity for all, funded by mining and exporting the country’s rich natural resources. Indigenous people and environmentalists proposed alternative politics, which were not funded by extraction but by an alternative green economy. The book is full of hard lessons about the challenges of building a winning environmental movement.

I originally intended to write a chapter in my book about how the birth of San Francisco (and other imperial cities) sent out a shock wave of deforestation, but I only touched lightly upon it in my chapter on mining.

Greg King has filled that need in his magisterial book about how ruthlessly and quickly the city’s magnates converted one of the Earth’s most magnificent forests and remarkable ecosystems into stumps as well as cash, credit, and dynastic fortunes on the city’s markets so that today only four percent of California’s old-growth redwoods remain.

Depressing as his narrative might otherwise be, King also reveals how the epic fight to save what remains has—like the campaign to stop whaling—changed popular perceptions of our living colleagues so that what once seemed a heroic enterprise now appears to many an epic crime. 

Conly starts by examining the problems tied to human population size and raises a powerful moral challenge to the notion that we have the right to procreate as much as we want.

In fact, she leans heavily toward answering the question in her book’s title with a “no” and, within certain parameters, would support a global one-child policy.

While I ultimately defend a different position than Conly’s on this issue, her book had a huge influence on my work on overpopulation, and this work is one of the most accessible and provocative presentations of the environmental challenge to procreative liberty.

Joanna and Molly are two inspirational educators. What really connected me to this book was their work on the ‘great turning’ – how we can build a life-sustaining society in the face of our business-as-usual industrial growth society.

The great turning has three aspects – slowing down damage to people and planet, building alternatives that can benefit communities and nature, and changing what and how we learn about our world. I try to incorporate these three aspects in my own work with students, activists, and policymakers. It gives me a sense of possibility and connection to a whole world of workable alternatives.