Here are 100 books that Mining North America fans have personally recommended if you like
Mining North America.
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I love being outdoors and I’ve been fortunate to spend much of life under the open sky, both professionally and personally. Learning about the landscapes I’ve visited on my outdoor adventures or helped protect through my professional conservation and writing work is both fulfilling and inspiring. Skilled writers deepen my understanding of the diverse, intricate, and complicated natural world. Whether I’m reading to better understand the policies and histories that have shaped our public lands or about the adventurers who inspire me to get out there, I always find immense value and enjoyment when reading about the landscapes we share.
Aldo Leopold was a Forest Service ranger stationed in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest when he first began advocating for a new approach to managing national forests. Leopold’s visionary thinking and diligent advocacy resulted in the first-ever Wilderness Area in the U.S.—the Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1922—more than 40 years before the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964. A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s best-known work and follows his efforts to restore a patch of cut-over farmland in Wisconsin while also articulating his vision of a land ethic where humans and nature are intertwined and care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. His beautiful writing resonated strongly with me when I first read A Sand County Almanac more than two decades ago, and his vision remains as important now as ever.
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has enthralled generations of nature lovers and conservationists and is indeed revered by everyone seriously interested in protecting the natural world. Hailed for prose that is "full of beauty and vigor and bite" (The New York Times), it is perhaps the finest example of nature writing since Thoreau's Walden. Now this classic work is available in a completely redesigned and lavishly illustrated gift edition, featuring over one hundred beautiful full-color pictures by Michael Sewell, one of the country's leading nature photographers. Sewell, whose work has graced the pages of Audubon and Sierra magazines, walked…
I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
McPhee refers to the “gin-clear” water of Alaskan rivers, and his prose is equally lucid. It is also dense with facts, each sentence packed like a canoe or loaded raft. Serialized in the New Yorker in the 1970s, the “The Encircled River” section describes his canoe journey down a 60-mile segment of Salmon River, the most northern river above the Arctic Circle.
With four others who worked for the U.S. government, they studied the river as a national wild river Congress would be voting on to become part of the Kobuk Valley National Monument. The legislation passed under Jimmy Carter on December 2, 1980. Pair with his Survival of a Birch Bark Canoe.
Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.
Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the…
I‘m a pediatrician in Reno, the fastest-warming city in the US. I also have a background in environmental science. I’ve seen the impacts of climate change on children first-hand, especially the impact of worsening wildfire smoke from “mega-fires” 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.
I loved this bookbecause of its discussion of paleontology (which has always interested me) and the extinctions prior to this one. But I also loved Kolbert’s description of the history of paleontology itself—specifically, how the discovery of fossils triggered a crisis in our understanding of ourselves and our world.
Like some of my other selections, this book made me think about humanity’s relationship to the planet and the other life we share it with.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions of life on earth.
Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Elizabeth Kolbert combines brilliant field reporting, the history of ideas and the work of geologists, botanists and marine biologists to tell the gripping stories of a dozen species - including the Panamanian golden frog and the Sumatran rhino - some already gone, others at the point of vanishing.
The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most…
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
When I left Wisconsin and arrived for a position at the University of Alaska Anchorage, I was struck by the state’s nearly manic fear of low prices for the oil flowing from Prudhoe Bay through the Alaska (or North Slope) oil pipeline. Years later I returned to Wisconsin and quickly learned that there was relatively little interest in a pipeline that ran down the entire state in the manner of the Alaska pipeline. Only this pipeline carried synthetic crude made from natural asphalt hacked or melted out of the ground in Alberta, Canada. My interest in the environmental and political aspects of that pipeline set me on the path to a book about asphalt.
Arguably, Bill McKibben has been this nation’s preeminent environmentalist since 1989 when he published The End of Nature. Falteris his latest book and it is a numbing take on our species and how we have damaged the environment, perhaps, to the point of no return. On the other hand, McKibben is as much an activist as an environmentalist and as such he cannot and, so far at least, has not lost hope no matter how dire the straits.
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.
My passion for mining history was sparked when I lived in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. One of my students wanted to write a short essay on the Pine Point Mine, which he claimed had cheated the community by making so much money, providing few jobs, and leaving a big mess after closing. I offered to drive the student out to tour the abandoned mine and was blown away by the dozens of open pits and abandoned haul roads that had been carved out of the northern forest. From that day on, I was hooked on mining history, hungry to learn as much as possible about these abandoned places.
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.
A harrowing journey through the past, present, and future of mining, this expertly-researched account ends on a vision for how industry can better serve the needs of humanity.
A race is on to exploit the last bonanzas of gold, silver, and industrial metals left on Earth. These metals are not only essential for all material comfort and need, but for the transition to clean energy: in the coming decades, billions of tons of copper, nickel, silver, and other metals will be required to build electric vehicles, solar and wind installations, and green infrastructure. We need more metals than ever before,…
I was an Eagle Scout selected for the 1964 North Pole expedition, graduate of MIT with both BS and MS degrees in Aero Astro – yes, a true MIT rocket scientist. I quickly took planning roles at the “bleeding edge” of technology: missiles, nuclear power, heart pumps, DNA sequencing, telemedicine… In every case, however, the organizations were plagued by incompetence and corruption. As an individual, I interacted with activist leaders in movements for: peace, climate, social justice, ending poverty, etc. Again, incompetence and corruption. Throughout, I dug for answers into the wisdom of the classics and emerging viewpoints. Finally. All that effort paid off. I found the “big picture”!
A basic foundation for Collapse 2020 is the collapse timetable presented in the Limits to Growth model. A key assumption is that, as the world population increases, there will be related extractions of natural resources. If not controlled, many of those resources will run out. This book reports the status of world resources as of 2014. The “good news” – if we can call it that – is that the rates of resource depletion track closely with the Limits to Growth model. This is “good news” because it confirms that the model is sound. That’s “good” because it means we can rely on that model to plan for the future. On the other hand, it’s actually “very bad news”, because it shows the world is already in very bad condition.
As we dig, drill, and excavate to unearth the planet's mineral bounty, the resources we exploit from ores, veins, seams, and wells are gradually becoming exhausted. Mineral treasures that took millions, or even billions, of years to form are now being squandered in just centuries-or sometimes just decades.
Will there come a time when we actually run out of minerals? Debates already soar over how we are going to obtain energy without oil, coal, and gas. But what about the other mineral losses we face? Without metals, and semiconductors, how are we going to keep our industrial system running? Without…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’m a climate scientist at Harvard and an environmental activist. In my day job, I use satellite, aircraft, and surface observations of the environment to correct supercomputer models of the atmosphere. What I’ve learned has made me feel that I can’t just stay in the lab—I need to get out in the world and fight for a future that’s just and ecologically stable for everyone. My writing and activism imagines how humanity can democratically govern itself in an age of environmental crisis.
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.
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the "twenty-first-century socialist" government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and…
I am an environmental scientist with over 25 years experience working on climate change and sustainability. 20 of those years were spent working internationally on environmental policy in developing countries, advising the World Bank and the OECD, and being a climate change negotiator in the UN. I am a thought leader who advised the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice and The Elders Foundation. In 2018 I co-founded my business, Change by Degrees, which works with people and organisations to transform business for good. I am passionate about fairness between people and between people and the planet and enjoy communicating in a hopeful and positive way about the future we can choose.
Colm describes his book as a ‘hypocrite’s guide to saving the planet’ and he is very honest about the contradictions in his own life as he tries to live sustainably.
He uses humour and storytelling to engage the reader and to help all of us feel overcome by the scale of the climate challenge to give ourselves a break and keep on going.
Bestselling author Colm O'Regan is a worrier. A professional one. Caution is his watchword. Risk aversion is his love language. Now Colm is grappling with the biggest worry of all: the whole 'planet being on fire' thing and how exactly we can help.
Don't worry, this isn't a book telling you how to live off the grid and make your own planet-friendly soap from woodlice (that's the sequel). Instead, Climate Worrier is about the journey, about trying (and often failing) to be part of the solution to the big issues, while not despairing at the endless hypocrisies that come from…
I have been teaching and writing about economics and the environment for over thirty-five years, and have been inspired by my students to work towards a new ecological economics that can underpin a sustainable planetary future. Many of the crises that I and colleagues have predicted – climate disasters, soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss – are now upon us, but the situation is not hopeless. I am working for a rapid transformation away from fossil-fuel and resource-intensive forms of economic growth, and hope that the expanding field of ecological economics can help to usher in this badly needed change.
This book provides an essential introduction to the expanding field of ecological economics.
Authored by some of the leading figures in the field, it covers the basic evidence of global limits to economic activity such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. The historical basis for ecological economic theory is explained in non-technical terms.
The book covers issues of sustainable scale, natural capital, and ecosystem services – simple concepts that nonetheless revolutionize economic thinking. It concludes with an analysis of policies needed to achieve sustainability.
From Empty-World Economics to Full-World Economics
Ecological economics explores new ways of thinking about how we manage our lives and our planet to achieve a sustainable, equitable, and prosperous future. Ecological economics extends and integrates the study and management of both "nature's household" and "humankind's household"-An Introduction to Ecological Economics, Second Edition, the first update and expansion of this classic text in 15 years, describes new approaches to achieving a sustainable and desirable human presence on Earth. Written by the top experts in the field, it addresses the necessity for an innovative approach to integrated environmental, social, and economic analysis…
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…
Drawing on my own experience as a local elected official and citizen lobbyist at all levels of government, I write books to help get citizens involved in the biggest challenges of our day. As an activist for clean energy, I wanted to write an easy-to-use guide to help ordinary citizens to become effective champions for more solar power in America. The Solar Patriot is my third book and my second on solar power. For two decades I have worked as a communications consultant and advocate for solar power, renewable energy, and climate solutions. Now, I’m writing a call to action for America off of fossil fuels as soon as possible to meet the urgent challenge of the climate crisis.
A welcome corrective to the trend of X number of things you can do in your personal life to save the Earth that won't threaten the rule of greedy polluters over the economy and government, Price's lighthearted book welcomes the reader with a smile but strikes hard against propaganda from corporate polluters while she stands up for climate justice. To help readers make a real difference, as opposed to doing things that feel helpful but really aren't like buying a Prius, Price does actually offer a few personal life changes, like buying less stuff or buying higher quality stuff at lower quantity. But most of her ideas are about thinking differently about the environment--such as Redefine Economy or even Redefine Extremism (greedheads, not environmentalists, are the real extremists). Or getting active in public policy--from the strikingly simple "Vote!" to "Join up locally--government & economy R us."
We've been "saving the planet" for decades now and the crises have only got worse. Many of us-environmentalists included-continue to live deeply unsustainable lives. At home, affluent citizens "buy green"; while at work, they maximise profits with dirty energy and toxic industries that are poisoning poorer communities.
With brevity, humour and plenty of attitude, Jenny Price tracks "save the planet" enthusiasm through strategies that range from ridiculously ineffective (Prius-buying and carbon trading) to flat-out counterproductive (greenwashing and public subsidies to greenwash). We need to imagine far better ways to use and inhabit environments. Why aren't we cleaning up the messes…
