100 books like More from Less

Bill Gates has managed the impossible task of writing a detailed book on the technological fixes we need across the board to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, but doing so in plain language that is appropriate for the widest of audiences.

This is key because the green transition will affect everybody’s life and cannot be left in the hands of experts and technocrats. Perhaps my only grievance towards the book is that at times it feels like a long laundry list of green desiderata, without taking time to think about the social, economic, and political implications of the transformation.

Nonetheless, it remains a go-to reference for anybody working in the decarbonization space. 

If you ask me, there is very little I agree with in this book, and in particular the idea that economic growth is irrelevant once you focus on the things that actually matter in life (access to water, education, housing, health, and so on) while respecting planetary boundaries.

Let alone the fact that a stylized chart of a doughnut is hardly going to change millennial economic and power dynamics. Nonetheless, Raworth wrote an extremely readable and erudite book, and crucially fostering reflection on the one issue that to my mind is central: how to turn economic growth into a force for good, addressing social needs without destroying nature.

A must read, if not to learn how to think like a 21st-century economist, at least to be aware of the challenges ahead. 

We intuitively understand that decarbonization and social justice are deeply interwoven as 21st-century challenges.

Dr. Chancel’s book shows us in great detail how this is the case, and therefore why it is important to keep inequalities in mind when designing policies to accelerate the decarbonization of the economy. After all, the poor are also more exposed to the catastrophic events associated with climate change.

But perhaps my greatest takeaway was looking at the problem the other way around, meaning that Chancel also shows us how tackling social inequalities can actually help us address some environmental challenges. 

Because the speed at which the atmosphere is warming is unprecedented in human history, we are prone to assume we are facing an unprecedented climatic challenge. However, this is not entirely true.

Archeologists Fagan and Durrani remind us that, at least locally, the climate has changed several times in the past, profoundly affecting the history of civilizations that were less advanced than ours. Some societies were able to deploy technical and social innovation to buffer environmental shocks. Others proved too rigid, slow and eventually collapsed.

To me the lesson is clear: history can be an important ally when charting the policy path ahead in a warming world. 

Bell, one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, argues that having the right culture is essential for capitalism (or any other economic or political system) to flourish – and I certainly agree. But he goes further: he worries that over time the economic gains that capitalism delivers end up undermining the cultural conditions that allow capitalism to flourish in the first place. His book is about the role of culture more broadly, not religion in particular, but religion certainly fits within the overall argument.

This is an extraordinary study about life in and around the strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, home for Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi people and many other lively things, before and after the arrival of Russian and American colonial powers.

I admire the nuanced way in which Demuth exemplifies how capitalist and communist resource management transformed not only human but also animal cultures (whales, for example, strategize against whaling ships).

Anyone in the education world likely hears about STEM all the time.

We know, intuitively, that science and technology matter. But rarely does anyone so beautifully make the case for what great STEM learning can look like.

In What STEM Can Do for Your Classroom, author Jason McKenna provides practical advice; turnkey activities; and helpful, plainspoken research that can help teachers change students’ lives through STEM—just as McKenna’s teachers did for him.

My admiration for this book is demonstrated by the way in which I quite shamelessly ripped off its title for my own. It has been said that America is the only nation that began perfect and hoped to improve. The engine of that improvement, from the earliest days of the Republic, had been new technologies but by the middle of the pre-Civil War period some Americans began to realize that the “improvement” they had unleashed was beginning to erode the very “perfection” that they had hoped to enshrine in the nation’s foundation. Writers, artists, and creative intellectuals in general are society’s canaries in the mine shaft, and the great names of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, George Innes, Charles Sheeler, and their colleagues—attempted to describe, understand, and perhaps heal the destructive effects of the machine. As Marx concludes, “what was a grim possibility… show more.

First published in 1958, this is one of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books and in it she attempts to define the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, developing her concept “natality.” 

It’s a challenging book that I’ve wrestled with and argued with and never forgotten. It includes some of her most powerful and frequently cited passages about birth. Lately, I’ve been returning to its opening pages, in which she discusses the launch of Sputnik into space. 

She saw this launch not as an exciting technological breakthrough, but as a fateful repudiation of our earthly existence, an existence that was defined by birth with possibilities and limitations.

This book is more classically within the philosophical canon. The Imperative of Responsibility is probably Jonas’s masterpiece. He wrote this book in 1979. It’s a contemporary classic, in the sense that it’s really foundational, in my view (but not just in my view), for environmental ethics because it’s a book—and this is over 40 years ago now—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.