Love Silent Spring Revolution? Readers share 100 books like Silent Spring Revolution...

Each of the five books on my list come at what’s happening to birds from a very different angle.

The Genius of Birds, a blockbuster by one of the world’s leading nature writers, tells a string of stories that help us understand why birds are both so remarkable and so crucial to the globe.

The thrust of the book is that birds are far smarter than once thought. But these chapters go much deeper than that into how birds are crafty, have tremendous memories, and are even capable of deceit.

Ackerman followed up The Genuis of Birds with an equally fascinating book, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent and Think, that digs into the daily lives of birds.

The Bald Eagle is the conservation success story of our time, but its path hasn’t been easy, as this highly readable book makes clear.

The collapse and rebuilding of the nation’s official symbol helps bring home the plight of birds in general, as well as what it will take to restore depleted species.

The eagle stands apart, since it’s the highest profile bird, with special protection no other species has been given. And yet, there’s much universal in the story of the relationship between birds and people.

This book on how Rachel Carson researched and wrote Silent Spring is a compelling back story of how she uncovered the evidence of the impacts of pesticides and nearly singlehandedly ignited the environmental movement.

Silent Spring remains an important book to read and understand the relationship between birds and the altered environment that is undoing so many species.

We list this biography by Linda Leer because it captures what Carson was up against in her pursuit. That includes an enormously difficult scientific study, vicious personal opposition from the pharmaceutical companies that ridiculed and vilified her, and Carson’s own deteriorating health that took her life shortly after the book was published.

It’s a stirring story we shouldn’t forget more than half a century later.

This is not an easy read, built on a deep academic tour of the evidence of how birds contribute to this world. But it makes up for the tough sledding by providing huge doses of detail that make the case for why we cannot let birds continue to wither away.

Birds consume, for instance, 400 to 500 tons of insects each year across the earth. They contribute to billions of dollars in value when you add up all the ways we rely on their pollinating, seed dispersal, garbage collection – not to mention the outdoor activities they provide people.

When bird species are pulled out of the equation, as vultures were in India for a time, the results can be catastrophic – leading to disease, death, and enormous health costs. By the time you finish this book, you’ll be ready to do whatever it takes to help stop the steady… show more.

This is the children’s book I wish I had written. 

It is full of exciting ideas about how we can create a better future through innovation, technology, and care for nature and people. 

It inspires children about the possibilities of what lies ahead if human work together instead of adding to their anxieties through climate despair. 

Beautifully illustrated.

I can’t count all the ways that Ritchie’s book changed my mind, and all for the better, too, about sustainability, environmental restoration, and a science-based, all-too-possible hope for the future. I had forgotten (like so many of us) how well humans are doing: child and maternal mortality rates are falling, as is hunger and extreme poverty, while education and life expectancy are rising. Ritchie presents (well, she inundates) readers with data-driven arguments and real-world solutions to the core sustainability challenges of air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing.

I had forgotten that not all that long ago, humanity solved two environmental disasters, namely acid rain and the atmosphere’s ozone hole, and I’m grateful for Ritchie’s fact-based, pragmatic, and never utopian hopefulness that we can do the same for the problems we face now. Prepare to be shocked into hopefulness. I certainly was.

As a non-scientist, I love reading books written by scientists in language that the rest of us can understand. This is one of the best – and it addresses many of the most urgent questions scientists will keep worrying about through the 21st century, about the interaction between oil production and use, the atmosphere, the oceans, and freshwater systems. Catherine Gautier writes in a clear, accessible style. She is well aware that we can not fence off the study of physical phenomena such as climate change and contamination of water sources from the study of society, economics, and politics.  

The Red Nation is a revolutionary Indigenous organization that is part of the historic 21st-century revival of Indigenous culture and political resistance that has emerged across the Americas to block oil pipelines, prevent mining projects, and basically lead the fight to save us all from climate extinction. This is their manifesto.

The Red Deal engages with many of the ideas of the “Green New Deal” proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, but starts from the standpoint of Indigenous people across the world. As a result, it puts the fight against climate change in the context of 500 years of capitalism and colonialism, and makes an inspiring case why everyone who wants a sustainable economy should support Indigenous people’s fights for their land and freedom.

Nordhaus was one of the first economists to explain the nature of climate change and why dealing with it is of economic importance.  In this book, he uses his DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate and Economy) model to help explain --- at a textbook level --- how unrestricted GHG emissions can cause climate change to occur and lead to serious problems in the future. He also utilizes the model to illustrate some of the uncertainties we face when thinking about the climate system and when trying to predict the changes to expect under different policies. The book thereby provides students (and others) with a good introduction to climate change policy.

This book shook me to my core. I felt so frightened by its vision of a world destroyed by global warming that I became even more determined to help get climate deniers out of power.

I know that other people who read this book were equally inspired to learn more about climate change or even join the climate movement. It’s really one of the most influential books of our time.