Here are 67 books that The Dandelion Conspiracy fans have personally recommended if you like
The Dandelion Conspiracy.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
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.
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.
First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters" (Peter Matthiessen, for Time"s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson"s watershed…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
In my next pick, Romero draws on previously unexplored archives to tell stories of pesticides never told before, most notably how industrial waste was utilized to make chemicals that could kill all that got in agriculture’s way.
I love how he renders ironic the closed-looped systems so championed by environmentalists—or the use of warfare chemicals on fields that grow our foods. It is indeed strange that we use chemicals designed to kill the food that we eat to live.
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology…
For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Poisoning is a complicated business. Your character needs to know what poisons are available, along with their toxicity, method of administration, reaction time, symptoms, and treatment.
This book offers all that information and more in language that you don’t need a chemistry degree to understand. From classic poisons to common household substances, natural venoms to street drugs, and pesticides to medical compounds, this book offers detailed information on all facets of the art of chemical assassination.
I adore non-fiction books that read like novels. After ten years of working in research labs, my master’s degree in biology led me to a new career in science writing. I recently dove into the worlds of narrative non-fiction and history when I wrote Radiant, the Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light. Immersing myself in Belle Époque Paris to research and intertwine the stories of Marie Curie and the inventor/dancer Loie Fuller helped me discover a passion for telling the stories of important figures forgotten by history.
While I knew that Rachel Carson was involved in starting the environmental movement with her revolutionary book Silent Spring, I had no idea that she was also a best-selling popular science author who wrote lyrical books about the ocean. It was fascinating to learn about her life and the challenges that she faced in while standing up to big chemical companies, whose profits were threatened by her writing.
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental movement
She loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international bestseller The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world.
Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a Nobel…
Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Before it launched the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring (1962) had to run a formidable publication gantlet. Rachel Carson challenged the prevailing scientific consensus about pesticides, a subject most magazines wouldn't touch for fear of losing ads. The chemical industry threatened legal action and mounted a PR campaign against Carson. But she had several strong cards to play.
She was already a best-selling author. She was firmly backed by her editor, Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, then an independent family firm with a tradition of publishing nature writers. The book was serialized in the New Yorker, and President Kennedy plugged it at a press conference. On CBS, Eric Sevareid gave Carson equal time with an industry spokesman, though some corporations pulled their commercials. As Brooks predicted, "A future social historian will be writing his Ph.D. thesis on the career of Silent Spring—just you wait!"
In 1962 the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sparked widespread public debate on the issue of pesticide abuse and environmental degradation. The discussion permeated the entire print and electronic media system of mid-twentieth-century America. Although Carson's text was serialized in the New Yorker, it made a significant difference that it was also published as a book. With clarity and precision, Priscilla Coit Murphy explores the importance of the book form for the author, her editors and publishers, her detractors, the media, and the public at large. Murphy reviews the publishing history of the Houghton Mifflin edition and the prior…
When I was studying plant science in graduate school, I realized that what I really wanted to do was not lab research but to help people understand plants better so they could grow more beautiful and bountiful gardens. To this end, I have written several books, founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), taught horticulture at City College of San Francisco for several decades, and, since 2006, written a column on gardening for the SF Chronicle. My list of books about gardening know-how will painlessly prepare you to grow plants well.
This
little book, part of a series put out by the Garden, will show you the best
ways to offset climate change in your gardening and landscaping. It includes
tips on materials, energy efficiency, and increasing carbon sequestration. A
chapter by Amanda Knaul and Susan K. Pell covers the climate footprint of
homegrown food.
This technique can save the earth—while resulting in a beautiful garden, too!
Climate Conscious Gardener picks up where Brooklyn Botanic Gardening’s groundbreaking Environmental Gardener left off, giving homeowners, landscapers, and public park managers practical strategies for greening the planet through sustainable and organic gardening. In simple terms, an introductory section explains what happens when the balance of carbon and nitrogen in the atmosphere goes awry, and how plants, soil, and synthetic gardening aids (such as fertilizer and pesticides) affect climate change. Most important, readers will learn how to calculate their garden’s carbon footprint—and what they can do to decrease it…
Writing my first book, I found out how dependent my thinking about the world beyond my doorstep was on language made up by engineers (“Please don’t block the driveway”). Engineering language defined how I saw the street. It was a shock to realize how severely this had limited my thinking about public space but also a liberation to become aware of this: now I could perceive streets in completely new and different ways. The books I recommend all have made me perceive the world differently. I hope they do the same for you. Also, see the recommendations by my co-author, Marco te Brömmelstroet.
Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.
Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.
Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster.
To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need…
I have been fascinated by managing insect pest populations since childhood when I assisted my mother in her vegetable garden by hand removing Colorado potato beetles from potato plants. I have also been interested, since childhood, in seeing the world beyond Nebraska when I laid on my back in the pasture on grandma’s farm, watching planes flying to exotic destinations. These two interests led me to obtain advanced degrees in entomology which provided the opportunity to conduct rice entomology research in those exotic places dreamed of in my grandma’s pasture. I read the five books recommended to develop my rice entomology research program and as reference material for scientific publications.
I loved this book because it provides the world’s best example of a minor pest that became a major pest because of the change in cultural practices that accompanied the advent of the Green Revolution in rice. It is also the best example of pest resurgence, which occurs when pests previously controlled by pesticides recur but in higher numbers than they did before due to the destruction of the pest’s natural enemies by pesticides.
This book consists of 22 chapters presented by world-renowned authors at a 1979 symposium on the economic impact of the pest, biology and ecology, taxonomy, forecasting, migration, and the development of integrated pest management practices to control the brown planthopper. As such, I found this classic book as a guide for developing a holistic research program for managing the brown planthopper targeted to resource-poor rice farmers in Asia.
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our species’ survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and it’s exactly what we evolved to do as humans.
Nicole’s comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if it’s not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.
When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly – nobody wants to end up like Into the Wild’s Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!
319 color pages, 400 wild foods, plant localization maps for each plant (400 maps), paperback, great print quality, superior plant identification guidelines, recipes for each plant, full page photos of the plants, at least 3 pictures for each plant, medicinal uses.
The Forager’s Guide to Wild Foods is probably the most important thing you want to have by your side when you go out foraging. Maybe there are times when you're still not sure about a certain plant and you need to consult the book, despite your vast experience. Or maybe you don’t have experience at all and just want…
Foreign cultures have always intrigued me. I am a Midwesterner who lived for several years in Latin America, teaching English and later doing field work in anthropology. As a young woman, I lived through a violent coup d’état in Chile, and I drew on that experience when I later wrote about political upheaval in Guatemala. A Ph.D. in anthropology gave me the opportunity to spend time in Guatemala and Mexico, some of it in Mayan towns. My love of historical fiction stems from my desire to enter and understand other worlds, and I am grateful to authors who spin their magic to bring far-off places and times to life.
This is a darkly beautiful novel, set in the period after the American Revolution, a time of great hardship for many Americans. Hannah Trevor has lost her husband and three children, and she cobbles out an independent if marginal life for herself as a midwife in rural Maine. She finds love with a married man, and when he is falsely accused of rape and murder, Hannah sets out to uncover the truth. I was drawn in by Lawrence’s striking prose and by Hannah, who is strong, resourceful, and in many ways, a loner.
Hanna Trevor, a midwife in 1780s Maine, is drawn into the investigation into the rape and murder of a young woman when an honorable man--her former lover and the father of her child, is accused of the crime. Reprint.
