Here are 100 books that The Death of Nature fans have personally recommended if you like
The Death of Nature.
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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.
Despite the title, this book is not literally about how to blow up a pipeline. Instead, it asks why, if the fate of the world is at stake, so few climate activists have turned to sabotage. Perhaps it should have been called, “Why isn’t anyone blowing up a pipeline?”
In my activism, I have always organized and joined non-violent actions and protests, but Malm raises a powerful point: historical movements, like the fight for women’s suffrage or the end of apartheid in South Africa, have used violence and sabotage. Only after the fact are these movements whitewashed into something peaceful and cuddly. Reading Malm’s short but powerful book left me with more questions than I started with, but the best books often don’t provide the right answers; rather, they ask new questions.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel…
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.
This is the book I wish I could have given my younger self when I first noticed that the ecological world around me was deteriorating. Species were going extinct as the world heated up. In my education as a scientist, I learned that the physical causes of the environmental crisis are simple (burning fossil fuels, converting land to pasture, and so on), but no one seemed to have the power to do anything to fix it.
In this book, Mau brilliantly shows why we feel so unable to change the world. Everyone, including CEOs, are constrained by capitalism. People might personally care about the environment, but if the money doesn’t work out, they are forced to act otherwise. This isn’t an exclusively environmental book, but it offers a powerful perspective on the forces behind the crisis.
Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital's paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsionoffers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx's unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Soren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding…
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.
When I started to read the news as a kid, I understood right away that oil prices were important. Constant war in the Middle East was somehow linked to the gas my mom used to fill up her minivan. It wasn’t until I read this book in college that I truly knew why energy dominates politics.
Mitchell points out that with the rise of coal mining came the rise of democracy because workers suddenly had the power to shut down the entire national economy by striking at only a few mines. They demanded rights and fair treatment. The transition to oil changed everything because it was easy to transport and difficult for workers to shut down. Mitchell shows that oil isn’t just about convenience. It’s about power.
Carbon Democracy provides a unique examination of the relationship between oil and democracy. Interweaving the history of energy, political analysis, and economic theory, Mitchell targets conventional wisdom regarding energy and governance. Emphasizing how oil and democracy have intermixed, he argues that while coal provided the impetus for mass democracy, the shift to oil drastically limited democratic possibility; above all, the ability to confront contemporary ecological crises.
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’ve researched and taught on contemporary social problems for over a decade. Much of this work focused on violence and, especially, torture. Not surprisingly, it often left me overwhelmed about the human condition and about the possibility of creating a better world. The students I taught often felt similarly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when hope seemed in short supply, I began rethinking how I talk about, teach about, and study politics, problems, and the possibilities of change. As an antidote to despair, helplessness, and denial, hope became a defining feature of my work on violence and now, as I’ve pivoted toward studying the environment, climate change.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s book is my instruction manual for living with wonder and consideration for the world beyond our doors and phones.
I found myself enthralled by its lessons in transformation, as simple as many of them are. Learn the names of other species and listen to them. Walk barefoot. Wander aimlessly. Rooted as metaphor and reality, remained with me as a way of beginning to heal the damage caused by climate change, environmental degradation, and the attention economy.
In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperilled, beloved earth?
Award-winning writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt's highly personal new book is a brilliant invitation to live with the earth in both simple and profound ways-from walking barefoot in the woods and reimagining our relationship with animals…
I remember, as a very young child, clandestinely sneaking out of the house on humid Houston nights to gather toads. How my parents never caught me in the act, I do not know. I only know holding these amphibians in my hands felt special, magical even. This compulsion toward other creatures speaks to the unfolding of my lifelong learnings, a path that led me to a PhD in Religion and Nature and then to work for the Center for Humans and Nature. I’ve never stopped reflecting on how humans might better care for our earthling kin, and I don’t suspect I’ll ever cease marveling at the earth’s wild generativity.
Hailed as a “new genre of nature writing,” Mueller’s book is species-specific, dwelling upon the lives and deaths of salmon, yet the subject matter could apply to any creature that has become a commodity within late-stage capitalism.Mueller contrasts the Norwegian farmed-salmon industry and the increasing mechanization and reduction of living beings to things with wild salmon populations and Native people’s perspectives from the Pacific Northwest. Critically, he dares to take on the perspective of salmon, sprinkling memorable and moving vignettes throughout the book, helping readers imagine the world from a salmon’s-eye-view. This work of interspecies empathy is a rare and welcome contribution to thinking about personhood through a lens that is other-than-human.
Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment
In search of a new story for our place on earth
Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture's tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon-weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest.
Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully…
I am Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Kansas, where I taught the History of Chemistry, History of Science in the United States, Early-Modern Scientific Revolution, and Great Lives in Science, among other courses. I also have published on late 19th-century physical science (with emphasis on spectroscopy and the work of Sir William Crookes) and the development of 20th-century electronic devices to aid chemical analyses (e.g., the development of handheld x-ray fluorescence spectrometers to measure lead concentration in paint). In addition to my interests in the history of science, I serve as the Technical Editor for an international environmental services company.
No better overall treatment of the Scientific Revolution during the 17th century is available for the reader who would encounter this material for the first time.
I used this book as a major text in my survey course on the history of modern science. The author also wrote arguably the leading biography of Isaac Newton.
This introduction to the history of science in the seventeenth century examines the so-called 'scientific revolution' in terms of the interplay between two major themes. The Platonic-Pythagorean tradition looked on nature in geometric terms with the conviction that the cosmos was constructed according to the principles of mathematical order, while the mechanical philosophy conceived of nature as a huge machine and sought to explain the hidden mechanisms behind phenomena. Pursuing different goals, these two movements of thought tended to conflict with each other, and more than the obviously mathematical sciences were affected - the influence spread as far as chemistry…
I am Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where I am on the faculty of The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and its former director. Because of my expertise in federal Indian law, I have been a consultant in certain legal matters involving Native issues. Some of the many books I teach and have written about are on my Shepherd list. My work is sustaining: writing and teaching about Native life and literature is a way of joining a crucial conversation about the survival of the planet through living a socially, politically, and economically balanced life.
I am recommending this book of beautifully written essays on the environment by the Chickasaw novelist, poet, and essayist Linda Hogan because it is the best book on the subject I know.
Dwellings focuses on the Indigenous relation to the natural world, one of kinship, a subject at the core of my thinking. “Here is a lesson,” Hogan tells us, “what happens to the people and what happens to the land is the same thing.” This is a lesson the West has not learned; and its ignorance of this lesson or its refusal to learn it has led us to the brink of climate collapse.
Reading Dwellings carefully and thoughtfully is a way I rehearse how to live with, not against the environment.
Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan's first work of nonfiction explores the author's lifelong love for the living world and all its inhabitants. As an Indian woman, grandmother, and environmentalist, Hogan questions "our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species who share our journey." In stories about bats, bees, porcupines, wolves, and caves, Hogan honors the spirit of all living things. Dwellings is about the idea and meaning of home. The earth is our universal home, this book tells us. Dwellings teaches us about cultures whose understanding of the world are often at odds…
My first love was architecture. But while I was working as an architectural drafter in my early twenties, I began taking college courses in philosophy and religious studies. During that time, I also acquired a set of the Great Books of the Western World by Encyclopædia Britannica. I was hooked. I quit my job and became a full-time student of philosophy, religion, and history. Since then, I have seen Pascal’s maxim demonstrated in all my research. Namely, that humanity is a living oxymoron: he is like a “reed,” easily blown over. Nevertheless, the human is also a “thinking reed,” concerned with meaning, purpose, and transcendence.
This book holds a special place in my heart as one of the first books I encountered on the history of science and religion. Lindberg's masterful exploration of the European scientific tradition from 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 served as my introduction to this captivating field of study.
In many ways, I owe my journey as a historian of science to the insights gleaned from Lindberg's work. While I never had the privilege of meeting him before his passing, his scholarship continues to inspire and shape my understanding of the intricate relationship between science and religion.
For anyone embarking on their own exploration of this fascinating topic, Lindberg's book is an indispensable guide that will leave a lasting impression.
When it was first published in 1992, "The Beginnings of Western Science" was lauded as the first successful attempt to present a unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. Chronicling the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy to late-medieval scholasticism, David C. Lindberg surveyed the most important themes in the history of science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. In addition, he offered an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe."The Beginnings of Western Science"…
I never believed the idea that creativity was for a gifted few. Throughout my life, as a teenage fishing guide, an entrepreneur and college professor, novelist, and creativity guide, the folks I’ve met are rich with creative and entrepreneurial qualities. My calling is to help you appreciate your creative genius so that it appreciates in value for you. Growing your creatively entrepreneurial genius is the best way to prepare for a future of unknowable unknowns, the best way to build careers we desire, the best way to fully appreciate life. I offer various perspectiveS on core creative and entrepreneurial concepts so you can construct the best path to your personal renewal and growth.
First and foremost we are sensual critters. At birth, our brains still have significant development to accomplish and focuses initially on the Sensory Control area since it’s vital for growth that we fully realize the messages and signals that the physical world is constantly sending. Here’s a poetic and philosophical exploration of how we emerged from and continue to be part of the physical sensual world. It makes sense it’s last. I’ve been reading it for two years without finishing; after a couple of pages of Abram’s beautiful wisdom about how, for instance, the first spoken languages were composed of natural sounds I need to put the book down and ruminate for a few days on the creative implications of my speaking and the sounds I make.
Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception.
For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including…
