Here are 100 books that The Earth Transformed fans have personally recommended if you like
The Earth Transformed.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I found my passion for sustainable mobility while working on my PhD thesis about electric cars at a time when no one was interested in electric cars. I am fascinated by the disruptive forces in the transportation space. With my long-term work experience in management consulting, corporate, academics, and startups, I’m trying to make a contribution to making transport carbon-free.
This book takes an exciting angle at mobility from a human civilization perspective. It shows us how climate change triggers massive migration processes across the globe.
For me, it was a great input when considering the best place to live for myself. Recommended for everyone who wants to leave their current location and be a mobile global citizen.
Where will you live in 2030? Where will your children settle in 2040? What will the map of humanity look like in 2050?
Mobility is a recurring feature of human civilisation. Now, as climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilise and technology disrupts, we're entering a new age of mass migrations - one that will scatter both the dispossessed and the well-off. Which areas will people abandon and where will they resettle? Which countries will accept or reject them? As today's world population, which includes four billion restless youth, votes with their feet, what map of human…
I consider myself a topologist of story, ever fascinated by the shapes stories take, and how those underlying forms—as much as their specific content—guide our reactions and our emotions. In a social-media-saturated age, it’s more important than ever that we practice the skills of comprehending story landscapes so that we can understand who benefits from them—and who doesn’t. Ditch the GPS: whether memoir, reportage, or fiction, these books showcase some of the map-and-compass skills we all need to navigate a complicated new era.
In the ancient Middle East Scheherazade had to begin a compelling story each night to stave off a bloodthirsty king’s tendency to murder his lovers. Journalist Lockwood traveled the world collecting the modern-day equivalent—myriad accounts of how climate change has already affected people living in numerous countries. The stories are simultaneously heartfelt and commonplace, out of this world and very much of it, perfect illustrations of how the global settles on the local like so much radioactive dust. If humanity is to have a vibrant future, the art of telling and listening to such stories will no doubt be as critical a life skill as Scheherazade’s was.
Join journalist Devi Lockwood as she bikes around the world collecting personal stories about how flood, fire, drought, and rising seas are changing communities.
It's official: 2020 will be remembered as the year when apocalyptic climate predictions finally came true. Catastrophic wildfires, relentless hurricanes, melting permafrost, and coastal flooding have given us a taste of what some communities have already been living with for far too long. Yet we don't often hear the voices of the people most affected. Journalist Devi Lockwood set out to change that.
In 1,001 Voices on Climate Change, Lockwood travels the world, often by bicycle,…
I am a geologist who studies the origin and evolution of continents, which has required traveling the world to conduct fieldwork. Most of that experience has focused on Greenland and the wilderness fringe that bounds the inland ice cap. For weeks at a time, I and two colleagues, John Korstgård and Kai Sørensen, camp in some of the world’s greatest wilderness landscapes. Over years of such research, I have come to treasure the exquisite emotional power fieldwork in wilderness settings provides. It is the most direct way to begin the journey of understanding the place of humanity in the unfolding progress of cosmic evolution and was the impetus for my recent book.
Academic research into glacial processes seldom inspires deep reflection, but this fine book dramatically changes that narrative. Although Jemma Wadham does an outstanding job providing an introduction to the physical science of glaciology, her emotionally rich descriptions of many expeditions to study the melting ice around the world underscores why fieldwork matters. She frankly presents personal challenges, life-threatening health issues, and the arduous reality of living on the fringe of massive ice sheets and glaciers in a way that exposes the deeply human experience of academic scientific research in wild nature.
A passionate eyewitness account of the mysteries and looming demise of glaciers-and what their fate means for our shared future
The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth's land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers, renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that they-and we-face.
Taking readers on a personal journey from Europe and…
There’s nothing like personal experience. You have to read the literature, it’s true. That’s how we’ve all met here at Shepherd. But you have to roll up your sleeves and get down to visiting, too, if you want to write about travel. I first approached the Arctic in 1991 and I return above sixty degrees north every year, although I must confess to a secret advantage; I married a Finn. We spend summers at a little cabin north of Helsinki. I know the region personally, I keep coming back, and I invite you, whenever you can, to come up and join us!
I admire Ben Rawlence for his immersion in his subject. In previous books he reported from a refugee camp on the Kenya/Somalia border and from strife-ridden eastern Congo.
Here, he roams right across the high north, assessing the gamut of issues confronting a fast-changing north. Not all the change is dire: he quotes Kenneth Høegh, an agronomist, on the novelty of trees.
“Growing up in Greenland, trees were kind of exotic, strange,” as he describes for us Høegh’s project of foresting his island.
With chapters on the changing forest, animals wild and domestic, the changing climate, and issues and opportunities it presents, The Treeline shows us that planetary change presses forward every bit as much in the high north as down here where most of us live.
A ground-breaking and beautifully written investigation into the Arctic Treeline with an urgent environmental message.
'Evocative, wise and unflinching' Jay Griffiths, author of Wild
The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years already.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always…
Brian Fagan is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books about archaeology, the past, and climate change for general audiences. I was asked to write my first climate change book (on El Niños) and was astounded to find that few archaeologists or historians focused on the subject, whether ancient or modern. Now that’s all changed, thanks to the revolution in paleoclimatology. I’m convinced that the past has much to tell us about climate change in the future. Apart from that, the subject is fascinating and vital.
Written by a first-rate historian of wide learning, this is one of those rare books that causes one to rethink your assumptions about history. White brings climate change to the forefront in a book that ranges widely over the European settlement of America and looks at it from a climatic perspective. This is technically an academic book but is so nicely written that you’ll be glued to the page.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they faced a cold new world. The average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia, and its effects were stark and unpredictable: blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, and winters when even the Rio Grande froze. This period of climate change has come to be known as the Little Ice Age, and it played a decisive role in Europe's encounter with the lands and peoples of North America. In A Cold Welcome, Sam White tells the story of this crucial period in world history, from Europe's earliest expeditions in an…
I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
I see this as a companion book to my own book. The scope is similar, but more basic and granular in its information, whether it’s explaining what a “last frost date” is or outlining DIY crafts for attracting pollinators. But the overall message is the same—all our growing efforts are linked. The actions we take and the choices we make are far-reaching beyond our own back fences. Nature’s interconnectedness is the power gardeners have to save the planet, garden by garden.
Homeowners are looking for actionable ways to help conserve the environment, and this hopeful, heartfelt guide offers them specific guidance on how to do so in their own home gardens. Want an easy, actionable way to reduce your contribution to emissions and food waste? Create your own climate victory garden. Garden plots in towns and cities are critical to supporting ecological diversity, and by instituting organic, regenerative practices and growing some of our own food, we can shift toward living in a more responsible way. In Grow Now, Emily Murphy, the founder of the popular website and podcast Pass the…
Chris Thomas is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist who is interested in how people are changing the Earth’s biodiversity. He has written over 300 scientific articles on topics as varied as showing that animal species have shifted their distributions closer to the poles as the climate has warmed, how butterflies navigate fragments of remaining habitats as they move through human-altered landscapes, and how invasive plants are increasing rather than reducing biological diversity. Chris is today Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York in England. His popular book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction was among The Times, Economist & Guardian Books of the Year for 2017.
This book is full of surprises, taking
on the thorny issue of where different species come from, where people think
they belong, and what people are doing about it. Written in an entertaining
way, Ken Thompson takes on those who hate and try to kill species simply
because they perceive them to be in the wrong place. First, he establishes the
science, pointing out that many species evolved in places that you wouldn't
guess…. Camels did not evolve in western Asia or North Africa originally, but I
won’t spoil the story.
Most species evolved somewhere but today survive
somewhere else. This is obvious to someone like Thompson, whose career
has been based in Sheffield in England, which was at the edge of an ice sheet a
mere 20,000 years ago. Virtually all of the species that live in and
around Sheffield today only colonised the area in the last 10,000…
The ecologist and author of Do We Need Pandas? “presents a stimulating challenge to our perceptions of nature” and non-native species (George Monbiot).
You may be surprised to learn that camels evolved and lived for tens of millions of years in North America—and also that the leek, national symbol of Wales, was a Roman import to Britain, as were chickens, rabbits and pheasants. These classic examples highlight the issues of “native” and “invasive” species. We have all heard the horror stories of invasives wreaking havoc on ecosystems. But do we need to fear invaders?
This is a unique tale of exciting personal encounters with wild tigers as well my hard science that revealed their mysterious world. Readers will experience the conflicts, violence, and corruption, inherent to struggle to recover the charismatic, dangerous predator. Among Tigers is not the usual doomsday prophecy, but a clear roadmap for how we can grow tiger populations to new levels of abundance. While it does not gloss over the very real challenges, overall, it delivers a message of reasonable hope to nature lovers worldwide. I have scientifically researched tigers and, fought passionately to save them, making me uniquely qualified to tell this story like no one else can.
I love tigers and nature. But through a half-century of experience and science in my own struggle to save tigers in an ancient, crowded nation aspiring for modernity and prosperity for its citizens, I have realized that we cannot hope to rewind the clock of material progress back to save wild nature by rejecting technology. Brand, the original counter-culture Guru, boldly shook off such baggage at an advanced age, and became a passionate, early advocate of ecomodernism, which tries to decouple human needs from nature in an effort to save nature through tools of modern science. I arrived independently at similar conclusions after years of hard scientific study of tigers, as well as my lived experiences of Indian society in transition. I believe Brand’s clearheaded manual provides a succinct introduction to ideas I have outlined in my own book as a framework to get to a world harboring ten times…
An icon of the environmental movement outlines a provocative approach for reclaiming our planet
According to Stewart Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization?half the world?s population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury?is altering humanity?s land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world?s dominant engineering tool. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some…
I’m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.
I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider-from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work-the…
I grew up wandering farmers’ fields looking for arrowheads, and I started working in archaeology at 16 – 50 years ago. I ski, snowshoe, run, and play piano, but I sold my soul to the archaeology devil a long time ago. I specialize in hunter-gatherers, and I’ve done fieldwork across the western US, ethnographic work in Madagascar, and lectured in many countries. I’ve learned that history matters, because going back in time helps find answers to humanity’s problems – warfare, inequality, and hate. I’ve sought to convey this in lectures at the University of Wyoming, where I’ve been a professor of anthropology since 1997.
Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that.
With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics...nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.
