The Environmental Book Club

All links are to Amazon, if you know better publishers we can link to for the authors please let me know. February 8th Eager :  The Surprising: Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb March 14th The Great Pivot : Creating Meaningful Work to Build a Sustainable Future By Justine Burt April 11th Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Women, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching Of Plants. by Robin Wall Kimmerer May 9th Arctic Dreams By Barry Lopez June 13th Inconspicuous Consumption : The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have By Tatiana Schlossberg 

Bill McKibben has a really good new book "Falter- has the human game begun to play itself out?" Where technology is going- Extremely scary. Blowout by Rachael Maddow which is super current. A  real classic, Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, if we stay on landscapes. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming makes the case for why we should find the political will quickly to deal with runaway climate change.  Tatianna Schlossberg, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Didn't Know You Have inverts David Wallace-Wells book and looks at climate change from the perspective of consumption. She also calls for finding the political will quickly. I don’t think Forbes or Bloomberg know anything but this is their book list on climate change: https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2019/01/23/ten-of-the-best-books-about-climate-change-conservation-and-the-environment-of-2018/#2462202945d6 In this set I read Eager and liked it.

Book club selection for January 2020 A wonderfully literate book on the environment that calls for rewilding landscapes. We enjoyed the book. There was much here that was economic- the jobs and wealth created from rewilded places was much larger and more widespread than the extractive economy; and place based- the book deals with the environment around Wales but is very applicable to California. Readers were interested in how they could rewild within their community. They were also impressed with the vocabulary- often looking up a word every other page. Questions for Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life Is the dream of a wilder California which replaces entire areas of cattle farming with natural ecosystems, and restores species that have long since disappeared, viable? What species would you like to see restored to the Bay Area? Can the ecological biography of nearly half a million years ago still be read in today's landscape? Are violent ranchers, corrup...

In November we read On Fire by Naomi Klein This book was also liked because it laid out the case, including equity, for the Green New Deal. A composite of one months worth of fires in Australia 

October 2019 selection of The Environmental Book Club. We read Drawdown by Paul Hawkins. The book was enjoyed by all readers. They were especially interested in how the various solutions could be applied at the local level. Here Paul Hawkins answers five questions from Orion on Drawdown https://orionmagazine.org/2015/11/5-questions-for-paul-hawken-author-of-a-new-list-of-the-100-best-solutions-to-the-climate-crisis/