Environmental Politics

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves—all with impunity.

What can we, as ordinary citizens, do about climate change? While countless environmental books focus on the causes of our current crisis, Advocating for the Environment is one of the first to focus on advocacy and policy-based solutions, arming listeners with the tools they need to take action and enact change.

We are facing a climate catastrophe. A plethora of studies describe the damage we’ve already done. Many people understand that we are facing a climate emergency, but may be fuzzy on technical, policy, and social justice aspects. In Is Science Enough?, Aviva Chomsky breaks down the concepts, terminology, and debates for activists, students, and anyone concerned about climate change. She argues that science is not enough to change course: we need put social, racial, and economic justice front and center and overhaul the global growth economy.

From farm-to-table restaurants and farmers markets, to support for fair trade and food sovereignty, movements for food-system change hold the promise for deeper transformations. Yet Americans continue to live the paradox of caring passionately about healthy eating while demanding the convenience of fast food. Rooted Resistance explores this fraught but promising food scene. This book wagers that socially responsible agrarian mythmaking should be a vital part of a food ethic of resistance if we are to rectify the destructive tendencies in our contemporary food system.

The Copernican view of the universe is mistaken. The Earth continues to be the center of the universe, because here there is life, and plenty of it. From the very limited exploration of our solar system, we have learned that there is no complex meaningful life. For humanity to survive in this century, we need to change the paradigm back to the Earth is the center of the universe. The nearest star system, Proxima Centuri, is at least 4.2 light years, (over 20 trillion miles) and unreachable. It would take approximately 70,000 years with present technology to get there.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build.

Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.

Fighting Dirty tells the story of how one small group of farmers, small-town residents, and Indigenous people fought the world’s largest waste disposal company to stop them from expanding a local dumpsite into a massive landfill. As one of the experts brought in to assess the impact the toxic waste would have on the community, Poh-Gek Forkert was part of the adventures and misadventures of their decades-long fight.

As president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister was known for being a straight shooter, willing to challenge his peers throughout the industry. Now, he's a man on a mission, the founder of Citizens for Affordable Energy, crisscrossing the country in a grassroots campaign to change the way we look at energy in this country.

All of Mumbai's possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food, and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains' edge, making a living by reusing, recycling, and reselling.

Since it was first proposed in the US House of Representatives, the Green New Deal has been hotly debated. The intent was not simply to fight climate change or address a specific environmental concern, but rather to tackle how climate change and other environmental challenges affect the economy, the vulnerable, and social justice—and vice versa. In Science for a Green New Deal, Eric Davidson dissects this legislative resolution.

Do our children have a right to inherit a livable planet? Is the government obliged to protect it? Twenty-one young people from across America have sued the federal government over climate change, charging that actions promoting a fossil fuel economy violate their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. As the World Burns by investigative reporter Lee van der Voo follows the plight of the young plaintiffs, chronicling their legal battle as their childhoods are consumed by another year of drought and wildfire, floods and hurricanes, and tumultuous politics.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering.

In this brave and provocative work, former US Vice President Al Gore asserts that only a radical rethinking of our relationship with nature will save the Earth's ecology for future generations. Gore's analysis of where we've gone wrong ranges across politics, history, science, economics, psychology, and religion. He argues that only a worldwide mobilization can save us from disaster and presents a brilliant and comprehensive plan for action that encompasses not only the Earth's ecology, but also population trends, appropriate technology, and environmental education.

"Der Klimawandel ist da, aber er führt nicht in die Apokalypse. Und er ist nicht einmal unser größtes Problem!" In seinem aktuellen Bestseller "Apocalypse never" zeigt sich der bekannte und international angesehene Umweltaktivist Michael Shellenberger als leidenschaftlicher Verfechter einer rationalen Umweltpolitik und erteilt dem Öko-Alarmismus eine klare Absage. Er legt dar, wie die vermeintlich alarmierenden Daten sachlich zu interpretieren sind und was wirklich hinter der Klimahysterie steckt: nämlich finanzielle Interessen, Machtstreben und die Sehnsucht nach einer Ersatz-Religion.

The United States is addicted to crude oil. In this book, Andrew Price-Smith argues that this addiction has distorted the conduct of American foreign policy in profound and malign ways, resulting in interventionism, exploitation, and other illiberal behaviors that hide behind a facade of liberal internationalism. The symbiotic relationship between the state and the oil industry has produced deviations from rational foreign energy policy, including interventions in Iraq and elsewhere.

No matter how President Obama spins his proposed government policies, it amounts to the same thing: a power grab. In his new book, best-selling author Christopher Horner reveals an out-of-control administration that wants to impose mandates, raise taxes, and even subjugate our authority to international organizations such as the United Nations.

One woman's enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments.

Climate catastrophe-inspired narratives like “Electrify Everything!” have a grip on people’s minds. The simplicity of the solution to the most complex endeavor ever faced by humans—the journey to a net zero future—is seductive, but it is fundamentally flawed. In Path to Zero: 12 Climate Conversations That Changed the World, author Tucker Perkins takes listeners on a series of future-casting journeys from the Year 2050 back to the present day to show us how a better way—a wide path to net zero carbon emissions—was, and can be, achieved in an accelerated time frame.