Summer Reading List
Summer Reading List
Embedded Files
Summary: "Down to Earth re-envisions the story of America 'from the ground up.' It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past."
Summary: "In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller travels to hot spots in the United States and around the globe to investigate how environmental crisis is creating millions of climate refugees who are challenging the developed world's borders and resources. Miller explores how a sense of threat in the United States is giving rise to high-tech surveillance fortresses and fueling calls for an ever-expanding border wall. He also weaves in stories of people engaged in creative defiance of the armies, border patrols, and police being deployed to fight those in need. Miller passionately makes the case for ecological restoration, not border militarization, as the best way to achieve sustainability and security."
Summary: "In fast-paced prose, Todd Miller travels to hot spots in the United States and around the globe to investigate how environmental crisis is creating millions of climate refugees who are challenging the developed world's borders and resources. Miller explores how a sense of threat in the United States is giving rise to high-tech surveillance fortresses and fueling calls for an ever-expanding border wall. He also weaves in stories of people engaged in creative defiance of the armies, border patrols, and police being deployed to fight those in need. Miller passionately makes the case for ecological restoration, not border militarization, as the best way to achieve sustainability and security."
Summary: "Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. "
Summary: " Paul Fleischman offers teens an environmental wake-up call and a tool kit for decoding the barrage of conflicting information confronting them.We’re living in an Ah-Ha moment. Take 250 years of human ingenuity. Add abundant fossil fuels. The result: a population and lifestyle never before seen. The downsides weren’t visible for centuries, but now they are. Suddenly everything needs rethinking — suburbs, cars, fast food, cheap prices. It’s a changed world. This book explains it. Not with isolated facts, but the principles driving attitudes and events, from vested interests to denial to big-country syndrome. Because money is as important as molecules in the environment, science is joined with politics, history, and psychology to provide the briefing needed to comprehend the 21st century."
Summary: " Paul Fleischman offers teens an environmental wake-up call and a tool kit for decoding the barrage of conflicting information confronting them.We’re living in an Ah-Ha moment. Take 250 years of human ingenuity. Add abundant fossil fuels. The result: a population and lifestyle never before seen. The downsides weren’t visible for centuries, but now they are. Suddenly everything needs rethinking — suburbs, cars, fast food, cheap prices. It’s a changed world. This book explains it. Not with isolated facts, but the principles driving attitudes and events, from vested interests to denial to big-country syndrome. Because money is as important as molecules in the environment, science is joined with politics, history, and psychology to provide the briefing needed to comprehend the 21st century."
5. A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington
5. A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington
Summary: "A 'powerful and indispensable' look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) — and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities."
Summary: "In Silent Spring, a book that is often viewed as a landmark work of environmental writing, Rachel Carson turns her attentions to the potentially harmful effects of pesticides on the environment – particularly those pesticides, including DDT, that were being administered via aerial spraying in an attempt to control insect populations on a massive scale. In many ways, Silent Spring served as a public warning, gathering expert opinion on the dangers of this increasingly destructive practice. In addition to the actual accounts of contamination that she describes, Carson’s book also contains an overarching argument about the proper relationship between man and nature that contributed to the growth of the 'deep ecology' movement regarding the interconnectedness of all living things and systems. After a parable that begins the book by envisioning a future in which silence reigns over the world after pesticides have wrought their ultimate destruction on the environment, Carson lays out her basic thesis. In an interconnected world, she argues, man’s newfound power to change his environment needs to be wielded with extreme caution if we are to avoid destroying the very systems that support us."
Summary: "In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben, a young nature writer from the Adirondack region of New York, laments the loss of a pristine natural world untouched by human hands and capable of sustaining and renewing itself indefinitely. With the advent of such global environmental problems as acid rain, the greenhouse effect, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the massive destruction of tropical rain forests, humankind has lost its sense of nature as an infinitely renewable resource capable of absorbing any amount of human alteration."
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