Best Green Books For Summer

Summer is the perfect time for diving in to those books you’ve been meaning to read. While the list of great book titles is endless, no top 10 list is complete without a green read. Whether it’s a poetic classic, inspiring fiction or urgent piece of non-fiction, environmentally themed books are now available in almost every genre including science, literature, popular culture, humour, lifestyle and food, as well as unexpected niche topics such as etiquette and fitness.

For this roundup of Best Green Books For Summer, we turned inwards—we asked around Green Living’s office and our ever-reliable colleagues answered, recommending their favourite eco books, new and old. We hope you enjoy them—let us know your favourites too!

Here are our top picks:

Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning by George Monbiot  (Anchor Books 2007) was seen by many Green Living staffers as the primary environmental text to both inform and inspire action. Monbiot offers one of the most comprehensive and authoritative examinations of the causes and risks of catastrophic climate change, in addition to imagining the path required to ensure it could be prevented, and he’s endlessly provocative.

The Scavengers’ Manifestoby Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson (Tarcher Press 2009) recently landed in the editorial department and we’ve gotten caught lingering over its curiously compelling ideas. The book describes the modern scavenger as having the capacity to reclaim a forgotten sense of discovery, adventure, self-reliance and self-sufficiency in a glorious effort to remove oneself from the endless trap of consumerism. As the authors aptly point out, once you begin to scavenge, buying new is a completely different experience.

Sea Sick (McClelland and Stewart) is also a vital work. In this groundbreaking book, the first of its kind, Canadian journalist Alanna Mitchell traverses the globe to demonstrate just exactly how imperiled our coral reefs and gulf streams are, the vital relationship between water and climate change and how we might still reverse this tragic course. Courageous, heartbreaking and impassioned.

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery (Harper Collins 2006) is a must for readers wanting a clear understanding (and even introduction) to the major environmental issues of our times, as well as a sense of how powerful individual action can be in the face of climate change. Watch for a follow-up book by Flannery on bookshelves this fall.

For a deeply hopeful message, pick up a copy of Eco Barons by Edward Hume (HarperCollins 2009). The author examines some of the world’s political, business and social visionaries who have used their wealth to create environmental projects of significance and impact. The Legacy of Luna by Julia Hill (HarperOne 2001) will also leave you feeling truly inspired. The author is a young woman who lived in a 1,000-year-old redwood tree named "Luna." She chronicles her experience and victory against a major corporation to save the old-growth redwoods of the Pacific Northwest.

No attempt to learn about our food system and the ways in which we’re both failing and succeeding to make it more sustainable is complete without a read of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (Penguin 2008). Pollan proposes an alternative way of eating that envisions our personal health as inextricably linked to the ecology and health of the food chains we’re part of. Organic Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew by Samuel Fromartz (Harcourt 2007) is another invaluable resource in your artillery of critical thinking about food marketing and consumer choices. Also on the topic of food, Barbara Kingsolver has become an oft-repeated name around the office. Many of us have been entranced by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins 2007), her family’s story of living on a farm in southern Appalachia and realigning their lifestyle to be in synch with the growing season. One of Kingsolver’s novels, Prodigal Summer, (HarperCollins 2000) is another beautiful work that mixes love and nature and gently promotes environmental protection.

For the eco-philosopher, Thoreau’s 19th-century classic, Walden, is an unparalleled triumph of environmental writing on the relationship between humans and nature. But for a more recent creative work, reach for The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr (Penguin 2003), which is a collection of short stories that are a must for the literary eco-connoisseur.