Active Hope : How to Face the Mess We're in With Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power
 

by Joanna Macy

The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, war, political polarization, economic upheaval, and the dying back of nature together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. This revised, tenth anniversary edition of Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face these crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.

 While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.

by Hal Harvey
Dozens of kids in Montgomery County, Maryland, agitated until their school board committed to electric school buses. Mothers in Colorado turned up in front of an obscure state panel to fight for clean air. If you think the only thing you can do to combat climate change is to install a smart thermostat or cook plant-based burgers, you're thinking too small.

by Richard Haass
 

More and more frequent extreme weather events occur each year, and planet Earth is in danger of developing more climates where life -- whether animal, vegetable, or human -- is unsustainable. This book explains how rising temperatures, shrinking lakes, rising oceans, and shifting weather patterns affect your life on a daily basis.

 

by Ben Ehrenreich

Examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. What might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see ... the future we have no choice but to build?

 If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you're by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. 

Nancy and John Hayden have spent the last 25 years transforming their draft horse-powered, organic vegetable and livestock operation into an agroecological, regenerative, biodiverse, organic fruit farm, fruit nursery, and pollinator sanctuary. They phased out sheep and potatoes and embraced apples, pears, stone fruits, and a wide variety of uncommon berry crops; turned much of their property into a semi-wild state; and adapted their marketing and sales strategies to the new century. 

 Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world's population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?

 A  guide for sustainability at home that offers simple, tangible steps toward reducing our environmental impact by looking at what we consume and the waste we create, as well as how to take action for environmental change. Wright believes the best way to change our planet and ourselves is through a gentle approach, rather than a judgmental one. This is a book of do's rather than don'ts

By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel - Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us.

In the era of screens and devices, the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Not only does this phenomenon have consequences for kids' physical and mental health, it jeopardizes their ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment.

Learn what things you can do right now to reduce your carbon footprint with this inspiring, accessible, stunningly illustrated book based on Eduardo Garcia's popular New York Times column.

 This book cuts straight to the facts, using infographics on every page to make the reality about our warming planet plain to see. How much do humans contribute to global warming? What do ever-more-frequent storms and floods mean for our homes, forests, coastlines, and crops? And what is happening to our oceans (beyond rising sea levels)? 

After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem.

by Tanja Hester

It can feel overwhelming to determine "the right way" to spend: a choice that might seem beneficial to the environment may have unintended consequences that hurt people. Marketers are constantly lying to you, making it hard to know what choice is best. This book empowers us to vote with our wallets by making sense of all the information coming at us, and teaching us to cultivate a more holistic mindset that considers the complex, interrelated ecosystems of people and the planet together, not as opposing forces.

Lowndes County, Alabama is Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers's life's work -- a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America's dirty secret.

Individuals can't save the world alone. But if millions of us work together to save our own patch of earth--then we really have a shot. How do we do it? With Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK). An ARK is a restored, native ecosystem. It's a thriving patch of native plants and creatures that have been allowed and supported to re-establish in the earth's intelligent, successional process of natural restoration. Over time, this becomes a pantry and a habitat for our pollinators and wild creatures who are in desperate need of support.

 The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves -- with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat -- and don't eat--for breakfast.