Good Life Reading

There are now so many great books on climate change that it’s hard to know where to start. Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe and George Monbiot’s Heat are all great launching pads. For a somewhat dated, but still informative, first-person account of the history of climate politics in the crucial 1988 – 1997 period, check out Jeremy Leggett’s The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era. For a Canadian perspective, Some Like it Cold by Trent University’s Robert Paehlke will be published later this Spring by Between the Lines press.

If you want to understand the global oil industry, you can’t do better than starting with Daniel Yergin’s Pullitizer-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. I warn you now, the environment gets considered on about 7 of its 855 pages, but if you were expecting more then you haven’t paid much attention to what has driven this industry over the last century and a half. To get the other side of the argument, see Linda McCuaig’s counterpoint to Yergin, It’s the Crude, Dude.

If you’re looking for something more along the lines of ‘but how do I green my life?’, then you want Adria Vasil’s Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada.

When it comes to big picture overview stuff, however, I tend to prefer (well-researched and insightful) fiction to the more academic accounts. So anything from Ursula K. LeGuin or Barbara Kingsolver gets a thumbs-up from me as a good eco-read. I recently re-discovered John Brunner’s environmental sci-fi novels from the seventies (Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Persistence of Vision) that had a big effect on me as a kid and they still hold up well. And a great writer like William Gibson can (in his novel Virtual Light) take the concepts from Mike Davis’ more academic City of Quartz and make them come alive. And for a fun ride, go with Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac.

I could go on all day, but over to you: what are your favourite pro-sustainability books?

by Keith Stewart