Environmental Engineering

In Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism, Schwartz shows how now, perhaps more than ever, veganism offers a pathway for all of us of whatever faith (or no faith) to reduce hunger, conserve the environment, save water, reinstitute justice, and care for animals and the Earth. It is no coincidence, as Schwartz demonstrates, that many of these ideas are mandates in Jewish scripture, and that reincorporating a care for the world (tikkun olam) can itself reinvigorate the spirit of a faith and galvanize its practitioners to act.

Lost in a sea of information about climate change and global warming? Let's dive in and explore the significance of this massive issue. You can't get away from it on the news, the flood of climate change information is like a barrage. How are you supposed to make sense of it all? You know about the conferences on global warming, and you are still concerned about the political actions needed to impact global warming, but struggling to understand what that change actually looks like?

A tremendous upheaval is coming this century: with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we can and should do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migration will remake the world in the 21st century, either by accident, or design—and as Royal Society Science Prize-winning science journalist Gaia Vince shows us, far better the latter.

Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. He argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.

“Relax”, writes author Mary DeMocker, “this isn’t another light bulb list. It’s not another overwhelming pile of parental "to dos" designed to shrink your family’s carbon footprint through eco-superheroism.” Instead, DeMocker lays out a lively, empowering, and doable blueprint for engaging families in the urgent endeavor of climate revolution.

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs). Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries.

Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

Dr Matt Winning is a stand-up comedian and environmental economist with a PhD in climate change policy, which means he's the sort of doctor who will rush to your side if you fall ill on a plane, but only to berate you for flying. We are currently facing a global climate emergency. You've probably noticed. But why does the end of the world need to be so depressing? Hot Mess aims to both lighten the mood and enlighten listeners on climate change. This is an audiobook for people who care about climate change but aren't doing much about it.

Despite more than 50 years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why? In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The audiobook follows the story of rising CO2 through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time.

Maverick environmental writers William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs follow up their acclaimed Smogtown with a provocative examination of China’s ecological calamity already imperiling a warming planet. Toxic smog most people figured was obsolete needlessly kills as many there as the 9/11 attacks every day, while sometimes Grand Canyon-sized drifts of industrial particles aloft on the winds rain down ozone and waterway-poisoning mercury in America. Vivid, gonzo prose blends first-person reportage with exhaustive research and a sense of karma, describing the horror of "Cancer Villages", spellbinding "peasant revolts" against cancer-spreading plants, and much more....

One morning in 2000, Dr. Jane Hightower walked into her exam room to find a patient with disturbing symptoms she couldn’t explain. The woman was nauseated, tired, and had difficulty concentrating, but a litany of tests revealed no apparent cause. She was not alone. Dr. Hightower saw numerous patients with similar, inexplicable ailments, and eventually learned that there were many more around the nation and the world.

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.

In her best-selling books Blue Gold and Blue Covenant, world-renowned water activist Maude Barlow exposed the battle for ownership of our dwindling water supply and the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to reclaim water as a public good. Since then, the United Nations has recognized access to water as a basic human right - but there is still much work to be done to stem this growing crisis.

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.

For billions of years, microbes have produced and consumed greenhouse gases that regulate global temperature and in turn other aspects of our climate. The balance of these gases maintains Earth's habitability. Methane, a greenhouse gas produced only by microbes, may have kept Earth out of a deep freeze billions of years ago. Likewise, variations in carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas released by microbes and other organisms, help to explain the comings and goings of ice ages over the last million years. Now we face a human-made climate crisis with drastic consequences.

For the Birds offers listeners a glimpse behind the binoculars and reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. With a wealth of data from in-depth interviews and over three years of observing birders in the field, environmental sociologist Elizabeth Cherry argues that birders learn to watch wildlife in ways that make an invaluable contribution to contemporary conservation efforts. She investigates how birders develop a “naturalist gaze” that enables them to understand the shared ecosystem that intertwines humans and wild animals.

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global best-sellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.

Are you worried about the effects of climate change on our environment? Want to help but don't know where to start? Environmental activist Natalie Fee's new handbook to green living will help you to make small lifestyle changes that will make a big difference to our planet.

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Rejecting the old Left/Right ideologies, Rand develops a more pragmatic view capable of delivering practical solutions to this critical problem. A renewed capitalism harnessed to the task is the only way we might replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate severe climate risk. If we leave our dogma at the door, Rand argues, we might just build an economy that survives the century.