Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
What are the most important environmental books? At Forum for the Future, we polled 100 staff and colleagues from around the U.K. for the green books that had most influenced us, and came up with our top 10. The list spans the last 50 years, and contains the usual suspects -- as well as a few surprises.
Small Is Beautiful and Silent Spring are the runaway winners, and the top 10 also contains one novel, one children's book, and one autobiography. While a couple of titles on the list are peculiarly British, others have had a global impact.
It's interesting to see what didn't get the votes. There are no wildlife or wilderness classics, and no overt spirituality. Would that be different if this were an American list, I wonder?
And there's no place for a number of classic reference texts -- no Limits to Growth, Our Common Future, or State of the World. This might have something to do with the fact that great sources of information are not always the most riveting of reads.
Here's the top 10 in full:
The Brit List
Small Is Beautiful (1973), by E.F. Schumacher
Silent Spring (1962), by Rachel Carson
Gaia (1979), James Lovelock
Factor Four (1995), by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, and Ernst von Weizsäcker
Stark (1993), by Ben Elton
The Web of Life (1996), by Fritjof Capra
My Family and Other Animals (1956), by Gerald Durrell
For the Common Good (1989), by Herman Daly and John Cobb
The Lorax (1971), by Dr. Seuss
The Politics of the Real World (1996), by Michael Jacobs.
Even though most of our staff were not born when Schumacher and Carson launched their books on the world, these easily took first and second place. (I suspect, though, that a few more people voted for these books than actually read them.)
Professor James Lovelock's outlining of his Gaia hypothesis -- the idea that Earth itself acts like a single organism -- is still popular, despite the author's recent eco-fatalism and backing for nuclear power.
Strangely, only one novel made the list, and this was a surprising choice: Ben Elton's blockbuster Stark, about a group of ultra-rich who seek to save themselves while the planet collapses. Elton, a stand-up comic and author, wrote a series of satirical novels in the 1990s, many with an environmental flavor, all with a distinctly "modern British" sense of humor.
There was also just one autobiography -- My Family and Other Animals, by one of our great naturalists, Gerald Durrell. His account of growing up in Corfu, Greece, in the 1940s, is enduringly popular.
There were a few children's books mentioned by our voters. The Lorax, Dr. Seuss's superb and subversive eco-parable, made the chart at No. 9. Others which didn't make the top 10 included Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson, The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, and A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh.
The most recently published books to make the list are from the mid-1990s. Factor Four will be familiar to many Grist readers. Capra's work on systems thinking is also internationally known. Less well known outside the U.K. is The Politics of the Real World, produced for a broad coalition of NGOs. Author Michael Jacobs did an excellent job of joining up the arguments for sustainable development.
There was a slew of other books from recent years that got some mentions, but did not quite make the top 10. U.K. titles included Jonathon Porritt's Capitalism as if the World Matters, George Monbiot's Heat, and Change the World for a Fiver by a group of community activists called We Are What We Do. (A fiver is slang for a five pound note, worth around $10). Recent books from the U.S. that won some votes include Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Stuart Hart's Capitalism at the Crossroads.
Overall, the list is very Anglo-American. This is due, in part, to some common intellectual traditions, but also reflects the fact that we British are lazy when it comes to speaking or reading anything but English. What is more disappointing is the absence of any books from the developing world.
So, did we get it right? How does the British top 10 measure up to your choices?
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Comments
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solarsklar Posted 5:13 am
19 Dec 2006
Top 10 Env Books
Instead of a Factor Four (1995), by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, and Ernst von Weizsäcker, I believe Amory's book called "Brittle Power" has more relevance relating to our global environmental and political situation. The others seem 'right', especially Seuss' The Lorax. - Scott Sklar
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Norm Ruttan Posted 5:30 am
19 Dec 2006
A Sand County Almanac
I would have included A Sand County Almanac and Essays on Conservation by Aldo Leopold.
Far ahead of his time when he wrote it about 1950 I believe. I first read it in 1970 and it made a tremendous difference in my life.
He made the point that no National Park in and of itself was large enough, when most people were thrilled to create small local wayside places.
It's not waste unless we waste it.
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caniscandida Posted 6:18 am
19 Dec 2006
American tastes?
I cannot speak for other Americans, but a few "wildlife and wilderness classics" would definitely be on my list. I entirely agree with Norm Ruttan's suggestion, for example. In fact it surprised me that Aldo Leopold had not originally been included. Perhaps because books of that sort are so often about experiences in North America, they do not appeal to British readers. Two more recent authors whom I am fond of are Peter Matthiessen (e.g. "The Snow Leopard," "Sand Rivers") and Barry Lopez (e.g. "Of Wolves and Men," "Arctic Dreams").
I have no idea what the category "overt spirituality" might include. Brian Swimme's "The Universe Story"? Thomas Berry's "The Dream of the Earth"? Those authors have indeed inspired many people.
C.S.Lewis's fiction might possibly count as environmentalist: in the Perelandra trilogy explicitly, but also in the Narnia Chronicles, his Christian world view includes an idyllic affection for the natural world, with which humans live in harmony; over against that, ugly industry is associated with the Devil. There is something of that in J.R.R.Tolkien's Lord of the Rings too, especially the description of Saruman's horrifying orc-factory at Orthanc, involving the bit-by-bit destruction of the forest of the Ents.
You can hardly get more British than that!
Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" I have not read, but it was recently made into a TV special, perhaps as one of the offerings of Masterpiece Theatre, and shown on PBS earlier this year. It was very charming and pretty, but I did not like the fact that the animal-loving boy was not content to observe animals in the field; rather, he had to collect them and keep them in the house.
Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!
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jwebb Posted 6:38 am
19 Dec 2006
Too Old?
I too was looking for "A Sand County Almanac" to be on the list. Some other early naturalists would be Prost, Thoreau (and Emerson), Whitman, etc. Perhaps on the more recent list I would definitely put Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and "Wilderness and the American Mind" by Roderick Nash which is a great, thought-provoking work. On the kids side you can't have the Lorax and leave out Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree", crazy brits!
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elasticsoul Posted 7:28 am
19 Dec 2006
Cradle to Cradle
This book, by William McDonough and his business partner describes the philosophy of working with nature, where what we do improves the environment - as nature herself does. They describe several projects where the authors created sustainable, health-giving industrial processes.
And the book itself was made of some new material that was designed to be 'upcycled,' meaning it could be remade into something something of similar or higher quality than a book - not a park bench. McDonough and his partner are leading by example.
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Maywa Montenegro Posted 12:43 pm
19 Dec 2006
Cradle to Cradle II
I second the nomination of Cradle to Cradle. While some books raise awareness through sheer poecy (Walden), and others alert the public of impending doom (Gaia), this one provides a comprehensive framework for action. From ideas for repackaging toothpastes (why the box around the tube?) to upcycled products, the book centers on creating internal feedback cycles---a.k.a. cradle to cradle production. For me, at least, the result was a feeling of empowerment and excitement. We will always need the clarion calls of Silent Spring and the whistle-blows of Crimes Against Nature, but the optimistic "how to" of Cradle to Cradle lands it in my personal top ten.
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klevin Posted 8:12 am
20 Dec 2006
Other illustrated children's books
A couple of books from Bill Peet with strong environmental themes that I enjoyed when I was a kid (and still do):
Farewell to Shady Glade
The Wump World
Both focus on the impact of outside forces on the native inhabitants of an eco-system. I was a big fan of pretty much all of his books, but these two really stand out in my memory these days.
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