Blue Revolution
Unmaking America's Water Crisis
by Cynthia Barnett

Americans see water as abundant and cheap: we turn on the faucet and out it gushes, for less than a penny a gallon. We use more water than any other culture in the world, much to quench what’s now our largest crop—the lawn. Yet most Americans cannot name the river or aquifer that flows to our taps, irrigates our food, and produces our electricity. And most don’t realize these freshwater sources are in deep trouble.

Blue Revolution exposes the truth about the water crisis—driven not as much by lawn sprinklers as by a tradition that has encouraged everyone, from homeowners to farmers to utilities, to tap more and more. But the book also offers much reason for hope. Award-winning journalist Cynthia Barnett argues that the best solution is also the simplest and least expensive: a water ethic for America. Just as the green movement helped build awareness about energy and sustainability, so a blue movement will reconnect Americans to their water, helping us value and conserve our most life-giving resource. Avoiding past mistakes, living within our water means, and turning to “local water” as we do local foods are all part of this new, blue revolution.

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Challenging Nature
The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life
by Lee M. Silver

From Booklist
The archetype of mortal defiance, Prometheus has found a new champion. Outspoken molecular biologist Silver argues that only scientists willing to join Prometheus in challenging divine prohibitions will ever deliver on the promise of new genetic technologies. Although despairing of ever expunging spiritual beliefs from liberal democracies altogether, Silver hopes that a truly open and rational public dialogue will expose the folly of continuing to allow religious fundamentalists to impose needless restrictions on scientific research. It particularly galls Silver that such religionists often confuse an ill-informed public by cleverly wrapping their religious objectives in scientific rhetoric. Surprisingly, Silver sees the Christian obstructionists of the Religious Right finding allies among the left-leaning, post-Christian devotees of nature. Both groups recoil from the prospect of using new science to improve human genes or to reengineer the plants and animals humans rely on for food. Both groups, Silver asserts, fail to realize that humans have been productively intervening in natural reproductive processes for millennia--and should now use available tools to do so more aggressively, both to minimize human suffering and to maximize ecological health. The relentlessness with which Silver disputes the views of his opponents will impress many readers--and alienate others. But this book will surely fuel precisely the kind of debate Silver recognizes as essential in a democracy sorting out perplexing scientific possibilities. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 

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Creation, The
An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
by E. O. Wilson (Author)

From Booklist
Famed entomologist, humanist thinker, and cogent writer Wilson issues a forthright call for unity between religion and science in order to save the "creation," or living nature, which is in "deep trouble." Addressing his commonsensical yet ardent discourse to "Dear Pastor," he asks why religious leaders haven't made protecting the creation part of their mission. Forget about life's origins, Wilson suggests, and focus on the fact that while nature achieves "sustainability through complexity," human activities are driving myriad species into extinction, thus depleting the biosphere and jeopardizing civilization. Wilson celebrates individual species, each a "masterpiece of biology," and acutely analyzes the nexus between nature and the human psyche. In the book's frankest passages, he neatly refutes fantasies about humanity's ability to re-create nature's intricate web, and deplores the use of religious belief (God will take care of it) as an impediment to conservation. Wilson's eloquent defense of nature, insights into our resistance to environmental preservation, and praise of scientific inquiry coalesce in a blueprint for a renaissance in biology reminiscent of the technological advances engendered by the space race. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 

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Earth Democracy
Justice, sustainability, and Peace
by Vandana Shiva

A leading voice in the struggle for global justice, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental activist and physicist. In Earth Democracy, Shiva updates the struggles she helped bring to international attention—against genetic food engineering, culture theft, and natural resource privatization-—uncovering their links to the rising tide of fundamentalism, violence against women, and planetary death.

Starting in the 16th century with the initial enclosure of the British commons, Shiva reveals how the commons continue to shrink as more and more natural resources are patented and privatized.  As our ecological sustainability and cultural diversity erode, so too is human life rendered disposable. Through the forces of neoliberal globalization, economic and social exclusion ignite violence across lines of difference, threatening the lives of millions.

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Environmental Ethics
Divergence & Convergence
by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler

This collection of essays and articles surveys multidisciplinary approaches to environmental ethics by leading writers, and provides an historical survey of thought on our responsibility to the environment. It includes non-Western as well as Western religious and cultural perspectives. Readers are encouraged to develop their own environmental ethic by the presentation of a number of differing but viable theories in the readings.

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Ethics for a Finite World
An Essay Concerning a Sustainable Future
by Herschel Elliott (Author)

Herschel Elliott takes traditional environmental ethics to task in this provocative, challenging, and controversial look at the balance between human activity and the environment. His comments on this balance are illustrated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina. He had this to say about the efforts to rebuild: "The whole problem is that the constant population and economic increase can't stand up against natural disasters like this, and until that is addressed, the problem will remain and this will happen again. The constant requests for money is like a band-aid on an open wound, it won't fix it."

This acclaimed philosopher constructs a coherent theory of ethics based on the idea that both self-centered and self-sacrificing behaviors lead to the same end: the total collapse of our environment. Therefore, the first ethical obligation of everyone should be to maintain the endurance and resilience of the Earth's ecosystem. Then, after the environment is secure, ethical attention can be directed towards maintaining the human population at a level that will allow human life to become worth living.
 

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Global: Environmental Ethics
by Louis P. Pojman

Dr. Louis Pojman is Professor of Philosophy at the United States Military Academy. He has a Ph.D. in Religion and Ethics from Union Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Oxford University. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Hamburg. He has taught at Oxford University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi before coming to West Point last year. He has won several Outstanding Teaching Awards and has been the President of the Society for Philosophy of Religion and an Associate Editor for The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is the author of more than 25 books and more than 80 articles.

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How Are We to Live?
Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest
by Peter Singer

Singer suggests that people who take an ethical approach to life often avoid the trap of meaninglessness, finding a deeper satisfaction in what they are doing than those people whose goals are narrower and more self-centered. He spells out what he means by an ethical approach to life and shows that it can bring about significant and far-reaching changes to one's life. How Are We to Live? explores the way in which standard contemporary assumptions about human nature and self-interest have led to a world that is fraught with social and environmental problems. Singer asks whether selfishness is in our genes and concludes that we do not have to accept the bleak view of human nature sometimes believed to be inevitable, given our evolutionary origins.

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Invitation to Environmental Philosophy
Edited by Anthony Weston

Brief, inviting, and provocative, this book is a perfect introduction to the burgeoning field of environmental ethics. It animates the basic questions, tells compelling stories, and offers a range of philosophical responses as complementary--not antagonistic--exploratory strategies vital to this growing topic. The book is built around five individually authored chapters, each a representative contribution by a major author in the field. Each chapter covers a central topic in environmental ethics in a somewhat different style. An epilogue offers both a bibliographical guide to these topics and many related issues and a practical guide to environmental action. An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy is an ideal text for courses in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy and an intriguing and rich supplement to a general ethics course, as well as a bridge into the academic literature in environmental philosophy.

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The Last Refuge
Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, Revised an Updated Edition
by David W. Orr

From Publishers Weekly
In 13 essays, Orr, professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin, critiques what he says is the current Bush administration's lack of environmental policy and calls for a more engaged citizenry. Orr sets the scene by relating a 2001 meeting with noncommittal White House staffers in which he and other leading environmentalists presented an environmental status report, entitled "Common Ground/Common Futures." "The news was delivered," he writes. "But no one was home." The present state of environmental affairs, he says, reflects "an unconstrained managerial and well-armed plutocracy intent on global plunder." Orr advocates a coherent environmental agenda, vigorous public information, restored political leadership and increased emphasis on environmental study in higher education. Specific essays focus on particular figures in the debate: one exposes Bjorn Lomberg, a favorite author of Dick Cheney's, as "scientifically dishonest," while another praises writer Wendell Berry's commitment to agrarian ideals. Perhaps the most informative essay in the collection, entitled "Leverage," examines the meager patchwork of U.S. environmental regulations and the nation's libertarian tendencies. Orr's politics will be familiar to all left-wing readers. There is little originality in his criticisms of the right and its attitude toward natural resources and energy efficiency. Orr's writing is steeped in sometimes utopian antimodern longings for small family farms, ecologically sound urban planning, increased public transportation and ecological diversity. While it's not hard to imagine how these essays might energize a readership committed to Orr's brand of politics, their rhetoric is too repetitive and ponderously moralizing to win wider audiences for their ideas.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 

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Making Peace with the Earth
by Vandana Shiva


In this compelling and rigorously documented exposition, Vandana Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power and shows its devastating environmental impact. Shiva argues that consumerism lubricates the war against the earth and that corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. She takes the reader on a journey through the world's devastated eco-landscape, one of genetic engineering, industrial development and land-grabs in Africa, Asia and South America. She concludes that exploitation of this order is incurring an ecological and economic debt that is unsustainable. Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism.

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What Have We Done?
By John Nolt (Author), Athena Lee Bradley (Author), Mike Knapp (Author), Donald Earl Lambard (Author), Jonathan Scherch (Author)

What Have We Done: The Foundation for Global Sustainability's State of the Bioregion Report for the Upper Tennessee Valley and the Southern Appalachian Mountains, is a comprehensive assessment of the ecological health of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Southern Appalachian Mountains. A synoptic story of a land and people-a bioregional narrative-it paints, for the first time, a large-scale picture of what we have done to this land and to ourselves.

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