A Cursory Reading List

I was recently asked by several people at a presentation we hosted here in Roseburg to provide them with a reading list of books that would touch upon subjects such as Transition, Permaculture, urban agriculture and community gardens, resource scarcity, environmental issues, and activism. I have done so on a public forum so others who were not at the gathering will be able to access this list, as well as add on certain works they think may have relevance to the subjects below.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and is comprised mostly of the works that I am able to produce off the top of my head; they are also, therefore, those which had the greatest impact on me when I read them. A couple of them I have not read, but find that they are so relevant to the subject that they may appeal to someone else with the time to read them!

There are links to the books' Amazon pages, but that does not mean I expect people to purchase them from the Web! Check to see if your local used bookstore doesn't have a copy, and if not, they may be willing to order one for you.

I may put up descriptions of the different books in the next few days, but barring that, I will say that all of these books are very crucial and well worth the read. I would, however, recommend The Transition Handbook, What We Leave Behind (and other works by Derrick Jensen), Masanobu Fukuoka (the Japanese godfather of Permaculture, or "do-nothing" farming), David Orr, Wendell Berry, and Bill McKibben as the best "thinking" books in this whole set.

Happy reading!

The Transition Movement and Community Change:
The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins
The Transition Timeline, by Shaun Chamberlain
Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change, by David Holmgren
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben

Permaculture:
Permaculture, A Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren

Gardening and Urban Agriculture:
Guerilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey
The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Lawn Into A Garden and Your Neighborhood Into A Community, by Heather Coburn Flores
Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times, by Steve Solomon

Food Culture and Food Politics:
The Food Revolution, by John Robbins
The Unsettling of America: Essays in Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
What Are People For?: Essays, by Wendell Berry
The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, by Gene Logsdon
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan (Basically an up-to-date synthesis of W. Berry)
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

Ecoliteracy and Environmental Issues:
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting
My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, by Chellis Glendinning
A Language Older than Words, by Derrick Jensen
You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet, by Thomas Kostigen

Waste and Sustainability:
The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, by David Orr
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
What We Leave Behind, by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay

Peak Oil and Resource Scarcity:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Kunstler
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, by Richard Heinberg
The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg
Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak, by Kenneth Deffeyes

Water Issues:
Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, by Maude Barlow
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, by Vandana Shiva
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Mark Reisner