🌍 Environment

The sailor who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch tells the story of plastic's invasion of the world's oceans — and makes the case for why it matters.

How the bottled water industry convinced the world to pay for something it was already getting for free — and what that tells us about commodity culture and environmental justice.

Miami, Jakarta, Mumbai, Lagos — the seas are rising, and the cities built at the water's edge are already running out of time.

The definitive account of how the American West built a civilization on borrowed water — and the reckoning that has been building ever since.

The insect apocalypse is real, it's already happening, and almost nobody is paying attention.

A Georgia writer's memoir interweaves her hardscrabble childhood with an elegy for the longleaf pine forests that once covered the American Southeast.

Three interwoven stories set in Appalachian Virginia — a love letter to predators, insects, and the intricate web of a mountain ecosystem.

Klein's argument that climate change isn't a problem to be solved within the existing economic system — it's a crisis created by it.

McKibben's follow-up to The End of Nature — this time admitting we've already lost the fight to prevent climate change and asking what comes next.

A rigorous, readable account of how climate change works and what it will cost us — written when we still had time to act.

Why did Easter Island's civilization collapse? And what does it tell us about our own?

The first book to explain climate change to a general audience — written in 1989, it reads like it was written yesterday.

The 1976 UN-commissioned warning about soil degradation that the world largely ignored.

How European colonial empires restructured the natural world — an environmental history of the plants, animals, and ecosystems caught in the machinery of empire.

A science journalist travels through deep time to investigate Earth's five mass extinctions — and finds uncomfortable mirrors for the present.

The most comprehensive and unflinching account of what climate change will actually do to human civilization — chapter by devastating chapter.

Elizabeth Kolbert travels the world documenting the sixth mass extinction as it happens — and finds humanity's fingerprints everywhere.

Jonathan Safran Foer investigates the animal agriculture industry and confronts the question every meat-eater eventually faces: can you know this and keep eating animals?

A rigorous, hopeful catalogue of the 100 most effective solutions to climate change — ranked by impact, costed out, and ready to implement.

The book that launched the modern environmental movement — still urgent sixty years on.