I recently compiled a list of materials for a friend about the era in which humanity’s presence (and deleterious effect) on the planet we inhabit seems almost beyond comprehension. Here we go:
Books, reports
Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (1972 report co-authored by IIED founder Barbara Ward)
The Limits to Growth (controversial but much-cited report, also 1972)
Histories / summaries
Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (essays)
Global Environmental History: 10,000 BC to AD 2000 (I.G. Simmons)
Climate Change in the Anthropocene (Kieran Ohara)
Biodiversity, food systems/big ag, speciesism
Biodiversity Loss: The Threat to Life on Earth (Anna Wainer, Odeta Grabauskaitė & Miriam Kennet, eds)
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Elizabeth Kolbert)
Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters (Jennifer Clapp)
Animal Liberation (Peter Singer)
This is Vegan Propaganda (And Other Lies the Meat industry Tells You) (Ed Winters)
Political / economic
Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism (George Monbiot, Peter Hutchison)
chomsky.info (I used to be a fan of Noam Chomsky, but now think he was as much a tool of the imperialist establishment as anything else – cf. Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously with Noam Chomsky and the “licensed critic” (George Orwell))
In The Grip Of Necrocapitalism: The Making And Breaking Of A Psychonomy (George Tsakraklides)
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Eduardo Galeano)
Articles, blogs & journals
Defining the Anthropocene (Simon L. Lewis & Mark A. Maslin)
Decolonising the Anthropocene: The Mytho-Politics of Human Mastery (Karsten A. Schulz)
On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene (Heather Davis, Zoe Todd)
https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/decolonising-the-anthropocene/ (Audra Mitchell)
Decolonizing the Anthropocene, Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropocene (Noah Theriault)
Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: Land is the Key to the Transformation of Society (George Monbiot)
Field Guide to the Anthropocene (Jason Anthony’s weekly essay/letter exploring the fundamental changes we’ve made and are making to the Earth)
Solutions-focused
Biocultural Heritage: Protecting interconnected nature and culture for a just, sustainable and resilient world (Krystyna Swiderska et al.)
Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (Audrey Tang et al.)
Drawdown, The Book (Project Drawdown)
Natural Solutions to Climate Change (The Nature Conservancy)
Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet (Dieter Helm)
Caring for the Earth: A strategy for sustainable living [PDF version] (IUCN)
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (Al Gore)
Decolonising Ecological Knowledge (service design by Sakshi Mathur)
NEON – New Economy Organisers Network
From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World (Duncan Green)
Community Weaving Framework (Fabian Pfortmüller, Sascha Mombartz, Nico Luchsinger)
Solutions Journalism Directory
Rev21: Revolution isn’t just possible; it’s inevitable (founded by Roger Hallam and Robin Boardman)
Reasons for hope?
Humankind: A Hopeful History (Rutger Bregman)
The Green Party (making hope normal again)
And last but by no means least:
The New Happy (book and newsletter by Stephanie Harrison)
See also: my post on alternative news sources