Reading List
George Monbiot
Journalist and Environmental Campaigner
George Monbiot read zoology at Oxford and began in investigative journalism, reporting from West Papua for his first book Poisoned Arrows. He has written a Guardian column for decades, alongside a run of books arguing that environmental problems are really political ones: Heat on emissions, Feral on rewilding and what Britain has lost, Regenesis on feeding people without wrecking the land. He argues in public and changes his mind in public.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy · 2007 · Fiction
“If I were to compile an environmental reading list for anyone, the first book I would give them to read would be The Road because that is the Ground Zero of environmentalism. It imagines the extreme scenario of losing everything. The consequences are conveyed with McCarthy’s brilliant sparseness and starkness, and his total refusal to offer hope where there is no hope.” — via Interview, September 2017
Doughnut Economics
Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
“Raworth rejects the old circular flow diagrams that are central to mainstream economics. She argues that we need to show that we depend on energy inputs and materials from the natural world, for example, which circular flow diagrams don’t demonstrate. And we need to show all the different spheres—state, commons, household and market—and how they interact with each other.” — via Interview, September 2017
What About Me?
by Paul Verhaeghe
“I suppose that Paul Verhaeghe adds another piece of the puzzle by discussing how neoliberalism manifests itself on an individual level, in terms of our identity.” — via Interview, September 2017
The Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein
“Naomi Klein attributes the most succinct formulation of the shock doctrine to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school.” — via Interview, September 2017
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
“You can take Piketty’s argument a little further and say that patrimonial capital breeds patrimonial politics. It creates a class of people who cannot ordinarily be displaced by democracy because they are able to buy their way back into power through our unreformed political-funding arrangements, the use of dark money, funding think-tanks, social media astroturfing, and sock puppetry.” — via Interview, September 2017