Earth Day Booklist
The first Earth Day was proclaimed on April 22, 1970 by one of its principal founders, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Already frustrated by the attitudes of big business, Senator Nelson, as the chairman of the White House Conference on Small Business, wisely noted that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around." He became greatly influenced by John McConnell, a grassroots organizer from San Francisco and Harvard graduate student, Denis Hayes. He asked the latter to organize nationwide events on college and public school campuses that would bring awareness to the environmental crises facing the world. As a result many environmental and conservation organizations were born and the Environmental Protection Agency was created.
We still have a long way to go. While some things have improved, we still have much to do. Economic interests continue to bring enormous pressure on the environment i.e., the BP oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the current nuclear crisis in Japan.
To learn more you might like to take out some of the following titles available in the branch libraries:
Rachel Carson
Houghton Mifflin, 2002
Sarah Callard, et al.
Carlton, 2010
Constructed Climates: a Primer on Urban Environments
William G. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Power Trip: the Story of America's Love Affair with Energy
Amanda Little
Harper Perennial, 2010
The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth
John Bellamy Foster, et al.
Monthly Review Press, 2010
Lights Out!: Ten Myths About (and Real Solutions to) America's Energy Crisis
Spencer Abraham
St. Martin's Press, 2010
Brian Black
Greenwood, 2010
David Archer
Princeton University Press, 2010
Written in Water: Messages of Hope for the Earth's Most Precious Resource
Irena Salina, ed.
National Geographic Society, 2010
Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps
Peter Douglas Ward
Basic Books, 2010
Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can do to Save Them
Ted Danson
Rodale, 2011
Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food
Paul Greenberg
Penguin Press, 2010
Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution
Caroline Fraser
Metropolitan Books, 2009
Soul of a Lion: One Woman's Quest to Rescue Africa's Wildlife Refugees
Barbara Bennett
National Geographic Society, 2010
100 Heartbeats: the Race to Save the Earth's Most Endangered Species
Jeff Corwin
Rodale, 2009
Stolen World: a Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery
Jennis Erin Smith
Crown Publishers, 2011
Winged Obsession: the Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler
Jessica Speart
William Morrow, 2011
Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives
Thomas French
Hyperion, 2010
Driven to Extinction: the Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity
Richard G. Pearson
Sterling, 2011
Second Nature: the Inner Lives of Animals
Jonathan P. Balcombe
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
The Great White Bear: a Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear
Kieran Mulvaney
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011
For further reading and research, you can access GreenFILE and the Left Index, two EBSCO databases, at select library locations.
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Comments
This is a great list! I
Submitted by Trevor (not verified) on April 21, 2011 - 5:29pm
Constructed Climates
Submitted by Will Wilson (not verified) on April 27, 2011 - 6:33pm