Four Of Our Favourite Sustainable Titles
3 October 2023
To commemorate Libraries Week becoming Green Libraries Week we’re celebrating four of our favourite environmental/sustainable-living titles.
Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong
Published in CD and MP3 CD audiobook in October 2022.
For most of human history nature was held to be sacred, and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all the world's cultures and religious traditions. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the seventeenth century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways.
Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world. She passionately believes that our religious heritage can teach us how to recover a spiritual bond with nature. Each of the book's ten chapters concentrates on a theme that has been central to the world's religious traditions - from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence - and offers practical steps to help us develop a different mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.
Sacred Nature is a book about 'deep ecology': it is about the most profound connections between humans and the natural world. It speaks to anyone interested in our relationship with the natural world, worried about the destruction of our environment, and searching for new ways of thinking to accompany the political action needed to save our planet.
Rewilding The Urban Soul by Claire Dunn
Published in large print, CD and MP3 CD audiobook and uLibrary eAudiobook in December 2021.
Once upon a time, a burnt-out Claire Dunn spent a year living off the grid in a wilderness survival program. Yet love and the possibilities of human connection drew her back to the city, where she soon found herself as overscheduled, addicted to her phone, and lost in IKEA as everyone else. Given all the city offered - comfort, convenience, community, and opportunity - she wanted to stay. But to do so, she'd have to learn how to rewild her own urban soul.
Now, Claire swims in city rivers, forages in the suburbs, and explores many other practices to connect to the world around her. Rewilding The Urban Soul is a field guide to being at one with nature - wherever you are.
How To Avoid A Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
Published in CD and MP3 CD audiobook in April 2022.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.
He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions-suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise.
As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.
The House Of Light by Julia Green
Published in CD and MP3 CD audiobook and uLibrary eAudiobook in September 2019.
For most of human history nature was held to be sacred, and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all the world's cultures and religious traditions. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the seventeenth century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways.
Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world. She passionately believes that our religious heritage can teach us how to recover a spiritual bond with nature. Each of the book's ten chapters concentrates on a theme that has been central to the world's religious traditions - from gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence - and offers practical steps to help us develop a different mindset to reconnect with nature and rekindle our sense of the sacred.
Sacred Nature is a book about 'deep ecology': it is about the most profound connections between humans and the natural world. It speaks to anyone interested in our relationship with the natural world, worried about the destruction of our environment, and searching for new ways of thinking to accompany the political action needed to save our planet.