The IM Book Club features our favourite reads. All the authors have appeared on the Inside Ideas podcast with Marc Buckley – so just click on the links for the inside track from the authors.
For younger children, aged 6-12 years, we recommend checking out the SDG Book Club.
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The Good Garden: How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard
Chris McLaughlinChris McLaughlin, is your goto person for anything and everything relating to gardening. Her latest book: The Good Garden: How to Nurture Pollinators, Soil, Native Wildlife, and Healthy Food—All in Your Own Backyard, is the perfect guide for the green fingered, as well as those twiddling in that direction. The associate editor for From Scratch Magazine, Chris has been gardening and studying plants for over forty years, writing nine books along the way, with her latest brimming with all the tricks and tips you will need to grow the sustainable garden of your dreams.
Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage
Felix Dodds + Chris SpenceGlobal climate conferences are typically met with scepticism by a public struggling to see them as anything more than a bastion of empty promises. But a new book asks us all to look again, at the detail, and specifically to the people shifting the needle of progress towards the symbiotic interests of people and planet. In a book about some of the achievements driven by scientists, politicians, diplomats, activists and businesspeople, Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage offers a much needed new perspective on the real impact being made when governments get together to thrash out deals that can deliver change.
Sundressed: Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothes
Lucianne TontiIn Sundressed, ‘Tonti travels the world to showcase producers who are reforming the industry, from Mongolian goatherders, to Mulberry groves in China, and American hemp farms. Many of these innovations begin in the fields, with the cotton crops that will ultimately be spun into a soft T-shirt or the sheep’s wool than will be knitted into a cozy sweater. Fiber farmers are taking a page from the regenerative agriculture movement, giving back to the land as they tend it. Meanwhile, further down the supply chain, top designers are working with Indigenous communities to relearn the artistry of sewing—and reward them financially. And global brands, including Levi’s, are working to produce a pair of jeans that can withstand dozens of washes without any sign of wear. Tonti also shows readers how accessible sustainable fashion can be’.
The Creativity Factor
Garry PrattIn his book The Creativity Factor Gary Pratt provides the scientific and practical evidence on how to effectively tap into your entrepreneurial creativity. With advice on the mechanisms, habits, and techniques that develop this skill, this uniquely holistic guide should help give you a newfound awareness of your creative potential and how it can lead to business success.
The book explores how walking impacts all of this and once you’ve read it you’ll struggle to keep your walking shoes off.
Catch up with what Gary had to say on my podcast for more from the pages of: The Creativity Factor.
Regenerative Leadership
Laura Storm + Giles HutchinsA guidebook on how to implement regenerative business models and practices, the book presents innovative new styles of leadership that are designed to support ecosystems, the economy, and the well-being of staff. It is packed full of practical tools and methods that leaders can start using today to future proof their organisations.
The Blue Revolution – Hunting, Harvesting, and Farming Seafood in the Information Age
Nicholas P. SullivanThe global seafood industry has undergone a serious transformation in recent decades in a bid to secure a sustainable future for itself. It is an ongoing journey writer Nicholas P. Sullivan explores in his wonderfully researched new book.
“A lot of the perceptions that people had about the state of fisheries are based on things that were happening in the 1990s where there was incredible over-fishing and the depletion of some iconic stocks like the Atlantic cod and the Norwegian salmon farming, which had all kinds of negative environmental effects,” Sullivan said. “But in the last 20 years or so there’s been a major shift: a behavioural shift, and policy shift, towards more sustainable and restorative wild-captured and farming techniques – and I wanted to tell this story.”
This book will speak to anyone in the industry, as well as environmentalists, and all lovers of seafood.
Green Swans – The Coming Boom In Regenerative Capitalism
John ElkingtonIn his latest book, Elkington – the man known as the ‘Godfather of Sustainability’ – presents solutions for how we can transform global systems to make them better serve the needs of people and the planet. To move towards this brighter future he calls for the roll out of Green Swans, solutions which are designed to ‘deliver exponential progress in the form of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation’. The book lays out the critical Green Swans Elkington believes can trigger an unstoppable paradigm shift towards regenerative economies.
“If you do it well, for example – in regenerating a city, part of what you’re doing is rebuilding the physical structure, but you’re also putting in educational systems, natural environment systems which helps sponge up floods and clean up the air and things like that. You’re then creating a system which is regenerative in multiple dimensions, and that is what I think increasingly we need to do,” he told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas.
The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing your own Food
Justin RhodesWhat this book offers is inspiration and practical insight, whatever your motivation. Whether it is to boost health, save or make money, or you just want to feel a closer connection to the food you eat, this book will walk that journey with you. The Rooted Life builds on the groundbreaking work Rhodes has been doing through his online resource, Abundant Permaculture. Packed with permaculture articles, educational films and business tips and tricks, it has long been the go-to place for people passionate about growing their own food, whatever stage they’re at.
The hit YouTube homesteader has been using permaculture methods on his 75 acre family farm near Asheville NC for decades, and there are some amazing pictures in the book showing what day-to-day life looks like for this family. But don’t worry if you are not looking out onto 75 acres, this book is full of imaginative ways you can transform any space to grow your own food.
The Web Of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
Jeremy LentJeremy Lent explores some of the biggest questions: Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? In a narrative which connects findings from areas including modern systems thinking, neuroscience and indigenous wisdom. It is a truly remarkable book, which the author hopes can inspire a shift to a more integrated worldview.
Speaking about his hopes for the book on the Marc Buckley podcast, Lent said: “My biggest hope really is a pretty large one, which is to really help to lay the foundations for a fundamentally different worldview that could lead us to an absolutely different future for humanity on this earth. So – it is a pretty big vision to hope that a book can do that, but basically we have been living, for the last few hundred years, according to this particular paradigm – this worldview of disconnection. It is a worldview that has led to all kinds of positive things such as the development of science, and incredible improvements in many elements of the human experience, in understanding of hygiene, and improvements in technology whereby you and I can speak to each other from thousands of miles away. All kinds of positive things have arisen from it so this is not to disparage elements of our worldview but it’s been a worldview of disconnection that is driving our civilisation right now toward a precipice, and driving many of us in our own lived experience to a place of isolation, alienation and a sense of meaninglessness in our own lives. We absolutely have to shift the direction of where we’re going and my hope for this book is that it lays a very solid and intellectually rigorous, coherent foundation for this different worldview of interconnectedness. That, if enough of a critical mass of people can begin to absorb and start to instil into their own lives, we actually still have the possibility of shifting humanity’s trajectory.”
The Life You Can Save
PROFESSOR PETER SINGERThe Life You Can Save has been a guide in showing millions of people how to take actions that are powerful in transforming the lives of people thousands of miles away. The book is all about effective altruism: doing the most good. And it is much more than book, The Life You Can Save has mobilised a global movement achieving outcomes that can be characterised by the amelioration of human lives. “We have a whole movement now called effective altruism that talks about how to be the most effective altruists. To not only give away some of your money and do some good but really make sure you are getting the best value for everything that you give,” author Peter Singer told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas.
Patterns of Connection
Fritjof CapraPatterns of Connection contains essential essays from five decades of Capra’s life, which he says provide ‘not only an account of my intellectual journey but also an account of the various social movements that I encountered and became part of’. The book opens with a detailed account of his experiences in the 1960s, a time which saw him study eastern philosophy and take psychedelics, and a time which he says were the ‘great formative years of my life’.
“Patterns of Connection is a collection of essays with a narrative that interweaves the essays, and gives the historical and philosophical context. And it is really the story about how my thinking evolved over five decades. So in this narrative I talk about all my books so when you read this one, you get all the references because it’s really an account of my journey,” he told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas.
Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition
Shalanda H. BakerShalanda, recently appointed Joe Biden’s new deputy director for energy justice at the U.S. Department of Energy, argues in her latest book that the transformation of the energy system is a civil rights issue and offers practical steps to upend the energy sector’s unequal power dynamics. Shalanda talks about the inequities of the U.S. energy system, including the fact that nearly half of Black and Latinx households experience energy insecurity; and her personal connection to this issue as an energy-justice advocate, lawyer, and queer woman of colour, including her family’s experience in a polluted Texas oil town.
The Most Important Comic Book on Earth: stories to save the world
Paul GoodenoughYoko Ono, Jane Goodall, and Ricky Gervais are among the hundreds of activists, celebrities, scientists, comedians and others across the planet to create stories for Rewriting Extinction, which has produced this amazing comic.
“We have seven beneficiary charities, which are Greenpeace, The World Land Trust, Born Free, Rewild, The Wildlife Trust in the UK, Reserva and Rewilding Europe,” said Paul Goodenough, Rewriting Extinction founder on Inside Ideas. “And the reason those seven charities were chosen was specifically as each of them has their own speciality, their own thing they work in, that links up to a plan that actually restores not just the ecosystems and the biodiversity, but also helps with climate change too.”
Sex Robots & Vegan Meat
By Jenny KleemanThe award-winning film-maker and journalist, Jenny Kleeman, was one of the first guests on the Inside Ideas podcast with Marc Buckley. She spoke to Marc on the eve of the release of the book, which has just the best title of any book you are likely to pick up this year And the content is every bit as good as Jenny takes you on a journey through the ever changing realities of what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world. One where you can ‘eat meat without killing animals, have the ideal sexual relationship without compromise, and have the perfect death without suffering’. Jenny goes beyond these in her exploration of the other ways human nature is likely to change in the years ahead.
A World of Three Zeros
Professor Muhammad YunusNobel Peace Prize Winner, creator of microcredit and social business, Professor Muhammad Yunus, writes about the economics that can deliver zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions.
Flames of Extinction
JOHN PICKRELLThe first book to tell the stories of Australia’s record-setting fires, focusing on the wild animals and plants that will be forever changed. It tells the story of the scientists, wildlife rehabilitators, and community members who came together to save wildlife and protect them in the future.
Tomorrow’s People and New Technology
Professor Felix DoddsAn antidote to predictions that technology is at the gates and ready to destroy all before it, this book is a glass half full look at the future. It explores the impact the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have on peoples’ lives by 2030 and asks how technologies, including AI, biotechnology, IoT, and big data will come to shape every aspect of it. ‘We’re trying to help people think ‘wow’, the author told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas, adding ‘the book is trying to make the future not seem scary. There are so many books out there that talk about the technology advance and it being a scary world, and talk about the challenges as opposed to the positives.’
The Physics of Climate Change
In his groundbreaking new book, The Physics of Climate Change, best-selling author, Professor Lawrence M. Krauss, examines the various predictions being made about a planet plagued by rising temperatures and reveals the data-backed projections countries need to acknowledge and address, and those which are a bit more speculative.
Sitopia
by Carolyn SteelCarolyn Steel was the second guest on Inside Ideas with Marc Buckley. She was a brilliant guest so it is no surprise Sitopia is every bit as engaging and enlightening. In Sitopia Carolyn explores how food can safe the world and at every stage she says she uses food as a ‘lens to explore the origins and dilemmas of our current situation’, which is being shaped by issues such as climate change, pollution, deforestation, and antibiotic resistance. And Carolyn looks at the ways food choices will ultimately dictate how successful we are in overcoming these challenges.
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
by Sasha SaganSasha’s first book, inspired in part by the work of her parents, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, is an exploration of the marvels of nature, as revealed by science, which require no faith in order to be believed. The book is an exercise in skepticism without cynicism, told through memoir and social history. It is a remarkable read, which Kirkus Reviews called ‘profound, elegantly written ruminations on the exquisite splendors of life’.
How To Be A Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet
Sophie EganIn How To Be A Conscious Eater, Sophie Egan asks three key questions about food: Is it good for me? Is it good for others? Is it good for the planet? And she explores these questions about the food we eat that ‘comes from the ground’, ‘from animals’, ‘from factories’, and from ‘kitchens’. Talking to Marc Buckley about the book, Egan said: “Eat fruits and vegetables, it’s that simple. They don’t all have to be organic, they don’t all have to be super-fresh and perfect. There’s so much that complicates things that I was really trying to help almost re-invigorate our reliance on our own common sense, on what we feel is right and reasonable, but we’ve been told is wrong by a million conflicting sources – you can search the internet and get any answer. So part of this is really just saying, ‘here’s what the science actually tells us and therefore what you should do about it.”
Planet Palm: How Palm Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World
Jocelyn C. ZuckermanspotThe award-winning, Brooklyn-based writer, Jocelyn C. Zuckerman, joined Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas to talk about her first book, Planet Palm: How Palm Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World. “The oil palm is indigenous to west and central Africa so it grows best at 10 degrees to the north and south of the equator, which is the same latitude Indonesia and Malaysia are on,” she said. “The problem is that it’s that exact swathe of the planet that is home to our tropical rainforests. Which, as we know, are massively important for sequestering carbon, and are home to our most important biodiversity. Much of it also sits on top of peatlands, organic matter that has accumulated over millennia, and the companies burn that, chop down the forests and then burn it, so it’s carbon flowing into the atmosphere for years and years. Back at the turn of the century no-one was thinking about carbon emissions or biodiversity loss – it wasn’t on our radars so we’re learning as we go and hopefully it’s not too late.” In the book she explains how it all went wrong and what the next chapter might hold.
MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us
Dr Parag KhannaIf we know the southern hemisphere is going to suffer more from climate change than the northern hemisphere, the question is: what are we going to do about it? In his new book the best-selling author, Dr Parag Khanna, tackles this question and explores who the winners and losers might be in the climate geography lottery, and whether there is a way everyone can walk away with the winning ticket. He writes about four possible scenarios in the book, each depicting a different future for the world. The only one anyone would want he calls Northern Lights, which would involve new settlements being built that are circular, use renewable power, hydroponic agriculture, waste water treatment, rain water collection, and all of the things that would prevent a repeat of past mistakes in terms of mass urbanisation.
“This is fundamentally a book about geography, like all my other books. It’s not about one geography but geographies of resources, people, borders and infrastructure, bringing those together in a dynamic way that actually benefits us,” he told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas.
Work Better. Save The Planet
Lisa WhitedIn her book Lisa Whited reveals the antidote for making the workplace a source of renewal, rather than a place that depletes and depresses people. “Can you imagine leaving work and feeling awesome because you had such a great experience, your interactions with your colleagues, you felt like you were of service, you made a difference, you were working with your strengths – I mean wow. Instead of depletion you get renewal.” It is a book that shows how the world of work can become more flexible and better aligned with the needs of people.
Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe
Maria RodaleMaria Rodale is a renowned author and activist who has spent her career in the family publishing business: Rodale Inc, which published such classics as: The Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore and Onward, by Howard Schultz. In Organic Manifesto, Rodale advocates for focusing more on how we grow things rather than what we eat, and she outlines the cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment. “There are two ways to look at food: there is what you ingest and how it is grown. And how it is grown is more important to everyone than what you actually eat,” Maria explains. “What you eat is personal, and that is about personal liberty and freedom. Some want vegan, and that’s great, others want meat, and that’s great. But how food is grown is collective, it is a communal thing. Chemicals affect all our health, whether you eat that food or not, chemicals disable the soil from storing carbon which impacts all of us. So as a movement we need to shift our paradigm to thinking who cares what you’re eating, let’s care about how we are growing and let’s care about the impact the way we grow things has on all of us.”
Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment
Allan SavoryAllan Savory says mismanagement of our resources is one of the main reasons for the major problems facing humanity. Recognised as the father of holistic management – which takes a systems thinking approach to resource management, the co-founder of the Savory Institute, a global movement of regenerative farmers and land managers, describes in the book his efforts to find workable solutions people can implement to overcome many of the problems besetting communities and businesses today.
Diet for a Small Planet
Frances Moore LappéThe three-million bestseller Diet for a Small Planet has – for decades – taught people in America about the plant-based food solutions that can support the health of people and planet. This new, and much anticipated 50th-anniversary edition has new features on how food systems can help restore ‘our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy’.
“The sense of urgency and the more rich and various reasons why – for health reasons, ecological reasons, economic reasons, and climate reasons that a plant-centred diet is one way to make a significant dent in this is because our food system contributes 37% of greenhouse gas emissions and among those is methane from cows – which packs a particularly strong climate punch so there is extra gain by limiting beef consumption,” the author told Marc Buckley.
A Small Farm Future
To create the small farming world of the future he envisions, farmer and author Chris Smaje says it is time to ditch destructive agriculture practices. In place of the behemoth global farming systems and networks currently destroying soils and leaving hundreds of millions of people malnourished, Chris wants to see a shift to A Small Farm Future where local economies are the cornerstone of a resilient and thriving world.
Diet for a Hot Planet
Anna LappéIn her book Diet for a Hot Planet, author and leading expert on global food systems, Anna Lappé warns that without radical change to food systems run away climate change is inevitable. Lappé takes the reader on a journey from food systems being the problem to food as a solution. She says we cannot ‘miss the food systems opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’. “Even if we got everything right in every other sector, even if every one of us had solar panels on our homes, and we stop fracking and we stop drilling for new oil; even if we got everything else right, we would still blow our carbon emissions,” adds Lappé.
Regenerative Business
Carol SanfordCarol Sanford is the author of five best-selling books and Senior Fellow of Social Innovation at Babson College. Her titles are required business school reading at Stanford and Harvard. In The Regenerative Business Sanford puts business at the heart of regeneration, though she questispotifyons some current interpretations of what regeneration means. “My grandfather taught me about the word regeneration, and he knew a version of it in Mohawk, but he taught me to understand that regeneration was more about revelation. I mean that in two ways. One is that you can reveal something that can’t be seen, kind of like a detective using their mind in a different way. But you can also reveal something in you that you didn’t know. The word reveal is closer but people have translated regeneration now in the popular press and their word means restore, renew – they’re taking everything that was already popular – biomimicry, circular, sustainability and they are renaming it that.”
Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers
Mark Shepard“Restoration agriculture is more like describing a process than a prescription. It’s not do this, do that, more: these are the ecological principles that we’re working with, this is how this seems to work in this area, if it’s hot, cold, dry, wet, all of those things affect how the system will work,” Mark Shepard told Marc Buckley. “It is also a little bit more deliberate than a rewilding in that we intentionally set up the ecological ecosystem that’s native to the area. We use genetics that have already been improved for yield, pest and disease resistance, and then arrange them in orderly patterns based on managing the rainfall and potential run-off that will hit the site.”
He added: “So our interactions with the system more closely mimic the natural disturbances that would manage and maintain those systems in the wild. So we try to mimic fire, we mimic grazing, that sort of thing. It is a little bit more deliberate and intentional than a rewilding. But similar principles apply, in that once we set up the system, it’s a semi-natural system.”
For more from the pages of Restoration Agriculture click on the links.
Overtourism: Lessons for a Better Future
Dr Martha Honey and Kelsey FrenkielThe book charts a path towards sustainable tourism, one that is underpinned by a commitment to people, planet, and prosperity. The authors say lessons can be learned from Covid to come up with a better future for the tourism industry. The book includes 13 guiding principles and a roadmap that are designed to help it move beyond the pandemic.
“We never imagined that, in the middle of writing this book, tourism would halt completely and I think in 2020 there was only something like 400 million international arrivals, which is still a huge number, but for a time it was halted completely, obviously brought on by a global health crisis,” Kelsey Frenkiel told Marc Buckley on Inside Ideas. “I think what we saw was that Covid 19 triggered new and unique challenges for tourism and it actually proved to us that this information was more timely than ever. So we took that opportunity to frame the book, talk about the pandemic and how this information could be used.”
Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries: New Tools to End Hunger
Dr Katie MartinIn the US, food banks and pantries provide billions of meals a year to people in need. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin offers an inspiring new paradigm for tackling hunger, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed. The key is shifting our focus from a lack of food to strategies that build empathy, equity, and political will. Martin shares solutions in a warm, engaging style, with simple steps that anyone working or volunteering at a food bank or pantry can take today. Solutions range from providing client choice, where individuals select their own food with dignity, to offering job training programs and joining the fight for a living wage. As Martin writes, it takes more than food to end hunger. Picking up this insightful, lively book is a great first step.
Building Community Food Webs
KEN METEROne of America’s most renowned food system analysts explores the civic networks being led by ‘grassroots food and farming leaders’ in the U.S. that are working to deliver healthier, more equitable food systems that can combat hunger.
A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation
A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy – identifies a bold new research and policy agenda and provides implementable options for coastal communities.
Sustainable Action: Overcoming the Barriers
Christian BergThe book Sustainable Action – Overcoming the Barriers was accepted as the new report to the Club of Rome. In it, Christian, who featured on the Inside Ideas podcast, gives a comprehensive account of barriers to sustainability and suggests action principles for sustainability which support actors in contributing to the realization of the SDGs.
Untethered: Overcome Distraction Build Healthy Digital Health and Reconnect With Life
Sini NinkovicSpeaking about his book to Marc Buckley on the Inside Ideas podcast, Sini Ninkovic said: “I think this book talks about technology as a very positive tool that comes with one downside, that it allows us to use it unconsciously. When Americans are asked how much time they think they spend unconsciously with their devices, it’s about 50% of their time. So if we are connected for 12 hours, that’s over six hours being spent unconsciously. If that was turned into action, into alignments with our ourselves, just imagine. One can become a millionaire in this country with a few years of six hours a day.”
He added: “There is a lot of wasted potential and that wasted potential can be used for a lot of good.”
THE elea WAY
Professor Vanina Farber and Dr Peter WuffliThe book offers practical advice on how to best integrate entrepreneurship and capital for impact and innovation by using elea’s philanthropic investing approach to fight absolute poverty with entrepreneurial means as an example.
The Creative Mindset
Jeff DeGraffThe Creative Mindset, brings six creativity skills to everyone and is now available. On Inside Ideas, Jeff said: “Everyone is creative. We are just creative in different ways and in a wide variety of situations. Believing you are creative is the first step to mastering a creative mindset. Once you do that, you can make innovation happen anywhere and anytime.”
Human Business
Professor Thomas JuliWritten in German, the book argues for the return of the human in the digital age. During the Corona period, we learned to appreciate technology. Thanks to the internet, we were still connected to the outside world, video conferences and online seminars shot up like mushrooms. But can we still be human in the digital age? Or is digitization taking over our lives?
The book explains how human business is a focus on people – be it employees, entrepreneurs, customers or the social environment. That it stands for a new, shared sense of responsibility and a corporate culture characterised by trust and respect.
Listen to Thomas talking about the book on Inside Ideas.
