10 Environmental Books You Should Read Over Holiday Vacation

Published 50 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was an immediate call to action for everyday citizens to rally and become civil activists. As The New York Times writes of the book, Carson “made a powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature would in turn poison humankind.”

Her research, more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides on the planet, engaged housewives and scientists, naturalists and farmers to look at progress in a whole new light.

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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water was written in 1986 and is still a landmark book surveying water use in the American Southwest. Environmental journalist Marc Reisner interviewed hundreds of people about the Southwest and learned the history of the region’s water infrastructure, quickly deducing that more water was being pulled out of the West’s waterways than could be naturally replenished.

Penguin books sums it up best as “a tale of rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion-dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disaster.”

Issues we are still fighting in 2012.

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In The Turquoise Ledge, Silko draws on her Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican, and European ancestry to create this thick, spiritually provocative memoir of desert life and its close bonds with animals, and environmental destruction.

Published in 2010 and written like a very private journal, Silko recounts her earthly interpretations, whether through painting or hikes looking for turquoise, where she searches for a quiet world, bereft of people.

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From fashion victim to educated consumer, in Overdressed Elizabeth Cline takes us on a retail journey through the factories of China to the streets of New York City. Cline has been equated to “the Michael Pollan of fashion,” pioneering the idea of how fast fashion disrupts not only the fashion industry but the environment.

Think you know where your clothes come from? Wait until you read this book.

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When it comes to considering the food we eat, it’s hard to take it all in at once. We are overwhelmed. Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook has decided to make the information easier to digest by putting the focus on the tomato. Besides the obvious information about tomato fields and the spraying of herbicides and pesticides (you knew that was coming), in Tomatoland Estabrook reveals the huge human cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry with a relentless drive for the cheap fruit fostering a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States.

Photo: Amazon