The Best Six Books on Low-Carbon Living

by Jules Pretty
|
6 books
What is the good life, and how might it prevent the climate and biodiversity crises and, at the same time, make us happier? This is the beginning of an end. And it is a good thing. Never has the modern affluent world achieved so much. Never have its side effects been so destructive to the planet and to people’s health. And dramatic changes will happen soon, whether we choose them first or they choose us. My 2023 book, The Low-Carbon Good Life, is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises of climate, growing inequality, nature loss, and food-related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework, and sustainable consumption. The climate crisis can be addressed by a combination of individual actions on consumption and political and public engagement. This list comprises the 6 best books on how to create new ways of just and sustainable living.
Read more... Read less...

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity
David Graeber, David Wengrow, 2021
A brilliant, clear, refreshing and fabulous synthesis, drawing on recent archaeological evidence and anthropological insight. The authors say that most accounts of pre-modern human history “simply aren’t true, they have dire political implications, and make the past dull.” This book is about freedoms, not the “weird arguments” made by many in support of modern ways of living and consuming. We are not at the top or end of a process of betterment. What has gone before was more diverse, egalitarian and astonishing than many would think. Human cultures have always diverged; they have not converged on one model perceived as more advanced or even perfect. This book overturns ideas about assumed superiority. It also suggests that large-scale public engagement leads to innovative and diverse futures. People have always valued the things they do and places they live as extensions of identity and so have commonly refused to adopt practices and ideas from other people and places.

On Fire

The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein, 2020
Naomi Klein is one of our finest chroniclers and guides in this age of climate emergency. She details how we came by this mess, and sets out the burning case for a Green New Deal. There are dispatches from around the world, and this is a fight for all our lives. Now we have to create new policies and practices to ensure safe and just living.

How Do You Live?

Genzaburo Yoshino, 2021
The things you feel most deeply from the bottom of your heart. This is the core of the 1930s Japanese classic, recently translated into English. This is a gentle delight. The 15-year-old boy, Copper, turns to his old uncle for advice and help. This is, as Neil Gaiman observes, a strange and wise book. I, too, wish it had been given to me when I was young – as it still is to Japanese children. Big questions: why, what to do, how to keep smiling. How to pause rather than run. A superb book about how to live better.

Slowdown

The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
Danny Dorling, 2020
Ever since Malthus, stories about the future have been about rapid growth – of population, consumption of goods, medical advances, and money itself. Danny Dorling is spell-binding in showing how this is all about to end in a period of slowdown. This Slowdown, as Danny Dorling has wisely called it, changes everything. It changes the way we think about the future. “An era is ending,” he writes – and we can look forward to just and sustainable options for all. Slow means hope.

Plunder of the Commons

A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth
Guy Standing, 2019
When it comes to the commons, many wrongly think there is always tragedy looming. Garrett Hardin’s notorious 1968 essay seemed to suggest that the commons would always be inefficient and subject to destruction. Yet most local and world commons are well-governed by rules, obligations and reciprocity. People knew how to manage collectively. This is a clear-eyed analysis and exposition of the importance of the commons as we transition through nature and climate crises. It suggests new ways to think and new policies that could be used progressively to create new commons. The most famed collective fund created with oil income is the Norwegian government’s Pension Fund Global, now used to fund public assets and commons in Norway. The UK government in the 1980s decided to spend its North Sea oil income on reducing taxes and cutting current account deficits. Guy Standing is blunt and calls this “The worst economic mistake ever made by a British government.”

On Time and Water

Andri Snær Magnason, 2022
When we talk or think about the future, it often seems devoid of emotional connection. What will engage us best – the great problems, the great opportunities. Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason writes beautifully of glaciers and stories in Of Time and Water. He wrote the elegy to the first glacier to be lost in Iceland, the Okjökul, the OK-glacier. “How do you say goodbye to a glacier?” he asked. And how, too, to say farewell to the reindeer calving grounds drowned by a reservoir, to all the herring and each blue whale? From cold winters and low-lying shores to an ocean free of plastic? This is a sea that formerly was dry yet is rising once again. A beautiful, fine letter to the future.