The modern genre of environmental writing is now sufficiently well established to be able to claim it’s own body of classic works. Should anyone doubt this, no less an imprint than the renowned and revered Penguin Classics has recently published a collection of twenty volumes that – aside from one or two exceptions being books with which I was previously unfamiliar – I would have most certainly placed on any list one might have asked me to compile of essential works in the genre.
Collected under the series title Green Ideas, these twenty short volumes gather together a group of complete books, long essays, and portions of longer works into a cohesive whole that would well grace the shelves of all environmentalists, conservationists, naturalists, and any others who would wish to avail themselves of the ideas propounded by some of the most significant thinkers on the subject over the previous century.
The authors whose works are included in the series are noteworthy indeed:
Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
Naomi Klein, Hot Money
Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological
George Monbiot, This Can’t Be Happening
Bill McKibben, An Idea Can Go Extinct
Amitav Ghosh, Uncanny and Improbable Events
Tim Flannery, A Warning from the Golden Toad
Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women
Michael Pollan, Food Rules
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species
Dai Qing, The Most Dammed Country in the World
Wangari Maathai, The World We Once Lived In
Jared Diamond, The Last Tree on Easter Island
Wendell Berry, What I Stand for Is What I Stand On
Edward O Wilson, Every Species is a Masterpiece
James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia
Masanobu Fukuoka, The Dragonfly Will Be the Messiah
Arne Naess, There is No Point of No Return
Rachel Carson, Man’s War Against Nature
Aldo Leopold, Think Like a Mountain
Now for the bad news – at least for those not in the U.K. For some reason unknown to, and after repeated enquiries, still not fully understood by your humble reviewer, the Green Ideas series is not presently, nor planned to be, published internationally. The best answer I can obtain is “copyright limitations.” Thus, I’ve not had the privilege of being able to lay hands or eyes on any of the volumes themselves. My intuition tells me that they are likely the physical equal to other recently published Penguin Classics series volumes such as those in the Penguin Great Ideas series.
Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, as those outside the U.K. with sufficient motivation to get hold of one, two, or even all of such books well know, there are ways…
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