Top 10 Books for Earth Day

Ecoholic Body: Your Ultimate Earth-Friendly Guide to Living Healthy and Looking Good by Adria Vasil
Adria Vasil’s latest eco bible delivers the lowdown on virtually every product that comes into contact with our bodies. From the pollutants clogging your sinus meds all the way to the outlaw toxins leaching from your sandals.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie
For this book, over the period of a week — the kind of week that would be familiar to most people — the authors use their own bodies as the reference point and tell the story of pollution in our modern world. Parents and concerned citizens will have to read this book.

What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World by Mckay Jenkins
After experiencing a health scare of his own, journalist McKay Jenkins set out to discover the truth about toxic chemicals, our alarming levels of exposure, and our government’s utter failure to regulate them effectively. What’s Gotten into Us? reveals how dangerous, and how common, toxins are in the most ordinary things, and in the most familiar of places.

No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beavan
The riotous story of a guilty liberal who snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, turns off his power, and becomes a bicycle nut in an effort to make zero environmental impact.

This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge by Tzeporah Berman
This unique book — part manifesto from a leader, part humorous activist memoir from a soccer mom — offers a wryly honest, behind the scenes, ultimately uplifting look at the state of the planet.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ultimately will have little impact. He suggests that rather than focusing on ineffective solutions that will cost us trillions of dollars, we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches that will allow us to deal not only with climate change but also with other pressing global concerns, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge by Jeffrey Simpson, Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers
Hot Air lays out in convincing and easily understandable terms the few simple policies that Canada must adopt right away in order to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. It even shows how these policies can be designed to have minimal negative effects.

Our Way Out: Principles for a Post-apocalyptic World by Marq De Villiers
Global warming, energy shortages, overpopulation — out of an endless stream of gloomy prognoses for humanity’s future, we have emerged with little inspiration and few concrete ideas for change. The transformation to sustainability is already happening, in many small ways, in many parts of the world. Our Way Out shows us how we can scale up these efforts to create meaningful and lasting change.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way and open our eyes to the kind of change we’ll need in order to make our civilization endure.

Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives) by Thomas Homer-Dixon
The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses.