On Friday, March 26, Laura Seydel and I will be speaking at the Georgia PRSA Chapter on the role of corporations in advancing environmental missions via communication & messaging. Below is a list of favorite books Laura and I will discuss at the end of the talk. There are SO MANY books to include – but here are a top list for those who want to improve their Spring reading list and educate themselves. These are in no particular order.
1. Organic Manifesto – Maria Rodale, CEO and Chairman of Rodale Inc., sheds new light on the state of 21st-century farming.
2. The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick – And What We Can Do About It – Robyn O’Brien – the story of how one brave woman chose to take on the system and a call to action that shows how each of us can do our part and keep our own families safe.
3. Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home ~ Christopher Gavigan – the essential guide for parents! All parents want a happy and healthy child in a safe home, but where do they start? It starts with the small steps to creating a healthier, less toxic, and more environmentally sound home – and this is the definitive book to get you there.
4. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America ~ Thomas L. Friedman - Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests.
5. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization ~ Lester R. Brown - explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.
6. Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the Worlds Problems ~ Michael Strong, John Mackey – In BE THE SOLUTION, Michael Strong (with an assist from John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market) makes a case for common-sense, do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial capitalism in a way you’ve never seen before. His discussion of free enterprise as a way of doing good in the world is as far removed from today’s headlines, featuring greed-is-good corporate capitalism, as the America of today is from the ideals laid down by our founding fathers.
7. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto ~ Michael Pollan -Pollan provides another shocking yet essential treatise on the industrialized Western diet and its detrimental effects on our bodies and culture. Here he lays siege to the food industry and scientists’ attempts to reduce food and the cultural practices of eating into bite-size concepts known as nutrients, and contemplates the follies of doing so.
8. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Hardcover)
~ Woody Tasch – Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth—philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.
9. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit – Daniel Quinn – Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a literary competition intended to foster works of fiction that present positive solutions to global problems. Ishmael, a gorilla rescued from a traveling show who has learned to reason and communicate, uses these skills to educate himself in human history and culture. Through a series of philosophical conversations with the unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Sixties idealist, Ishmael lays out a theory of what has gone wrong with human civilization and how to correct it, a theory based on the tenet that humanity belongs to the planet rather than vice versa.
10. Our friends, The Frogs – Laura Elizabeth Seydel – In this colorful book, Laura Elizabeth Seydel introduces her readers to an array of interesting frogs in her quest to educate and save her slimy friends from extinction. Full of beautiful photography, expert knowledge, and optimism for the future of frogs, this is the perfect book for kids wanting to make a positive impact on the planet! All proceeds will be donated to Amphibian Ark (www.amphibianark.org), a global conservation community that is working endlessly to save our frog population.
