MUST READ:  The Big Picture           http://www.energyskeptic.com/Book_List.xls

Walter Youngquist

Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations & Individuals  

James H  Kunstler

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Garrett Hardin

Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos

David Pimentel

Food, Energy, and Society

John Perlin

A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization

Clive Ponting

A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

Peter Corning

Nature's Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind

Ward & Brownllee

Rare Earth  Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe

Laurie Garrett

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health 

 

Science & Critical thinking         The world's major problems require scientific literacy 

Natalie Angier

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

Skeptic Magazine

Critical thinking, how we know what we know, how to avoid being too gullible or too critical

 

OIL & GAS: how integral they are to our lives, why they're so difficult to replace, history 

Kenneth Deffeyes

Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak

Kenneth Deffeyes

Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

Matthew Simmons

Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

Julian Darley

High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis

Daniel Yergin

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power   [Pulitzer Prize winner]

 

Fossil Fuels and Food:  How far have we overshot carrying capacity?

D. & M. Fisher

The Nitrogen Bomb.  April 2001.   Discover magazine

Gever, Kauffman, et al

Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades

Vaclav Smil

Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production

Rich Pirog, et al

Food, Fuel, and Freeways     http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/ppp/food_mil.pdf

 

Can we avoid WW III as energy declines and times get harder?

Lutz Kleveman

The New Great Game:  Blood and Oil in Central Asia

Michael Klare

Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict

Chalmers Johnson

The Sorrows Of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Robert Baer

Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

Ahmed Rashid

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia

Peter Turchin

War and Peace and War. The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations.

David Berreby

Us and Them. Understanding Your Tribal Mind.

 

The most likely short-term "solutions"               

Robert L. Hirsch

Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. The "solutions", which need to be started at least 10 years ahead of Peak Oil, are: Heavy Oil, Gas-to-Liquids / Liquified Natural Gas, Enhanced Oil Recovery, Efficient Vehicles, and Coal Liquids www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

Howard Bucknell III

Energy and the National Defense.  [Déjà vu --- we've been through this before!  This is an extraordinary guide to how people dealt with the energy crisis in the 70's.  Bucknell, like Hirsch, perceived this as a liquid fuels crisis.  The same debates, political inertia, solutions, etc as now went on.  Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it...]

Department of Energy

Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan    

 

Filling in the gap between Energy Supply and Demand

Feral Metallurgist

Other sources of energy cannot deliver sufficient surpluses to replace the potent portable energy we know as gasoline and diesel. It is not generally understood that poorer quality energy sources can be critically dependant upon oil for their extraction, processing and distribution. In other words, oil is the precursor for other sources of energy; gas, coal, nuclear, solar, hydro, because these require oil fuel to create and maintain infrastructure. It also gives them the illusion of being "profitable".   http://www.unknownnews.net/040712a-fm.html

Buckminster Fuller

Energy slave unit = avg output of a man doing 150,000 foot-pounds of work per day 250 days per year. In low-energy societies, nonhuman energy slaves are horses, oxen, windmills, riverboats. Now, the average American has more than 8,000 energy-slaves at his or her disposal, and these slaves can work under extreme conditions: no sleep, 5,000° F, at 400,000 pounds per square inch pressure, etc”

 

Oil & Natural Gas

 

Oil is the main transportation energy source on land, air, and water; and the major feedstock for over half a million products, such as plastics, paint, medicine, roads (bitumen), solvents, inks, chemicals, etc. Natural gas is the feedstock for fertilizers that allow an extra five billion people to be alive than could otherwise exist, is how half of Americans heat and cook at home, and almost 25% of electricity. 

 

Shale Oil

Randy Udall, & Steve Andrews

The Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in Colorado “Pulling the Sword from the Stone”     http://www.aspencore.org/images/pdf/OilShale.pdf

 

Fusion is the only possible solution that can replace fossil fuels

Martin Hoffert, et al

Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet   1 Nov 2002    Science 

 

Hydrogen.

Joseph J. Romm

Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate

U.Bossel & B.Eliasson

Energy and the Hydrogen Economy www.methanol.org/pdfFrame.cfm?pdf=HydrogenEconomyReport2003.pdf

Alice Friedemann

The Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Black Hole   http://www.energybulletin.net/4541.html

 

Alternative Energy

Howard Hayden 

The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World                                           

 

Biomass 

Alice Friedemann

Peak Soil: Why Cellulosic and other Biofuels are Not Sustainable and a Threat to America’s National Security http://www.energyskeptic.com/Peak_Soil.htm

D. Pimentel, T. Patzek

Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower

 

Wind

E.ON Netz Corp.

http://www.nowhinashwindfarm.co.uk/EON_Netz_Windreport_e_eng.pdf    German wind farm realities

Incoteco (Denmark)

http://www.glebemountaingroup.org/Articles/DanishLessons.pdf    Danish windpower

Pacific NW National Laboratory

Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States Where the wind blows, how strong, and when. Most regions are not suitable for wind production, most major cities too far away.          rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/atlas_index.html

 

Nuclear

H  Hirsch, O  Becker, M  Schneider, A Froggatt

Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century   http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards.pdf

Richard Wolfson

Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology

 

Infrastructure        New energy sources must maintain the infrastructure we built when oil had EROEI of 40-100

Charles Hall et al.

Hydrocarbons and the Evolution of Human Culture  20 Nov 2003   Nature 426, pp. 318–22

Brian Hayes

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape

Kate Ascher

The Works: Anatomy of a City

ASCE

American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.   2005

Env Protection Agency

The Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis.  2002.  Office of Water

 

Politics   Why it's so hard to find a way out of our situation: the Human Political Animal

Joel Bakan

The Corporation  The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

Stanton Glantz

Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles

Marion Nestle

Food Politics  How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health

Jack Doyle

Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution

James C. Scott

Seeing Like a State.  How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

 

Human Ecology     Why it's so hard to find a way out of our situation: homo sapiens in nature

Steven A. LeBlanc

Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage

William Catton

Overshoot

Mathis Wackernagel

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Tim Flannery

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People

Judith Shapiro

Mao's War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China

Michael Williams

Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis

Tim Flannery

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

 

Topsoil        Cheap energy is hiding the destruction of topsoil, i.e. you can grow tomatoes on rocks with fertilizer

David Montgomery

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

David W. Wolfe

Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean

R. Ratta, R. Lal

Soil Quality and Soil Erosion

N. Brady, R. Weil

The Nature and Properties of Soils

 

Water                                                                                                    

John Opie

Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land

Jeffrey F. Mount

California Rivers & Streams. The Conflict between Fluvial Process & Land Use

Sandra Postel

Pillar of Sand, Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?

 

Resource Allocation

David Landes

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies     [Pulitzer Prize winner]

 

Population         

Roy Beck & Leon Kolankiewicz

The Environmental Movement’s Retreat From Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998). The years surrounding 1970 marked the coming of age of the modern environmental movement.  As that movement approaches its fifth decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by national environmental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.   www.capsweb.org/facts/beckkolan.pdf#search=%22The%20Environmental%20Movement%3Fs%20Retreat%20From%22

Garrett Hardin

The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons,

Bill McKibben

A Special Moment in History    May 1998    Atlantic Monthly

All links at:

www.mnforsustain.org/table_of_contents.htm   especially those by William Catton about Malthus

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Environment, Scarcity, and Violence

 

Global Warming

Spencer R. Weart

The Discovery of Global Warming

John D. Cox

Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change And What It Means For Our Future

Brian Fagan

The Little Ice Age: How climate made history 1300 - 1850

Brian Fagan

The Long Summer. How Climate Changed Civilization

The National Academy

Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises                       http://www.nap.edu/books/0309074347/html/

 

Extinction          When energy shortages increase in length and severity after 2011, will we be able to stop ourselves from burning coal as a substitute?  95% of life died in the Permian extinction.  Burning coal could change the air and water chemistry enough to make this happen again.

Peter Ward 

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

Peter Ward, et. al.

Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, And Earth's Ancient Atmosphere

John Atcheson

Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb   Dec 16, 2004   Baltimore Sun   (potential for runaway greenhouse?)

James Lovelock

The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity

 

Societies in Decline         What happens after financial and/or energy collapses -- how do people cope?  What careers will be best in an outsourced, resourced-depleted world?

Dmitry Orlov

Russia: Reinventing Collapse. The Soviet Example and American Prospects

Peter Godwin

Zimbabwe: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

Oxfam America

Cuba  

Dale Allen Pfeiffer

North Korea

Timothy Egan

The worst hard time: the untold story of those who survived the Dust Bowl    

 

Collapse      The use of non-renewable fossil fuel to power civilization is a singular event - could collapse from energy shortages come sooner than most people expect? 

Robert Constanza, et al

Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth

Donella Meadows

Nothing is So Powerful As an Exponential Whose Time Has Come   http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?display_article=vn280exponentialed

Albert Bartlett

Arithmetic, Population, and Energy          http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/symposium/bartlett/bartlett.html

Jared Diamond

Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

 

Health Care     Take care of yourself, health care will decline as society grows poorer

R. Barker Bausell

Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary & Alternative Medicine

Ray Moynihan

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients

Steve Salerno

Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

Merrill Goozner

The $800 Million Pill. The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs

Marion Nestle

1) Safe Food     2) What to Eat

 

Evolutionary Psychology & Biology

Matt Ridley

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

Judith Harris

No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

Judith Harris

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

Geoffrey Miller

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

David Barash

Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People

Sarah Hrdy

Mother Nature.  A history of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection

Steven Pinker

How the Mind Works

 

Violence

Azar Gat

War in Human Civilization.

Lawrence Keeley

War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

James Waller

Becoming Evil. How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing

Philip Gourevitch

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Jack Weatherford

Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World

Daniel Goldhagen

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans & the Holocaust

Wrangham & Peterson

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

Michael Ghiglieri

The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence

Richard Rhodes

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

 

Science

Brian Greene

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, & the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time

Laurie Garrett

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

 

BioInvasion & BioDiversity                         

Michael Novacek, et al

The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts      

 

Critical Thinking

Dietrich Dorner

The Logic of Failure

Nicholas Capaldi

The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking. How to Win an Argument, Defend a Case, ….

Robert Cialdini

Influence: The Art of Persuasion

Carl Sagan

The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark

Michael Shermer

Why People Believe Weird Things. Pseudoscience, superstition and other confusions

 

Evolution 

Charles Darwin

On the Origin of Species & The Descent of Man 

Jonathan Weiner

The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time  [Pulitzer Prize winner]

Carl Zimmer

Parasite Rex. Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

 

Putting it All Together

Edward O. Wilson

Consilience.  The Unity of Knowledge

 

Industrial Agriculture 

Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Michael Maren

The Road to Hell  The ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity

Steven Stoll

The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California

Richard Street

Beasts of the Field. A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.

Richard Walker

The Conquest of Bread. 150 years of Agribusiness in California.

Julie Guthman

Agrarian dreams. The paradox of organic farming in California

Kimbrell (editor)

Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture 

Jim Hightower

Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A report of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the Failure of America's Land Grant College Complex

Richard C. Fluck

Agricultural Energetics

Carolyn Johnsen

Raising a Stink: The Struggle over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska

 

The Future of Farming

John Jeavons

How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

Jim Bender

Future Harvest: Pesticide-Free Farming

B. C. Mollison

Permaculture: A Designers' Manual

 

The Joys and Hardships of Family Farms

Mildred Kalish

Little Heathens. Hard times & high spirits on an Iowa Farm during the great depression.

Barbara Greenwood

 A Pioneer Sampler : The daily life of a pioneer family in 1840 (illustrated, good for tweens)

M. R. Montgomery

A Cow's Life  The Surprising History of Cattle

David Masumoto

Epitaph for a Peach, Four Seasons on my Family Farm

Gene Logsdon

The Contrary Farmer

 

Natural History

Susan McCarthy

Becoming a Tiger: How baby animals learn to live in the wild

Carl Safina

Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

Robert Sapolsky

A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

Barry Lopez

Of Wolves and Men

Holldobler & Wilson

Journey to the Ants

Claude Combes

The Art of Being a Parasite

James Gould

Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence

 

Rolling Back the Clock                 Who knows how far back civilization will go?

Steven Vogel

Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle

Joanna  Stratton

Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier

Richard White

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own.  A New History of the American West. 

Stephen Ambrose

Undaunted Courage.  Merriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

Robert Massie

Peter the Great: His Life and World

Barbara Tuchman

Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century

Jean Gimpel

Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

George Huppert

After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

 

How Rich Nations Steal From Poor Nations

Susan George

Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire

Moises Naim

Illicit.  How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (comment: the poor from the rich)

 

Morality & Ethics

Michael Shermer

The Science of Good & Evil : Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, & Follow the Golden Rule

 

Fire

Stephen J. Pyne

Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire

Stephen J. Pyne

Burning Bush, A Fire History of Australia

Murry Taylor

Jumping Fire.  A Smoke Jumper's memoir of fighting wildfire

 

Inventing a New Society                                                                           What worked, what failed, and why?

Eleanor Agnew

Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s and Why They Came Back

Mark Holloway

Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880

Robert Hine

California's Utopian Colonies

Donald E. Pitzer

America's Communal Utopias

Helena Norberg-Hodge

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

 

What to do

Howard T. Odum

The Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies

Ted Trainer

The Alternative, Sustainable Society; the Simpler Way  

Richard Heinberg

The Oil Depletion Protocol : A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism And Economic Collapse

Richard Heinberg

Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World

Richard Heinberg

The Party's Over: Oil, war, and the Fate of Industrial Societies  

 

Trashing the Planet

Michael Harris

Lament For An Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery: A True Story

Thomas Hayden

Trashing the Oceans   http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4nov02.htm

W.Rathje & C.Murphy

Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. What our garbage tells us about ourselves

WorldWatch Institute

State of the World 2004

 

Groups involved with the issue of Peak Oil

Post Carbon Institute

http://www.postcarbon.org/ select outposts or get involved

Oil awareness

http://oilawareness.meetup.com/

 

Higher Education in America

Murray Sperber

Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education

 

Investment

William Bonner

Financial Reckoning Day

William Bonner

Empire of Debt  The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis

Stephen Leeb

The Oil Factor How oil controls the economy & your financial future

Van K. Tharp

Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom

John R. Talbot

The Coming Crash in the Housing Market

David / Tom Gardner

The Motley Fool Investment Workbook

 

Converging Storms  Cheap energy allowed us to hold environmental problems at bay, avoid the consequences of destroying and poisoning fisheries, forests, biodiversity, soil, water; and having a population that exceeds carrying capacity.

Donella Meadows

The Limits to Growth: The 30 year update      

N. Middleton 

World Atlas of Desertification

Edward O. Wilson

1)  The Future of Life      2) The Diversity of Life

Richard Ellis

The Empty Ocean: Plundering the World's Marine Life

Rick Weiss

Ocean species depleted by fishing: Worldwide numbers down 90 percent since the 1950s  May 15, 2003 Washington.Post

John McCormick

Acid Earth: The Global Threat of Acid Pollution

Chris Bright

Life out of Bounds: BioInvasion in a Borderless World

Laurie Garrett

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

Robert Glennon

Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping & the Fate of America's Fresh Waters

Virginia Abernethy

Population Politics: The Choices That Shape Our Future

Theo Colborn

Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story

Dan Fagin

Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry manipulates science, bends the law, and endangers your health

Jennifer Viegas

1,000 Times Too Many Humans?   http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20031124/humans_print.html

Tim Radford

Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up'   http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1447921,00.html

Hopfenberg & Pimentel

Human population numbers as a function of food supply.   2001. Environ Dev Sustain 3(1):1-15

Sierra Club

First Anniversary of Superfund Bankruptcy

Roger Segelken

40% of world deaths due to environment factors  http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/98/10.15.98/env-death.html

Thomas Hayden

Trashing the Oceans An armada of plastic rides the waves, & sea creatures are suffering         November 4

G. Luft & A. Korin

Terrorism Goes to Sea            Nov/Dec 2004  Foreign Affairs