Island Press publishes the best ideas and information for readers seeking to protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Visit us at www.islandpress.org to learn more.
In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wonderous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars, crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens?
For readers who know kelp only as tangles on the ocean surface or smelly mounds of seaweed littering beaches, Forest of the Sea reveals a thriving three-dimensional underwater world of color and beauty whose loss if allowed to happen will reverberate in unimaginable ways for both nature and humans.
Author David Helvarg, a veteran journalist and accomplished scuba diver, takes us on a memorable journey beneath the waves through kelp’s natural and human history, the billions of dollars of products and services it contributes to our global economy, the unwitting human activities that threaten its survival, and the hopeful movements around the world to restore kelp habitat. Helvarg introduces us to Indigenous leaders promoting sea otter reintroduction, out-of-work urchin fisherman, documentary filmmakers, and ocean scientists all working in an unlikely collaboration to restore and protect kelp forests while promoting a growing range of uses for food, medicine, and energy.
Forest of the Sea is the first book to document what is at stake if we lose these irreplaceable marine jewels, helping readers to understand how these natural systems might adapt and survive.
David Helvarg is a journalist and well-known ocean activist with a decades-long list of accomplishments and accolades. He is the founder and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy and media group with a large and devoted following. He is the author of six books about oceans with a string of awards and recognitions. He produces the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast and has produced more than 40 documentaries for media outlets such as PBS and The Discovery Channel. His most recent is “Sequoias of the Sea” about the community impacts of kelp forest collapse in California.
Transportation and the Shape of Cities
Christof Spieler, Mandi Chapa, and David Copeland Loredo
April 2026 | 312 pages | Full color | World rights available
Transportation in cities has one undeniable limitation: space. Each mode of urban transportation has inherent geometric properties that no amount of policy or design can change. Designing transportation is always a problem of geometry: if we want to add something new, we need space for it. This is never easy historically, the decisions about reallocating space have negatively impacted people without power and means. Planning for transportation in cities requires thoughtful planners, engineers, landscape architects, urban designers, and policy makers to solve design problems. Understanding the properties of each mode is fundamental to good design in cities.
In Transportation and the Shape of Cities, transportation experts Christof Spieler, Armandina Chapa, and David Copeland Loredo take a comprehensive look at the five major modes of US transportation pedestrian, micromobility (including the bicycle), car, train, and transit. For each, they consider the theory and discuss its geometry, how it works as a network, its role in the transportation system, and how it fits into urban design.
Transportation and the Shape of Cities is a visually rich tool to help people plan cities. It is not a design standard, but a guide to solving the design problem of the limitations of space and the geometrical characteristics of each transportation mode. The information will help someone answer a question such as “How much space should there be in front of this building for a good sidewalk?” or “Would a bike lane fit in this street?” or “How long would an overpass over this railroad be?” Dimensioned drawings appear throughout, along with discussions of the factors that drive the dimensions.
Transportation matters because it shapes all of our lives. We can make transportation networks better through thoughtful design, informed policy, and inclusive conversations. Transportation and the Shape of Cities is designed to help professionals to do that in whatever role they are in.
Christof Spieler, PE, AICP, LEED AP is Director of Transportation for Madison, Wisconsin. He was previously a planner in Houston, working with cities and agencies across the United States. He also taught at Rice University and served on the board of Houston METRO. He is the author of two editions of Trains, Buses, People, published in 2018 and 2021 by Island Press.
Mandi Chapa is a practicing planner with a background in architecture. She has contributed to projects in the Houston region and across the United States, focusing on design, equity, inclusion, and creating connected places shaped by the community. Mandi is a senior lecturer at Rice University, where she teaches urban transportation in the School of Architecture.
David Copeland Loredo, AICP is a planner from Houston. His focus is on enhancing the quality of life through design. His work emphasizes legibility, accessibility, and enjoyability in projects ranging from logos to city planning. David excels in graphic storytelling, cartography, and digital visualizations, aiming to communicate complex ideas and champion community identity.
The Other Housing Crisis
Ending the Deterioration and Loss of Affordable Homes
Todd Swanstrom, Alan Mallach, and Austin Harrison
July 2026 | 336 pages | World rights available
We are in the throes a housing crisis, framed by the media as a crisis of affordability. And the solution, it seems, is to increase the supply of housing to drive down the cost. The national conversation on housing affordability, however, ignores the issue of housing quality. Most people find affordable housing not through public subsidies but by purchasing or renting older housing in the private market. For older housing to be affordable, it is almost always in disrepair and/or is located in a disinvested neighborhood with low market values. Millions of homeowners and renters live in unsafe and unhealthy housing.
The Other Housing Crisis brings attention to the neglected issue of housing deterioration and makes the case for more investment in home repairs. Contributions by expert researchers and experienced practitioners examine the damage housing deterioration imposes on the physical, mental, and financial health of residents, as well as the related damage to the environment. Chapters highlight innovative home repair programs in cities across the United States from Austin, Texas to Memphis, Tennessee, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Many housing units in the US are deteriorating to the point that they must be demolished. Since 2000, as the supply of affordable housing has been shrinking, the United States has lost an average of about 400,000 older housing units each year. Every repair that saves a home from demolition deliberate or by neglect adds to the supply of decent quality affordable housing.
The analysis and recommendations in The Other Housing Crisis will help policymakers and practitioners to curb the loss of affordable housing and place housing deterioration and home repair squarely on the national policy agenda. Addressing the housing crisis is not a matter of either increasing the supply of housing or preserving existing housing. We need to do both now.
Todd Swanstrom, the Des Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is the co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century and The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the TwentyFirst Century.
Alan Mallach, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Community Progress in Washington DC, has held positions with the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and has taught at Pratt Institute (NYC), Rutgers University, and the New Jersey School of Architecture. He is the author of The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America and many other books, articles, and applied research studies.
Austin (“A.T.") Harrison is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Rhodes College. His research interests include neighborhood change, community development and organizing, housing policy, and structural decline. His previous work has been featured in Housing Policy Debate, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Housing Studies, Metropolitics, and more.
Reining in the Bulls
How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed
Michael Marx
July 2026 | 232 pages | World rights available
Major corporations exercise enormous control over our lives. They influence how we think, what we buy, who we vote for, and how our society evolves. They are key drivers of the wealth that fuels our economic system, and their power insulates them from strict government regulations and accountability. In this setting, corporate abuses pollution, toxic and inhumane work environments, defective products go unchecked. When the government refuses to corral industry’s misdeeds, advocacy groups turn to corporate ethics campaigns to expose and change harmful behavior.
Reining in the Bulls is the first comprehensive resource for professionals of nongovernmental organizations who want to understand, plan, and execute modern corporate campaigns. Michael Marx is a pioneer in this field and has led multiple high-profile campaigns, pressuring companies that were harming workers, communities, and the natural environment. He pulls from his and other campaign experts’ experience to highlight lessons learned from both US and international examples of corporate ethics campaigns. These types of campaigns are unique in that they require understanding not only of how to pressure branded companies, but also an understanding of their inner workings to strategically target that pressure.
The need for a comprehensive guide is growing. Few advocacy professionals receive training on how to conduct these campaigns effectively. Even those who have worked on corporate campaigns for a while need to evolve their strategies to incorporate advances in social media and the threats posed by new industries, such as AI. With this book, advocates have a powerful tool for holding companies accountable and protecting our social and environmental well-being.
Michael Marx is an internationally respected environmental corporate campaign director and founder of Corporate Ethics International. In the last 30 years, he has led some of the largest campaigns targeting companies like Mitsubishi, Home Depot, Walmart, and Exxon/Mobil. Over his career, he has designed campaigns for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Pew Charitable Trust, ClimateWorks, and Hewlett Foundation. He was co-founder and executive director of ForestEthics (now Stand.earth) and previously served as a campaign director at Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club.
Dismantling Disaster
Designing with Communities for Climate Risk and Recovery
Wes Michaels
July 2026 | 232 pages | World rights available
As we enter an unprecedented era of extreme weather events, we must design and build our cities with disaster prevention in mind. Unfortunately, disaster management efforts are administered in an ad hoc manner by emergency managers and recovery agencies. When designers are involved, their approach often focuses on regional, top-down climate adaptation projects. These require expensive multi-decade designs that advance novelty over meaningful transformation. In the meantime, communities on the frontlines of climate change most often poorer communities and communities of color are left vulnerable to repeated disasters or forced to relocate.
In Dismantling Disaster, landscape architect Wes Michaels offers new strategies for how designers can work with communities to recover from and, more importantly, prevent disasters. Drawing on his professional experience, Michaels examines on-the-ground examples that range from hurricane and coastal flooding in South Carolina and Louisiana to wildfires in California and electric grid failures in Puerto Rico. This book is structured in three parts. The first part introduces designers to a new understanding of “disaster” and how disaster vulnerability is woven into our built environment. The second part focuses on community-led design. Michaels provides “soft” strategies to co-design with communities. Finally, the third part shows designers how to incorporate disaster risk reduction into their design practice. He walks readers through redesigning existing buildings and spaces to withstand disasters and better meet community needs in times of crisis.
This book is for built environment professionals landscape architects, architects, urban planners who want an approach to designing for climate change that addresses the immediacy of the crisis and envisions a new role for designers in community-led initiatives.
Wes Michaels is a landscape architect and Principal at SMM in New Orleans. As Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Tulane University and Faculty Fellow at the Tulane Center on Climate and Urbanism, he focuses on disaster risk, climate adaptation, and regenerative landscapes. His work bridges academic research and professional practice to reimagine how communities can thrive in an era of uncertainty.
New York’s Secret Subway
The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit
Matthew Algeo
September 2025 | 244 pages | Rights sold: Audio
In the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to Harlem. Air pressure would shoot passengers up and down the island in clean, quiet carriages. But Beach was up against the operators of the horse-drawn streetcars and the politicians in their pay, most conspicuously William M. Tweed, the notorious “Boss” of Tammany Hall.
New York’s Secret Subway tells a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach, a visionary inventor and entrepreneur, against the oafish tyrant Tweed, the exemplar of corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history, the surreptitious creation of the nation’s first operational subway.
New York seemed destined to become the second city in the world with a comprehensive subway system, after London. Unfortunately, political lethargy and greed would conspire to deny the city a subway for another thirty years. Yet Alfred Beach still proved conclusively the feasibility of underground railways in Manhattan, and paved the way for modern mass transportation systems. Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters, New York’s Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today’s clashes between public interests and powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than a century ago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.
Matthew Algeo is an award-winning journalist and author. He has reported from four continents for NPR News and written for major publications including the Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post. He is the author of seven books, including Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, which Christopher Buckley called “utterly likable,” and the Washington Post named one of the best books of the year.
Praise for New York’s Secret Subway:
“[An] engrossing chronicle... an immersive view of 1860s New York as a hotbed of innovation and corruption.”
Publishers Weekly
“In New York's Secret Subway, Matthew Algeo reveals a fascinating and intriguing piece of history hidden right beneath every New Yorker’s feet. Featuring larger-than-life characters, ambitious engineering, and the kind of smoke-filled-room political corruption that still accompanies modern transportation projects, this is a book every city lover, transit fan, and history buff ought to read.”
Doug Gordon, co-host of “The War on Cars” podcast and co-author of Life After Cars
Living Off Grid
50 Steps to Unplug, Become Self-Sufficient, and Build the Homestead of Your Dreams
Ryan Mitchell
September 2025 | 232 pages | World rights available
Ryan Mitchell never thought he would go off the grid. Yet this self-described desk-jockey with no carpentry skills today lives on 11 acres in a house he designed and powers with solar, gets his water from a well, has a composting toilet and septic system, eats from his garden, raises baby quail, and runs his own business. His bills are a fraction of what they were when he paid rent and utilities, and he has infinitely more free time to pursue the things he loves. Life is far from perfect: there are times when the generator stalls or the water pump quits. But he has independence, self-sufficiency, and the support of a like-minded community.
If you’ve ever dreamed of this lifestyle, Living Off Grid will help you navigate the most important decisions you’ll need to make to create the reality that’s right for you. Whether you’re an urbanite who just wants to save some money (and carbon) with small solar arrays or you’re ready to purchase land or you’ve already taken the plunge and want a better way to deal with your wastewater, Ryan has done the hard work to set you up for success. He will also help you steer clear of common pitfalls, including purchasing land in a flood zone, underestimating your water needs, trying to rely solely on wind power, or simply biting off more than you can chew or afford. Finally, he will explore littlediscussed topics such as living off grid when you have a “regular” job and aging in place.
As someone who has done it himself and guided countless others on their journeys to unplug, Ryan knows that going off the beaten path can be daunting. But with the right knowledge, you can choose the road less traveled – and it could make all the difference.
Living on 11 acres in a homestead powered by solar, Ryan Mitchell has helped countless people simplify their lives and go off grid. As the best-selling author of Tiny House Living: Ideas for Building and Living Well in Less than 400 Square Feet, he’s been featured in the New York Times, BBC, Associated Press, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Mother Earth News, Treehugger, and NPR
Squirrel
How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World
Nancy F. Castaldo
September 2025 | 240 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Squirrels are a common sight, seemingly everywhere in wild and urban nature. Their antics in city parks delight us while their raids on our backyard gardens and birdfeeders never fail to exasperate. But squirrels are more than amusing backyard entertainers, and few of us know much about them or fully appreciate their role in keeping the environment healthy. As stress on the natural world intensifies, should we be paying more attention to the plight of squirrels?
In Squirrel, Nancy Castaldo shines new light on this familiar backyard mammal, exploring their staggering diversity (they’re found on all continents but Antarctica) and the many surprising ways they shape our world, our communities, and our cultures. Each chapter explores an aspect of squirrels and their close and sometimes fraught association with humans: their importance to myriad ecosystems; their introduction to nineteenth-century urban parks; their complicated global status as both invasive and endangered; their role as celebrated cultural icons and social media memes; and ultimately, why we must prevent population declines and protect their well-being while we can.
Like other wildlife species, squirrels are increasingly stressed by climate change, and their fate may foreshadow our own. The book includes a detailed bibliography, an exhaustive list of squirrel species and their status, and tips for coexisting peaceably with squirrels in our yards and neighborhoods. Chapters are introduced by exquisitely drawn historical illustrations.
Nancy Castaldo is a naturalist, environmental educator, and the author of more than two dozen books for young readers. Her books have garnered starred reviews, the Eureka Award for Nonfiction, the Green Earth Book Award, and Sigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing honors, among others. Nancy has also authored articles about nature for a variety of print and online publications. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and on the International Wildlife Coexistence Network Council. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and rescued Bichon.
Praise for Squirrel:
“Charming, thoughtful, and gorgeously rendered, Castaldo’s Squirrel delivers the very best of classical nature writing with a modern twist. If we can learn to love and protect these unheralded, quotidian creatures, perhaps we do indeed stand a chance against the larger uncertainties we collectively face.”
Karen Pinchin, author of internationally bestselling Kings of Their Own Ocean
“They’re ubiquitous but mysterious, adorable but sometimes reviled, ordinary but endlessly surprising. Almost everyone sees squirrels daily, yet we know almost nothing about these acrobatic backyard mammals. Thank you, Nancy Castaldo, for this delightful, riveting, thought-provoking book, and for finally giving squirrels the attention they deserve. I’ll be thinking and talking about Squirrel for a long time.”
The Unfinished Metropolis
Igniting the City-Building Revolution
Benjamin Schneider
October 2025 | 296 pages | World rights available
Consider your surroundings. Maybe you’re in a house or in an apartment building. Maybe you’re at a desk in an office building, or in a café looking out on a lively main street. The urban landscape is not simply the backdrop to your life. It determines, to a remarkable degree, what kind of life you’re able to live. Today, the horizons of American life are constrained by a built environment that has not significantly changed since the 1970s.
American cities used to constantly evolve, experimenting with new urban designs and ambitious infrastructure projects, from railroads and subways to public housing and shopping malls. But now we keep pursuing the same 20th century urban development plans freeways, downtown office towers, suburban housing developments. This pattern is why Americans are so dependent on their cars, why housing is so expensive and homelessness is at crisis levels, and why downtowns are struggling and communities are fraying.
In The Unfinished Metropolis, Benjamin Schneider argues that city-building is a lost art. We need to embrace new transportation technologies, new types of housing, new ways to use streets other than for cars and parking. In this insightful and entertaining tour of the built environment, Schneider explores common urban designs that shape our lives and color our cultural imagination: office parks, apartments, single family homes, and transit systems. He explains how these forms came to be, why they no longer function as promised, and introduces readers to the advocates and professionals around the country who are working on transformative new solutions. Learning from past mistakes, we can remake our cities and create better lives for ourselves and future generations.
Benjamin Schneider is a freelance journalist covering all things urbanism. His work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, MIT Technology Review, Slate, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Born and raised in San Francisco, Schneider has lived in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée.
Praise for The Unfinished Metropolis:
“Schneider reminds us that the hallmark of cities has always been making room, literally, for new ideas, and that creativity and cooperation at the local level remain the recipe for success. Here’s hoping the next generation of leaders will listen.”
Alexandra Lange, Pulitzer Prize winning critic and author of Meet Me By the Fountain
“‘We’ve forgotten that our cities are never finished.’ With this clarion call, Ben Schneider pulls back the curtain on the perverse system of growth mostly non-growth that is the hidden force behind so many American ills. Reading this book is a great first step to unleashing the YIMBY revolution in your stunted town.”
Jeff Speck, FAICP, author of Walkable City and Walkable City Rules
The Twilight Forest
An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West
Gary
Ferguson
October 2025 | 228 pages |
Rights sold: Audio
With their towering, cinnamon-colored trunks and dusky green canopies, ponderosa pine has long been a charismatic icon of the American West. Yet a quiet unraveling has begun: in the past decade, in a vast area from Santa Fe to the Sierras, more than two hundred million ponderosa have died. While some trees will survive in cooler places, scientists estimate that by mid-century less than five percent of the ponderosa in the American Southwest may remain. As the very character of this vast region shifts, what will be left behind? And how can we come to terms with such profound loss?
In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings readers on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn and to celebrate the forests that nurtured him. In warm and luminous storytelling, Ferguson weaves together the human and natural history of ponderosa, from its march across the West more than 10,000 years ago, to centuries of artists inspired by its dazzling stature and shady passageways. Both wildfire and climate change are constant presences on this journey. The story of ponderosa reminds us that loss can be a gateway to connection to nature and each other.
While it is tempting to hide from the changes around us, Ferguson offers a healing approach: “to pick even one of these thousand doors of loss, pull it open and walk through.” The resulting journey is a life-affirming tribute to one of America’s most cherished wild landscapes.
Award-winning author Gary Ferguson has written for a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair and Outside, and is the author of twenty-seven books on nature and science. His memoir The Carry Home, which the Los Angeles Times called “gorgeous, with beauty on every page,” was awarded “Best Nature Book of the Year” by the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Hawks Rest described as “dazzling” by The San Francisco Chronicle was the first title to win the Best Book award from both the Mountains and Plains and the Pacific Northwest booksellers associations. Gary’s 2016 article “A Deeper Boom,” for Orion magazine, was chosen “Best Essay of the Year” by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Praise for The Twilight Forest:
“Ferguson uses the ponderosa to illustrate the impact of nature on culture, providing the inspiration readers may need to take action and help conserve the ponderosa pine…. A passionate work for those interested in a detailed exploration of ponderosa pines and their influence on the cultural landscape of the Americas.”
Library Journal
“Those of us lucky enough to have wandered these forests in their prime are grateful for this graceful elegy. It's more than that, of course it's also a deep warning about what we're doing to all the landscapes of the earth as we rapidly warm this planet. May we remember, mourn, and organize.”
Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun
Preserving with Purpose
Reimaging Buildings for Community Benefit
Amy Hetletvedt
November 2025 | 216 pages | World rights available
While prominent buildings like Notre Dame in Paris rise from the ashes, historic buildings in disinvested communities are lost at an alarming rate. The resulting holes in the fabric of the community are not only a loss of structures, but of the stories and the embedded possibilities that the buildings represent.
In Preserving with Purpose: Reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit, architect Amy Hetletvedt unfolds a revolutionary-but-simple vision for re-thinking building conservation in vulnerable communities. It begins with the question: what can be done now in circumstances or communities when restoration is not wholly fundable, not possible, or potentially not even desirable?
Hetletvedt explores contextual approaches to existing buildings in disinvested communities as an alternative to demolition, explains why these buildings matter, and what communities and professionals can make of them, together.
Preserving With Purpose features profiles and case studies from around the world. Four profiles focus on places facing the challenges of vacancy and abandonment which have, over time, reimagined buildings using the approaches described in the book. The profiles include Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas; The Dorchester Projects and Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, Illinois; Menokin in Warsaw, Virginia and the Granby Four Streets in Liverpool, England. Fifteen case studies cover a broader geographic range and are organized into three purposeful interventions: priority, practical and poetic.
Professionals and community members are encouraged to approach historic buildings creatively and collaboratively; to invest in strategic mending that not only addresses buildings but benefits communities. Preserving with Purpose is a compelling invitation into the beautiful and fruitful middleground between ruin and restoration.
Amy Hetletvedt is a licensed architect, preservationist, and educator who has been supporting buildings, the people who love them, and the communities they serve for more than twenty years. She has lived and worked on four continents, collaborating on projects in a variety of scales and settings. Hetletvedt is a former Historic District Commissioner for the City of Detroit and has taught master’s level design studios and architectural ethics. Her writing has appeared in ArchDaily, Slate, DOCOMOMO, and regional architectural media.
A Year of Compassion
52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and CrueltyFree
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
March 2025 | 210 pages | World rights available
Affectionately known as the Joyful Vegan, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has been a leading voice in compassionate living for over two decades, guiding countless people to achieve lasting health and purpose. Now, with A Year of Compassion, she shares simple, effective, and impactful actions we can all take to make humankind a little kinder by protecting animals, supporting the planet, and optimizing our own health.
Colleen lives by the motto: Don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything. Do something. Anything. She knows we’ll never be perfect in this imperfect world, but with small, incremental changes, we can each contribute to big change. One week, you might declutter your fridge to cut down on food waste, while the next, you could store some basic supplies in your car to help an injured animal. Another week, you might explore eating by color to boost your nutrient intake, while the next, you can take steps to stop junk mail in its tracks.
Feel free to skip around, choosing your own sustainable adventure. Whether you read A Year of Compassion cover to cover or take it week by week, Colleen is there to encourage, inspire, and motivate, helping you become the change you want to see in the world.
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is a recognized expert and thought leader on the culinary, social, ethical, and practical aspects of living compassionately, healthfully, and sustainably. An award-winning author of seven books including the bestselling The Joy of Vegan Baking, The 30-Day Vegan Challenge, and The Joyful Vegan: How to Stay Vegan in a World that Wants You to Eat Meat, Dairy, and Eggs Colleen is also an acclaimed speaker, a regular contributor to National Public Radio, and the host of sustainable, vegan, animal-friendly trips around the world. Host of the podcast Food for Thought (one of the longest running podcasts), Colleen also co-founded the political action committee East Bay Animal PAC to work with government officials on animal issues in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives with her beloved husband and two cats in Oakland, CA and can be found at JoyfulVegan.com.
Poisoning the Well
How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America
Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin
April 2025 | 264 pages | Rights sold: Audio
When doctors told Brenda Hampton that she was experiencing kidney failure, with readings that were “off the charts,” she had never heard of forever chemicals. Neither had Mark Favors, even though dozens of his friends and relatives had developed unusual cancers after serving in the armed forces and living downstream from military bases. Fred Stone, a farmer who fertilized his fields with sludge from local wastewater, only learned about them after being informed that his land was toxic and advised to euthanize his cows.
In fact, few of us are familiar with forever chemicals, also known as PFAS or per- and polyfluoroalkyl compounds. Yet these substances are all around us, used in countless products from Teflon pans, to raincoats, to mascara, to certain types of firefighting foam. More importantly, they are in us. Studies have revealed that 97% of all Americans have PFAS chemicals coursing through their veins. And as their name implies, they do not go away.
Poisoning the Well is the story of how these dangerous compounds contaminated four American towns, leaching into drinking water, infiltrating bodies, and leaving a trail of death and disease in their wake. With extensive on-the-ground and investigative reporting, it traces the lives that have been ripped apart by PFAS and the machinations that have allowed chemical giants to continue polluting communities long after the risks were known. And it honors the individuals, like Brenda, who have made it their personal mission to ensure that forever chemicals are not forever, after all.
Sharon Udasin is a reporter for The Hill, covering U.S. West climate & policy from her home base in Boulder, Colorado. She was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder and has also reported for The Jerusalem Post and The New York Jewish Week. A graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Journalism School, Sharon also received a 2022 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award and was honored by the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in 2013.
Rachel Frazin is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers energy and environment politics and policy for The Hill. Her work has also appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast, the Tampa Bay Times, and The Palm Beach Post. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and was a recipient of a 2023 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award.
Hot Takes
Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change
Sadie Babits
June 2025 | 256 pages | World rights available
It’s Monday morning and your editor assigns you a story about a housing project where several residents have been hospitalized because of heat stroke. Is this a climate story? Is it a climate justice story? No one would have thought so twenty years ago. In fact, when many of us were attending journalism school or reporting our first stories in newsrooms, those terms did not even exist. Today, it’s a whole different story.
Whether you cover the environment, healthcare, economics, politics, sports, or any other beat, the fact is, you need to understand climate change to do your job. Because climate affects every human (and animal, and plant) on Earth, that means it affects all our reporting.
You may know the basics when it comes to the science of human-driven climate change. But how about the major policies that determine global climate action or the growing number of legal climaterelated cases? Have you considered what it means to practice journalism focused on solutions rather than offering up a puff piece? What about how to cover the vast inequities generated from humancaused climate change, or how race and socioeconomics interact with climate? Are you prepared to detect and debunk misinformation and to remove bias from your stories?
Climate change is dramatically shifting so many aspects of our world, journalism included. So, whether you’re still a student or a fifty-year veteran, chances are, you could use some up-to-date guidance on how to report on this critical and endlessly complex issue. You have come to the right place. No resource has all the answers, but Hot Takes engages the big questions that will determine how climate change is covered, and the stories we tell our audiences and ourselves.
Sadie Babits is Supervising Climate Editor at NPR and previously was Professor of Practice and Sustainability Director at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Babits has also served as board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Praise for Hot Takes:
“Hot Takes is smart, clear-sighted, and on target. It should be read by anyone reporting on climate change or on the impacts of climate change, which is to say by just about any working (or aspiring) journalist.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, Under a White Sky, and Field Notes from a Catastrophe
The Hype About Hydrogen, Revised Edition
False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate
Joesph J. Romm
April 2025 | 224 pages | Rights sold: Audio
For decades, we’ve been promised that a hydrogen economy is just around the corner: a high-tech Eden in which our cars, homes, and industries would be powered not by fossil fuels but by hydrogen from pollution-free sources. After billions in investment, hydrogen has failed to live up to these overblown promises. Yet it is as hyped as ever, a target of media enthusiasm and hefty investment from government and industry. Is it time to accept that the “fuel of the future” will never arrive?
In 2003, energy expert Joesph J. Romm wrote The Hype About Hydrogen to explain why hydrogen wasn’t the panacea we were promised and may never be. In this newly revised and updated edition, Romm builds an even stronger case, explaining the barriers hydrogen faces, from its inefficiency as an energy carrier to the “chicken-and-egg” problem in infrastructure development and the risk of increased global warming from hydrogen leaks and emissions. In a series of significant updates, Romm breaks down the latest methods of production, including “green” hydrogen, hydrogen made with nuclear power, geologic hydrogen, and “blue” hydrogen from natural gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS), laying out the challenges with each. He then explores the limitations of suggested applications of hydrogen, including e-fuels made with direct air capture of CO2, hydrogen cars, and heating in buildings and industry.
The Hype About Hydrogen is essential reading for anyone who hopes that hydrogen will be a major solution to the climate crisis. The good news? We don’t need it to be. With advancements in renewables and battery technology, electrification offers us a path forward that is cleaner, safer and can be implemented today.
Joseph Romm was Principal Deputy and then Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the mid-1990s, overseeing a $1 billion budget on climate solutions for transportation, buildings, and industry. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, where he researches climate solutions. In 2009, Rolling Stone named him one of 100 "People Who Are Reinventing America," and Time named him "Hero of the Environment." He has authored 11 books, including the original edition of The Hype About Hydrogen, which was named one of the best science and technology books of 2004 by Library Journal. He holds a PhD in physics from MIT.
Praise for The Hype About Hydrogen:
“Vital, very readable guidance for investors, environmentalists, and interested bystanders looking toward a future without fossil fuels.”
Booklist
“This book should be read and understood by every citizen.”
Journal of Scientific Exploration
Going for Zero
Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future
Carl Elefante
May 2025 | 256 pages | World rights available
Climate change is no longer an abstract threat. Day after day, an already disrupted climate is impacting the lives of millions, and the time available to curtail climate change is alarmingly limited. Going for zero greenhouse gas emissions requires retooling everything about industry, agriculture, transportation, and every city and town that people inhabit. The work of architects, engineers, landscape architects, urban designers and the countless others who shape the built environment has never been more relevant. Decarbonizing how buildings are designed, constructed, and operated is a sea change that is already altering professional principles and practices.
In Going for Zero: Carbon-free Buildings and the Path to Our Urban Future, seasoned architect and former AIA president Carl Elefante addresses how buildings and cities can and must help resolve the looming climate emergency. Elefante offers a decidedly alternative viewpoint, one informed by his architecture career rescuing buildings from senseless demolition and learning from the practices and wisdom embedded in built heritage.
The challenge of our built environment and the possible solutions are covered in four sections: climate imperative, justice imperative, urban imperative, and beyond modernism. Elefante explains that revitalizing communities by optimizing existing resources makes social, economic, and environmental sense and directs resources where they are most needed.
Going for Zero is an urgent call to action and path forward. Elefante’s message is ultimately one of hope but we must act now.
Carl Elefante practices architecture at the intersection of sustainable design and historic preservation and is known worldwide for coining the phrase: “the greenest building is…one that is already built.” A Principal Emeritus with Quinn Evans, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2024 Firm Award recipient, Carl designed noteworthy projects during a decades-long architectural career. In 2018, Carl served as the President of AIA, the highlight of many leadership roles in professional associations. Carl is a Fellow of both the AIA and the Association for Preservation Technology (APT).
Praise for Going for Zero:
“Architects always meld art and science, but only some are bold enough to meld art, science, and people Carl Elefante is a leader of that select group. His extraordinary book is a book for everyone, and especially anyone ready to move us away from destruction to a new path.”
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, DLFAPA, Hon AIA, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It
Standing for Nature
Legal Strategies for Environmental Justice
Dana Zartner, Fabian Cardenas, and Mohammad Golam Sarwar
May 2025 | 288 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Rights of Nature laws are becoming a vital tool for addressing environmental injustice. From New Zealand and India to Ecuador and Bolivia, advocates have successfully secured legal rights for rivers, forests, and mountains. Granting rights to nature has the potential to expand environmental protections, strengthen indigenous rights, promote sustainable development, and alter how humans relate to nature.
Standing for Nature offers advocates a blueprint for creating, implementing, and safeguarding rights of Nature laws. This book looks closely at four examples New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, and the United States to explain why these laws have been successful in some places but not others. Through this comparative exploration, the authors highlight key strategies for advancing rights of Nature laws in the United States and around the world. These lessons include an examination of different legal traditions to better understand which is the best form of law judicial, legislative, or regulatory for advocates to target; how to ensure effective implementation once a law is passed; and how to shift communal perspectives on the human-Nature relationship for better implementation and enforcement. This book is essential for environmental lawyers, policy makers, and advocates interested in gaining new knowledge and tools for championing rights of Nature laws in their own communities.
Dana Zartner is a professor in the International Studies Department and adjunct professor at the School of Law at the University of San Francisco. She has served as an accredited representative at UN meetings, including the Committee on Women’s Rights in New York and the Expert Mechanisms on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva. She is the author of Courts, Codes, and Custom: Legal Tradition and State Policy Toward International Human Rights and Environmental Law.
Fabian Cardenas is a professor of International Law at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and director of the Centre of Studies on Law and Sustainability. He has worked with the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Mohammad Golam Sarwar is an assistant professor of law at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh and a doctoral researcher at SOAS, University of London. He has served as a legal consultant to the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UN Development Programme, and the International Labour Organization.
Praise for Standing for Nature:
“I can thoroughly recommend Standing for Nature if you want to delve into the opportunities and challenges facing environmental justice and legal innovation. This book has changed my world view, placing nature as an equal to humanity, which is essential if we are to continue to derive benefits from the services that nature provides.”
The Biologist
Threat Multiplier
Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security
Sherri Goodman
September 2024 | 264 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. We learn how the military evolved from an environmental laggard to a climate and clean energy leader. And we discover how a warming world exacerbates every threat from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases. No one knows the stakes better than Sherri Goodman, the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, also known as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security). In Threat Multiplier, she offers a front row seat to the military’s fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.
Sherri Goodman has been a leader in environmental, energy, and climate security since she served as the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security). She is credited with educating a generation of US military and government officials about the nexus between climate change and national security, using her famous coinage, “threat multiplier,” to fundamentally reshape this field.
December 2024 | 222 pages | World rights available
In Building for People, architect and ecodistrict planner Michael Eliason makes the case for low-carbon ecodistricts and presents practical tools for developing these residential and mixed-use communities. As cities turn brownfields into green fields and look to maximize public investment in transit and infrastructure, ecodistricts are the answer. Eliason shows that this type of affordable, climate-adaptive living option is possible anywhere.
Full-color photos and illustrations show what is possible in ecodistricts through examples around the world. Looking at small districts like Steingau in Kirchheim unter Teck, to massive urban redevelopment like Vienna’s Sonnwendviertel and Seestadt-Aspern as models, Eliason argues that building regulations and planning processes must change to make these livable neighborhoods possible.
Michael Eliason is an architect and founder of Larch Lab part architecture and urbanism studio, part “think and do” tank focusing on research and policy, decarbonized low-energy buildings, and climate adaptive urbanism.
Multisolving
Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World
Elizabeth Sawin
November 2024 | 256 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Finalist, 2025 getAbstract International Book Award, “Business Impact” category
Multisolving is a simple but powerful idea: using a single investment of time or money to solve many problems simultaneously. In a world that tends to approach complex, deeply intertwined societal issues from siloes, it offers a hopeful vision for holistic change.
This unique resource is for anyone working to fight climate change, reduce hunger, advance social justice, conserve biodiversity, or otherwise make a difference and who senses all these issues are tied together. It may also be for you: doing the work you know is imperative but that is sometimes overwhelming and often faces opposition from well-heeled interests.
Multisolving can’t promise a list of “fifty simple things to make everything OK.” It does offer strategies to build solidarity between diverse groups, overcome powerful interests, and create lasting progress that benefits all.
Elizabeth Sawin is Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute and an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of ‘multisolving’ to help people see and create conditions for such win-win-win solutions.
Science With Impact
How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy
Anne Helen Toomey
November 2024 | 296 pages | World rights available
Will you please just listen to me? If you are a scientist, or a fan of science, have you ever wondered why your fact-based explanation of ground-breaking scientific research falls flat with family, friends, and the general public? Social science communicator Anne Helen Toomey argues that science today faces a public-relations crisis, and she calls for a whole-scale change in how scientists engage with the world.
This practical, how-to guide will help scientists address public distrust, communicate about uncertainty, and engage with policymakers so that science can make a difference. Science with Impact argues that science can and should make a meaningful difference in society, and offers hope and guidance to those of us who wish to take the steps to make it so.
Anne Helen Toomey is n associate professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University, a visiting scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, and the executive director of Participatory Science Solutions LLC, a social-impact research consulting company. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
Meet Me at the Library
A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy
Shamichael Hallman
October 2024 | 204 pages | Rights sold: Japanese
We are facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, with troubling effects on our mental and physical health. How do we create spaces for people to come together to open our minds, understand our differences, and exchange ideas?
Shamichael Hallman argues that the public library may be our best hope for bridging these divides and creating strong, inclusive communities. While public libraries have long been thought of as a place for a select few, increasingly they are playing an essential role in building social cohesion, promoting civic renewal, and advancing the ideals of a healthy democracy. Many are reimagining themselves in new and innovative ways, actively reaching out to the communities they serve. Meet Me at the Library offers us a revealing look at one of our most important civic institutions and the social and civic impact they must play if we are to heal our divided nation.
Shamichael Hallman is a social, civic, and tech innovator. He serves as the Director of Civic Health and Economic Opportunity at the Urban Libraries Council. Prior to this, he was the Senior Library Manager of the historic Cossitt Library in Memphis Public Libraries.
The Banks We Deserve Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy
Oscar Perry Abello
February 2025 | 152 pages | World rights available
In The Banks We Deserve, journalist Oscar Perry Abello argues that community banking has a crucial role to play in addressing urgent social challenges, from creating a more racially just economy to preparing for a changing climate.
Abello tells the stories of new community banks like Adelphi Bank, the first new Black bank in 20 years; or Walden Mutual Bank, the first mutual bank chartered specifically to finance a more sustainable food system. For a community or industry that is being ignored by big banks, the idea of starting up a new bank or credit union rarely figures as an option. In The Banks We Deserve, Abello shows advocates, organizers, and innovators that it can be done, that it is being done, and describes a path to support more community banks and credit unions.
Oscar Perry Abello is a journalist covering alternative economic models and policies across the United States. He is currently the senior economic justice correspondent for Next City, an independent, not-for-profit, online publication covering cities from the lens of social, racial, and environmental justice. His writing has also appeared in Yes! Magazine, City & State New York, Impact Alpha, Shelterforce, and other outlets.
Naturalist
A Graphic Adaptation
Edward O. Wilson, Adapted by Jim Ottaviani and C.M.Butzer
November 2020 | 240 pages | Full color | Rights sold: Chinese (Simplified), Korean
Regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists, Edward O. Wilson spent his boyhood exploring the forests and swamps of south Alabama and the Florida panhandle, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants the latter to become his lifelong specialty. His memoir Naturalist, called “one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written” by the Los Angeles Times, is an inspiring account of Wilson’s growth as a scientist. This graphic edition, adapted by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by C. M.Butzer, brings Wilson’s career to life through dynamic full-color illustrations and Wilson’s own lyric writing.
In this graphic adaptation of Naturalist, vivid illustrations draw readers in to Wilson’s lifelong quest to explore and protect the natural world. His success began not with an elite education but an insatiable curiosity about Earth’s wild creatures, and this new edition of Naturalist makes Wilson’s work accessible for anyone who shares his passion. On every page, the striking art adds immediacy and highlights the warmth and sense of humor that sets Wilson’s writing apart. Naturalist was written as an invitation a reminder that curiosity is vital and exploration is open to all of us. Each dynamic frame of this graphic adaptation deepens Wilson’s message, renewing his call to explore and celebrate the little things of the world.
Edward O. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including The Ants and On Human Nature, both of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He was Faculty Emeritus in the Museum of Comparative Zoology and Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus at Harvard University.
Jim Ottaviani has written a dozen graphic novels about scientists. His most recent books are Hawking, The Imitation Game, Primates, and Feynman. His books are New York Times bestsellers, have been translated into over dozen languages, and have received praise from publications ranging from Nature and Physics World to Entertainment Weekly and Variety
C. M.Butzer is an illustrator, printmaker, and cartoonist. His work has appeared in numerous books, publications, and textiles, including Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel. Butzer is also a storyboard and concept artist whose clients have included Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Praise for Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation:
“Breezy and accessible...this hearty graphic memoir is poised to inspire a new generation of naturalists.”
Publishers Weekly
“Ottaviani’s adaptation is astonishingly detailed Butzer’s illustrations are charming... Wilson’s life is undoubtedly a rich and fascinating one.”
Booklist
“This is a wonderful idea brilliantly executed…The story captures Wilson’s warm, gentle humor, his sense of adventure, and his passion for his work… It’s a must-have for Wilson fans…but will also reach a new generation of readers. A perfect gift for the comic book fan or budding naturalist on your list.”
Cool Green Science
Planetary Health
Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves
Edited by Samuel Myers and Howard Frumkin
August 2020 | 536 pages | Rights sold: French, Italian, Japanese
Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.
Interdisciplinary in nature, Planetary Health explores how accelerating environmental change affects each dimension of human health. It then turns to the rich terrain of solutions, reimagining our cities, our food systems, our energy sector, the chemicals we use, even our economics and our ethics. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic introduction to a field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world.
Samuel Myers, MD, MPH is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and founding Director of the Planetary Health Alliance. Dr. Myers served as a Commissioner on the Lancet-Rockefeller Foundation Commission on Planetary Health. He was the inaugural recipient of the Arrell Global Food Innovation Award in 2018 for research quantifying the impacts of environmental change on human nutrition. He has also been awarded the Prince Albert II of Monaco Institut Pasteur Award for research at the interface of global environmental change and human health.
Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH is emeritus professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where he was Dean from 2010-2016. He was previously head of Our Planet, Our Health at the Wellcome Trust and director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His other books include Environmental Health: From Global to Local and Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability
Praise for Planetary Health:
“Planetary Health should be on the reading list of all health professionals because they have an important part to play as we strive for planetary health.” The Lancet
“If I could place a copy of this book in every home, every school, and on the desk of every public official, I would. Hope, wonder, awe, and respect are written into every page. So is a call to care.”
Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land and Writer in Residence, Harvard Divinity
“...by the end of the book, it seems difficult to imagine a better framework for understanding Earth’s contemporary human-environmental dynamics. This book is a must-read for anyone passionate about creating better outcomes for more people, far into the future." The Dirt
Built Environment
Movement
Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet
May 2024 | 288 pages | World rights available
“This book will no question make you think in new ways. Why have we surrendered our cities to cars? What might it be like to inhabit a space designed for people instead? It’s exciting and hopeful this we can do!” Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon
In Movement, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert Marco te Brömmelstroet (“the cycling professor”) take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed and look at how they could be different. Verkade and te Brömmelstroet draw inspiration from the Netherlands and look at what other countries are doing, and could do, to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer.
Bicycle City
Daniel Piatkowski
May 2024 | 244 pages | World rights available
In Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future cycling expert Daniel Piatkowski argues that the bicycle is the best tool that we have to improve our cities. The car-free urban future where cities are vibrant, with access to everything we need close by may be less bike-centric than we think. But bikes are a crucial first step to getting Americans out of cars.
Piatkowski offers pragmatic lessons drawn from the latest research along with interviews, anecdotes, and case studies from around the world. Electric bikes are demonstrating the ability of bikes to replace cars in more places and for more people. Cargo bikes are replacing SUVs for families and delivery trucks for freight. At the same time, mobility startups are providing new ownership models to make these new bikes easier to use and own, ushering in a new era of pedal-powered cities. Bicycle City is about making cities better with bikes rather than for bikes.
Killed By a Traffic Engineer
Wes Marshall
April 2024 | 344 pages | Rights sold: Audio, Chinese (Simplified)
Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.
Built Environment
Human Transit, Revised Edition
Jarrett
Walker
February 2024 | 320 pages | Rights sold: Chinese (Simplified)
The first edition of Human Transit, published in 2011, has become a classic for professionals, advocates, and interested citizens. Walker has updated and expanded the book to deepen its explanations. New topics include the problem with specialization; the role of flexible or “demand response” services; how to know when to redesign your network; and responding to tech-industry claims that transit will soon be obsolete. Finally, he has also added a major new section exploring the idea of access to opportunity as a core measure of transit’s success.
No other book explains the basic principles of public transit in such lively and accessible prose, all based on a respect for your right to form your own opinion. Walker’s goal is not to make you share his values, but to give you the tools to clarify and advocate for yours.
Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
Danielle Arigoni
October 2023 | 224 pages | World rights available
In Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation, community resilience and housing expert Danielle Arigoni argues that we cannot achieve true resilience until communities adopt interventions that work to meet the needs of their oldest residents.
Arigoni explores how to integrate age-friendly resilience into community planning and disaster preparedness efforts through new planning approaches. These include an age-friendly process, and a planning framework dedicated to inclusive disaster recovery.
Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation will help professionals and concerned citizens understand how to best plan for both the aging of our population and the climate changes underway to create communities that serve the needs of older adults better, not only during disasters but for all the days in between.
People, Planet, Design
Corey Squire
November 2023 | 392 pages | World rights available
In the US, design choices made by the typical architecture firm employee each year can reduce emissions by about 300 times that of an average American. What if great design were defined by its ability to cool the planet, heal communities, enhance ecological functioning, and advance justice?
In People, Planet, Design, architect Corey Squire builds the case, provides the data, and lays out the practical tools for human-centered architecture. This approach integrates beauty and delight with an awareness of every design choice’s impact. Outcome-focused with a deep dive into practical strategies, the book showcases ten building systems that embody design excellence. Essential reading for architects who want to transform what the profession means, People, Planet, Design pioneers a new vision and sets readers up with clear guidance for implementation.
Science and Nature
What a Bee Knows
Stephan Buchmann
March 2023| Rights sold: Audio, Chinese (Simplified), Italian
The next time you hear the low buzzing sound of an approaching bee, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She might be responding to scents on the breeze as her olfactory organs provide a 3D map of an object’s location. She might be tracing the route based on her memories of a particular flower or the electrostatic traces left by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious pathways and experience their complex and alien world.
Although their brains are incredibly small just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible.
Thing
Samuel Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado with Steven M. Wise
June 2023 | | 240 pages | Full color | World rights available
Happy the elephant is intelligent, social, and self-aware and considered a thing in the eye of the law. Led by lawyer Steven M. Wise, the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed cases on behalf of captive nonhuman animals like Happy since 2013, arguing that their autonomy entitles them to certain legal rights. In Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood, comic artists Sam Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado bring together Wise’s groundbreaking work and their own illustrations in the first graphic nonfiction book about the animal personhood movement. Beginning with Happy’s story and the central ideas behind animal rights, Thing then turns to the scientists that are revolutionizing our understanding of the minds of such nonhuman animals as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales.
Purified
Peter Annin
November 2023 | 248 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Water shortages are plaguing communities from coast to coast, and recycled water could help close that gap. In Purified: How Recycled Sewage Is Transforming Our Water, veteran journalist Peter Annin shows that wastewater has become a surprising weapon in America’s war against water scarcity. In five waterstrapped states California, Texas, Virginia, Nevada, and Florida current filtration technology is transforming sewage into something akin to distilled water, free of chemicals and safe to drink. But sensationalist media coverage has repeatedly crippled water recycling efforts. Can public opinion turn in time to avoid the worst consequences?
Purified’s fast-paced narrative cuts through the fearmongering and misinformation to make the case that recycled water is direly needed in the climate-change era. Water cannot be taken for granted anymore and that includes sewage.
Science and Nature
Swamplands
Edward Struzik
October 2021 | 312 pages | Rights sold: Audio
In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into an Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches hang low over dismal swamps. Places like these–collectively known as swamplands or peatlands–often go unnoticed for their ecological splendor. They are as globally significant as rainforests, yet, because of their reputation as wastelands, they are being systematically drained and degraded.
Swamplands celebrates these wild places, as journalist Edward Struzik highlights the unappreciated struggle to save peatlands by scientists, conservationists, and landowners around the world. An ode to peaty landscapes in all their offbeat glory, the book is a demand for awareness of the threats they face.
The Cartoon Guide to Climate Change, Revised Edition
Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein
May 2022 | 224 pages | First edition rights sold: Croatian, Chinese (Simplified), French, Russian, Turkish
When The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change was first published in 2014, it offered something entirely new: a fun, illustrated guide to a planetary crisis. If that sounds like an oxymoron, you’ve never seen the carbon cycle demonstrated through yoga poses or a polar bear explaining evolution to her cubs.
That creativity comes from the minds of Yoram Bauman, the world’s first and only “stand-up economist,” and award-winning illustrator Grady Klein. After seeing their book used in classrooms and the halls of Congress alike, the pair has teamed up again to fully update the guide with the latest scientific data. Sociologists have argued that we don’t address climate change because it’s too big and frightening to get our heads around. The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change takes the intimidation and gloom out of one of the most important challenges of our time.
In Search of Nature
Edward O. Wilson
Fall 1996 | 224 pages | Rights sold: Audio, Chinese (Simplified), Korean
Perhaps more than any other scientist of our century, Edward O. Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves, but for what it can tell us about human nature and our own behavior. The grace and precision with which he writes of seemingly complex topics has earned him two Pulitzer prizes. In Search of Nature presents for the first time a collection of Wilson’s seminal short writings, addressing in brief and eminently readable form the themes that have actively engaged this remarkable intellect throughout his career.
Health, Food, and Water
Barons
Austin Frerick
March 2024 | 248 pages | Rights sold: Audio, Vietnamese
“In this eye-opening debut study, Frerick… reveals the ill-gained stranglehold that a handful of companies have on America’s food economy…It’s a disquieting critique of private monopolization of public necessities.” —Publishers Weekly, starred
Barons is the story of eight titans of the food industry, their rise to power, and the consequences for workers, eaters, and democracy itself. Readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up independent roasters. They will visit the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. Barons paints a stark portrait of corporate consolidation, but it also shows that a fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.
Water Management
Shimon C. Anisfeld
May 2024 | 312 pages | World rights available
Climate tech is critical for averting planetary chaos. Half the greenhouse gas reductions required to reach “net-zero” climate targets in 2050 will need to come from technologies that have not yet been invented. Making Climate Tech Work is an insightful analysis of how smart government policies can make those technologies a reality. Which approaches can lead us to a sustainable economy, and which are likely to fall short? Learn how Denmark became a wind energy superpower, Germany incentivized renewables, Australia phased out incandescent bulbs, and why carbon taxes have failed around the world – but could be designed for success. Alon Tal expertly distills each policy’s benefits and drawbacks, along with related ethical questions and public perceptions. The result is an essential primer for anyone interested in accelerating climate tech solutions.
A New War on Cancer
Kristina Marusic
May 2023 | 216 pages | Rights sold: Audio
Fifty years into the war on cancer, nearly twenty percent of all Americans die from the disease. Astonishingly, up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes. In searching for answers, Kristina Marusic met remarkable doctors, scientists, and advocates who are upending our understanding of cancer and how to fight it. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease. For Berry, a young woman whose battle with breast cancer is woven throughout these pages, the fight has become personal. Marusic shows that, collectively, we have the power to prevent many cases like Berry’s. The war on cancer is winnable if we revolutionize the way we fight.
Health, Food, and Water
Making Healthy Places, Second Edition
Edited by Nisha Botchwey, Andrew Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin
May 2022 | 552 pages | Rights sold: Chinese (Simplified)
Making Healthy Places surveys the many intersections between health and the built environment, from the scale of buildings to the scale of metro areas, and across a range of outcomes, from cardiovascular health and infectious disease to social connectedness and happiness. This new edition is significantly updated, with a special emphasis on equity and sustainability, and takes a global perspective. It provides current evidence not only on how poorly designed places may threaten well-being, but also on solutions that have been found to be effective.
Making Healthy Places is a must-read for students, academics, and professionals in health, architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, parks and recreation, and related fields.
The Economics of Sustainable Food
Edited by Nicolette Batini
June 2021 | 320 pages | World rights available
Producing food industrially like we do today causes tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation.
The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book’s multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals.
Overtourism
Edited by Martha Honey and Kelsey Frenkiel
May 2021 | 400 pages | World rights available
Overtourism charts a path toward tourism that is truly sustainable, focusing on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and prosperity. This practical book examines the causes and effects of overtourism before turning to emerging management strategies. Visitor education, traffic planning, and redirection to lesser known sites are among the measures that can protect the economic benefit of tourism without overwhelming local communities. As tourism revives around the world, these innovations will guide government agencies, parks officials, site managers, civic groups, environmental NGOs, tourism operators, and others with a stake in protecting our most iconic places.
Business and Economics
The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom
Erik Nordman
July 2021 | 256 pages | Rights sold: Chinese (Simplified)
Fifty years ago, conventional thinking among economists and environmentalists was that depletion of natural resources could only be prevented through the free market or government regulation. This notion was upended by Elinor Ostrom, whose work to show that regular people could sustainably manage their community resources won her the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ostrom’s revolutionary proposition fundamentally changed how we think about environmental governance.
In The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, author Erik Nordman brings to life Ostrom’s brilliant mind. Her message of shared collective action is more relevant than ever for solving today’s most pressing environmental problems.
Green Growth That Works
Edited by Lisa Mandle, Zhiyun Ouyang, James Salzman, and Gretchen C. Daily
September 2019 | 336 pages | Rights sold: Audio, Chinese (Simplified)
Rapid economic development has been a boon to human well-being, but comes at a significant cost to the fertile soils, forests, coastal marshes, and farmland that support all life on earth. If ecosystems collapse, so eventually will human civilization. One solution is inclusive green growth the efficient use of natural resources. Its genius lies in working with nature rather than against it.
Green Growth That Works is the first practical guide to bring together pragmatic finance and policy tools that can make investment in natural capital both attractive and commonplace. Pioneered by leading scholars from the Natural Capital Project, this valuable compendium of proven techniques can guide agencies and organizations eager to make green growth work anywhere in the world.
Ecological Economics, Second Edition
Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley
October 2010 | 544 pages | Rights sold: Chinese (simplified), Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese
This introductory-level textbook describes a relatively new “transdiscipline” that incorporates insights from the biological, physical, and social sciences. It provides students with a foundation in traditional economic thought, but places that foundation within a framework that embraces the linkages among economic growth, environmental degradation, and social inequity. The second edition of Ecological Economics provides a clear overview of a field of study that continues to grow in importance. It remains the only stand-alone textbook that offers a complete explanation of theory and practice in the discipline.
