Clear some space in your bookshelf; you’re going to need it after perusing this shortlist of the best books on sustainability.
Whether you’re a sustainability guru or wannabe no-waste newbie, these environmental sustainability books offer loads of low-impact learning opportunities to help you become more informed, inspired, and excited to do your part to protect our planet.
And contrary to what you might think, they don’t have to be heavy—either in technical jargon or in the heart. While some are certainly heavier than others, our top sustainbility books provide accessible, understandable, and empowering language that shows all is not lost.
So let’s get reading and ready to make a positive change. And if you need some ideas for what to do with the old books you’re clearing out to make room for these, watch our video below.
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Contents: The Best Books On Sustainability
- Drawdown Jump to section
- Let My People Go Surfing Jump to section
- Nature's Best Hope Jump to section
- The Store Of More Jump to section
- Is It Really Green? Jump to section
- This Changes Everything Jump to section
- Eating Animals Jump to section
- The Uninhabitable Earth Jump to section
- The Lorax Jump to section
Drawdown
By: Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken is a passionate environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and founder of Project Drawdown, a not-for-profit organization that “seeks to help the world reach “Drawdown”—the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline.”
The New York Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming outlines the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming that already exist today, providing a pathway towards a sustainable future.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
Let My People Go Surfing
By: Yvon Chouinard
One of the best sustainability books written by a one-of-a-kind entrepreneur. Yvon Chouinard is an environmental activist, rock climbing legend, CEO, and founder of Patagonia.
Part memoir, part business treatise, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman takes the reader through his life, from humble dirtbag making outdoor gear in his garage to building arguably the best sustainable outdoor clothing company in the world.
Entertaining as much as it is inspiring, it provides a clear picture of what it means to have corporate responsibility and the positive change that can bring about.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
Nature's Best Hope
By: Douglas W. Tallamy
The most dangerous threat to our planet isn’t plastic pollution and waste; it’s the loss of biodiversity. We can’t stop farms from destroying wildlife habits with pesticides, or logging companies from razing forests, but we can achieve significant individual impact by learning how to increase biodiversity at home.
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard shows how anyone with a backyard, however big or small, can aid in the restoration of local wildlife populations.
Essentially a sustainable gardening book, Tallamy shows the enormous impact one person’s gardening habits can make. Something simple as planting more native species (the elimination of which has largely led to our biodiversity bungle), we can combat the extinction of insect and animal species.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
The Store Of More
By: Hope Jahren
The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here is a “pocket primer on climate change”: what it is, how it started, and what we can do about it.
Author and scientist Hope Jahren helps readers understand climate change on an intimate level. Rather than berating us with facts and figures, she takes readers on a journey from Mesopotamia to the now, through speculated causes and contributors, outlining our dire trajectory.
After drawing a clear (and guilt-free) picture of the root of the issues, she takes us into the future to look at the projected consequences and potential remedies. All while maintaining an encouraging tone that reassures us that it isn’t too late.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
Is It Really Green?
By: Georgina Wilson-Powell
If you find yourself yo-yoing between activism and apathy, Is It Really Green?: Everyday Eco Dilemmas Answered is the book for you. Georgina provides clarity for more than 140 everyday green-living questions. She clears up confusion, sheds light on common actions and their consequences, and ultimately instills confidence in the reader’s ability to make a difference. Ultimately, it’s one of the best books about sustainability for those who are confused about what we can actually do to save the planet—so, all of us.
Think of her as the good angel on one shoulder when you’re faced with decisions like: What’s better, plastic vs glass? Or what’s really necessary for a zero waste kit?
Georgina is also the original founder of Pebblemag, before it came under the Sustainable Jungle umbrella.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
This Changes Everything
By: Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein dropped the mic on the environmental world with her original bestseller, The Shock Doctrine, where she boldly claimed that anything short of serious systematic changes, will spell the end of our world.
Hyped by Time Magazine as the “first truly honest book ever written about climate change”, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate: addresses the greatest challenge of our generation from an economic and political perspective.
Environmental problems aren’t removed from other societal problems like wealth inequality and broken democracies. Rather than trying to fix the environment by fixing the economy (aka “disaster capitalism”), Klein argues for precisely the opposite. As the name accurately implies, it’s perhaps one of the most important sustainability books of the decade.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
Eating Animals
By: Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer wasn’t always a vegan. Heck, he wasn’t always an environmental writer, but rather a novelist. Now, it’s hard to think of a list of the top sustainable food books that doesn’t include Eating Animals.
After beginning to question why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out on a global investigative journey to learn about various cultural meat-eating traditions. Why do we eat meat? What are the ethical and environmental ramifications of doing so?
Importantly, Safran’s food sustainability book is not a vegan guilt trip or polarizing lecture on animal consumption and what foods are sustainable, but rather a gentle journey of discovery that leads readers to make up their own minds.
Follow it up with his latest, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
The Uninhabitable Earth
By: David Wallace-Wells
The award-winning, best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming draws a vivid image of what the world will look like if we do.not.change. There is no shortage of potential horrors as Wallace-Wells lays down a necessary no-B.S. picture of the urgency of the climate crisis.
While alarmism is the order of the day, this book is a lyrical and provocative wake-up call that society may just need to prioritize climate change. If reading this book scares you, it should. Fear is one mechanism that can move us to action.
Available: Better World Books | Amazon
The Lorax
By: Dr. Seuss
This 1971 childhood classic continues to be enjoyed by anyone who “cares a whole awful lot” about our home. It’s timeless insight into the magic of earth’s natural beauty reveals how we’re undermining it. Not only is The Lorax one of the best children’s books about sustainability, but it’s also one of the best summaries of our ecological crisis for readers of any age.
You might see it for what it is—colorful pages and a call to protect our earth—but children can find solace in the fun word plays, rhymes, and images found in each page.
After your lil’ environmentalist becomes enthralled with the magic of nature, follow it up with How to Help the Earth-By the Lorax. This Step into Reading book by Tish Rabe, Christopher Moroney, and Jan Gerardi provides child-friendly suggestions for going green.
