Top 10 Eco-Books

                                    Feeling blue? ... the future of planet Earth is in our hands. Photograph: Corbis

 

From the despair of nuclear bombs to the hope of nuclear technology, the environment journalist picks out green books that are both positive and negative about our planet's future

 

I am not a tree hugger. Nor a people hater. For me, as an environment journalist for 30 years, the story is about people and how they work, live and dream on planet Earth. And how we – seven billion of us, and counting – can keep up the mad dance of civilisation in an ever more crowded and resource-depleted world. Luckily, I am an optimist. 

 

These books contain some stories of potential horrors ahead, like Bill McGuire's Waking the Giant. But we can and do step back from the abyss. John Hershey's Hiroshima, is a receding nightmare.
I have spent the past two years researching the current global frenzy of land-grabbing for my new book The Landgrabbers (Eden Project Books). It was a sobering journey. But I don't doubt that we can – as Lynas proposes – continue to live sanely and successfully into the future. Even so, if Lovelock is right that we are now Gaia's brain, then we have some hard thinking to do.

1. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

Something deep in the ocean has grabbed control of the Earth. Sea levels begin to rise. London floods. Our hero is on a mission to find out what is happening to the planet before it is too late. A tale of climate change? Well, no. Wyndham was writing his sci-fi thriller long before global warming was a gleam in any boffin's eye. But the story of how society collapses under the environmental onslaught is terrifyingly contemporary.

2. The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham

The British landscape is richer and more layered with the remains of human activity than almost any other. This is the classic telling of how a curious amalgam of nature and nurture has moulded moorland and fen, hedgerow and woodland. Much that is ancient persists. Simply country lanes turn out to be sunken "greenways" dating back thousands of years. But vital features such as dewponds, mires, sacred springs and wildwoods are disappearing. Rackham, a Cambridge botanist and landscape antiquarian who lives near Grantchester meadows, opens our eyes with wonderful humanity. They say a squirrel could once have crossed Britain without having to touch ground. Oh, but it's much more interesting than that.

3. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock

This is Lovelock's first, slimmest and best telling of his marvellous thesis that planet Earth is, to all intents and purposes, a living organism that has evolved to manage its environment to suit the living things that comprise it. Planet Homeostasis. Richard Dawkins hates the very idea, but no matter. How could selfish genes be so altruistic? But actually Lovelock proposes nothing more subversive to science than that the planet's organisms can act together as a super-organism, like bees in a hive. He ends with the proposition that Gaia needs a brain, and we may be it. This is environmental science at its best, rigorous but mind-blowing. A work of wonder.

4. The Ultimate Resource by Julian L Simon

To many, this is an anti-eco book. An economist tells why there are no limits to growth, why Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and the rest of the doomsayers simply don't understand the ability of humans to come up with answers. That necessity is the mother of invention. The past may not be an infallible guide to the future, and Simon's addiction to free-market economics may be absurd (markets are an invention of man not a law of nature, and should be cast aside if they fail us). But his optimism about our inventiveness (the ultimate resource of the title) is important. We may need environmental doomsters to point out the planetary perils, but we surely need optimists like Simon to encourage our response. Otherwise we may give up, head for the hills and party to the end.

5. Waking the Giant by Bill McGuire

Just out, and dreadfully alarming. Bill McGuire, a distinguished geologist and brilliant science writer, charts how changing climate may trigger not just wild weather but also volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Perhaps it already is. The last time that ice caps were melting and sea levels were rising, geology was in overdrive. Faults shuddered, magma melted and mayhem followed. As McGuire persuasively shows, it could be kicking off again. This is science so scary that even the climate scientists widely dismissed as alarmists do not dare speak of it.

6. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Most of us live in cities. They are the environment we know best. This classic assault on town planners almost single-handedly destroyed the arrogance of 20th-century modernists who wanted to build homes and cities as "machines for living in". As if we too were machines. Cities don't need zoning and shopping malls and industrial estates; they need back alleys and unplanned corners, where humans can be human and a chaotic jumble can take over. She may have been writing about the US, but she makes you cry afresh for the vandalism inflicted on Britain in the past half century.

7. Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

I went to Montana, to the beautiful badlands on the American prairies, a couple of years ago. It is magnificently empty, dotted with abandoned shacks and haunted by big skies, the sound of wind and freight trains carrying coal west. I met a dentist who had a part-time ranch the size of the Isle of Wight. Raban's extraordinary bitter-sweet romance is about how this forgotten corner of America, once the new frontier for migrants, got this way. This empty. It is a story of broken dreams and recurring nightmares, of a socialist past and a sometimes rabid Republican present. It is about what happens when people and the land don't get along.

8. The God Species by Mark Lynas

This is a brave book by a green who changed his mind. After years writing about our environmental perils, Lynas decided that technology was not our nemesis but our saviour. Many greens feel profoundly betrayed. But Lynas has not renounced his concerns about climate change and the other "planetary boundaries" that he says threaten our life-support systems. He just thinks those concerns are so important we can no longer have the luxury of seeing being green as a lifestyle choice. Whatever we may feel, we cannot rule out GM seeds or nuclear technology. To say otherwise is dilettante foolishness at least as irrational as that of climate sceptics.

9. Hiroshima by John Hersey

I was brought up in the shadow of the bomb. One day, before I went to school, my dad told me what to do if I saw a mushroom cloud in the sky during lunch break. This was during the Cuban missile crisis, when many though that what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen any moment to Maidstone and Maidenhead. Hershey's contemporary report of what actually did happen to Hiroshima and its people – how an entire city was destroyed one bright sunny morning with one piece of munitions – is journalistic brilliance. These days, we are inclined to forget what nuclear weapons can do. This is a chilling reminder. Not even our worst climate-change nightmares can compare.

10. Beyond the Last Village by Alan Rabinowitz

We hacks call him the Indiana Jones of conservation. Alan Rabinowitz goes out and finds undiscovered species in some of the most remote places on Earth. Places we thought the world was too crowded to sustain any longer. His narrative of a journey into the back woods of northern Burma, on the southeastern-most edge of the Himalayas, is beautifully written, sharp-eyed and mysterious. It feels like Conrad's Heart of Darkness in reverse, as he escapes the "civilisation" of a brutal military regime to find peace and light in the farthest lands. A Shangri-la.

This list was compiled by Fred Pearce@The Guardian