8 sustainability books to learn and get inspired

Do you want to learn more about sustainability or raise awareness? Then read or share these sustainability books from our list below. We’ve carefully selected the best books on sustainability that challenge your thinking, and uplift and inspire you to act. (You also might want to explore our list of 12 sustainability documentaries).

1. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Noami Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate provides you with a detailed analysis of how we need to change the economic system to stop global warming, and why massive civil disobedience is the only way forward to make this change happen – in the short time we still have. It’s one of the most important and best climate change and sustainability books ever written.

2. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things you learn about a design approach that goes beyond reduce, reuse, recycle, and aims to eliminate the concept of waste in the first place.

3. Let My People Go Surfing – A sustainability book on a reluctant businessman

The sustainability book Let My People Go Surfing inspires you with Yvon Chouinard’s story of founding and running Patagonia, Inc. – one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer challenges the current mindset to approach problems in isolation. This book on sustainability introduces you to systems thinking, as a new way to see the world’s biggest problems ― war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation― from a holistic perspective.

5. Doughnut Economics

The sustainability book Doughnut Economics takes you on a journey to explore the question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow? It’s one of the best sustainability books for students who are interested in economic models that combine both socio-economic and environmental sustainability.

6. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

Lester Brown’s book Plan B 4.0 helps you to envision a new energy economy and the steps to achieve it.

7. Braiding sweetgrass

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s sustainability book, Braiding Sweetgrass, you discover a new way to see nature through the eyes of factual, objective science enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people.

8. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

This is one of the few sustainability books that won the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. The planet has seen five mass extinction in its history. We’re currently witnessing the Sixth Extinction; a mass ecocide of animals, plants and insects. This book on sustainability explores its causes and impacts.

Learn more

You might also be interested in these topics:

• 12 sustainability documentaries to watch
• 8 best global warming documentaries to learn about climate change
• 12 global warming documentaries