Hot, Flat, and Crowded by
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Best Book of the Year A Businessweek Best Business Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year In this brilliant, essential book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America's urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet--one that is "hot, flat, and crowded." In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession. The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its economy, but to lead the world in radically innovating toward cleaner energy. And it could inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, and concern for the common good that are our greatest national resources. Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge--and the promise--of the future.
Chew on This by
Kids love fast food. And the fast food industry definitely loves kids. It couldn't survive without them. Did you know that the biggest toy company in the world is McDonald's? It's true. In fact, one out of every three toys given to a child in the United States each year is from a fast food restaurant. Not only has fast food reached into the toy industry, it's moving into our schools. One out of every five public schools in the United States now serves brand name fast food. But do kids know what they're eating? Where do fast food hamburgers come from? And what makes those fries taste so good? When Eric Schlosser's best-selling book, Fast Food Nation, was published for adults in 2001, many called for his groundbreaking insight to be shared with young people. Now Schlosser, along with co-writer Charles Wilson, has investigated the subject further, uncovering new facts children need to know. In Chew On This, they share with kids the fascinating and sometimes frightening truth about what lurks between those sesame seed buns, what a chicken 'nugget' really is, and how the fast food industry has been feeding off children for generations. Featuring cover art by M. Wartella.
The Way We Eat by
A thought-provoking look at how what we eat profoundly affects all living things--and how we can make more ethical food choices Five Principles for Making Conscientious Food Choices 1. Transparency: We have the right to know how our food is produced. 2. Fairness: Producing food should not impose costs on others. 3. Humanity: Inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals is wrong. 4. Social Responsibility: Workers are entitled to decent wages and working conditions. 5. Needs: Preserving life and health justifies more than other desires. Peter Singer, the groundbreaking ethicist who "may be the most controversial philosopher alive" (The New Yorker), now sets his critical sights on the food we buy and eat: where it comes from, how it's produced, and whether it was raised humanely. Teaming up once again with attorney Jim Mason, his coauthor on the acclaimed Animal Factories, Singer explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment. In The Way We Eat, Singer and Mason examine the eating habits of three American families with very different diets. They track down the sources of each family's food to probe the ethical issues involved in its production and marketing. What kinds of meat are most humane to eat? Is "organic" always better? Wild fish or farmed? Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make the best food choices. As they point out: "You can be ethical without being fanatical."
The Atlas of Food by
What we eat, where we eat, and how we eat: these questions are explored in this remarkable book, now with a new introduction contextualizing the atlas for 2013 and beyond. By providing an up-to-date and visually appealing understanding of important issues around global food and agriculture, The Atlas of Food maps out broad areas of investigation#151;contamination of food and water, overnutrition, micronutrient deficiency, processing, farming, and trade#151;to offer a concise overview of today's food and farming concerns. Buttressed by engaging prose and vivid graphics, Erik Millstone and Tim Lang convincingly argue that human progress depends on resolving global inequality and creating a more sustainable food production system.
Full Planet, Empty Plates by
With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. "In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil," Lester R. Brown writes.What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world's shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.
What I Eat by
A stunning photographic collection featuring portraits of 80 people from 30 countries and the food they eat in one day. In this fascinating study of people and their diets, 80 profiles are organized by the total number of calories each person puts away in a day. Featuring a Japanese sumo wrestler, a Massai herdswoman, world-renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria, an American competitive eater, and more, these compulsively readable personal stories also include demographic particulars, including age, activity level, height, and weight. Essays from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, journalist Michael Pollan, and others discuss the implications of our modern diets for our health and for the planet. This compelling blend of photography and investigative reportage expands our understanding of the complex relationships among individuals, culture, and food.
The Globalization of Food by
Globalization has become perhaps the most central--and one of the most contested--terms in the social sciences in the present day. If one wishes to understand the conditions in which different groups of people live today, it seems increasingly impossible to ignore the aspects of those conditions that are seen to be characterized, or influenced, by "global" forces, movements and phenomena. Regarding particular phenomena, no matter how apparently "local" or parochial in nature, as being located within "global" flows or systems or structures, seems today to be a very necessary component of any effective sort of social investigation. Many social scientific scholars in the last decade or so have engaged in a "global turn" in their thinking, investigating key areas and facets of human life--such as work, economy, cities, politics, and media--in terms of how these are being affected, influenced and changed by (what can be taken to be) "globalizing forces." Themes of inter-societal, trans-societal and cross-planetary connections, structures, processes and movements are increasingly central across the social sciences, including sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, economics, international relations, and many humanities disciplines too. Moreover, such themes--and the controversies and polemics often attached to them--have become common currency in many spheres outside the academy, with politicians, businesspeople, political activists and citizens of all varieties taking up ideas associated with "globalization," and deploying them both to make sense of, and also sometimes to try to change, the world around them. This book covers the issues of globalization as they relate to food. Contributors include Carole Counihan, Alan Warde, Pat Caplan, Alex McIntosh, Rick Wilk, Jeff Sobal, Marianne Lien and Krishnendu Ray.
Green Metropolis by
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York.Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan- the most densely populated place in North America -rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
Six Degrees by
Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is what readers of Al Gore's best-selling An Inconvenient Truth or Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point will turn to next. Written by the acclaimed author of High Tide, this highly relevant and compelling book uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report projecting average global surface temperatures to rise between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Based on this forecast, author Mark Lynas outlines what to expect from a warming world, degree by degree. At 1 degree Celsius, most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. A 3-degree rise would spell the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, disappearance of Greenland's ice sheet, and the creation of deserts across the Midwestern United States and southern Africa. A 6-degree increase would eliminate most life on Earth, including much of humanity. Based on authoritative scientific articles, the latest computer models, and information about past warm events in Earth history, Six Degrees promises to be an eye-opening warning that humanity will ignore at its peril.
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