The profiled books tackle our most vexing global challenges, including globalisation, climate change and poverty.
Dr Wayne Visser is CEO of CSR International, Visiting Professor of Social Responsibility at Manheim University, Germany, and has written and edited a number of publications for the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership.
The Sustainability Bookshelf: Our Pick of the Best
Wayne Visser
The Top 50 Sustainability Books The Top 50 Sustainability Books, 1 published in 2009, draws together some of the best thinking over the past 50 years and more on the most pressing social and environmental challenges we face as a society. The selection was based on a poll of CPSL’s global alumni network and included many authors who have become household names in the environmental, social, and economic justice movements – from Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and EF Schumacher to Vandana Shiva, Muhammad Yunus and Al Gore. Others, such as Aldo Leopold, Thomas Berry and Manfred Max-Neef, were relatively undiscovered gems, whose work should be much more widely known.
The profiled books tackle our most vexing global challenges, including globalisation (e.g. Globalization and Its Discontents and No Logo), climate change (e.g. Heat and The Economics of Climate Change) and poverty (e.g. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and Development as Freedom). Some of the featured thoughtleaders are highly critical of the status quo (e.g. David Korten, Eric Schlosser and Joel Bakan), while others suggest evolutionary ways forward
(e.g. Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken and Jonathon Porritt). Some place their faith in technological solutions (e.g. Janine Benyus, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker), while others are upbeat about the potential of business to be a force for good (e.g. John Elkington, Ricardo Semler, William McDonough and Michael Braungart).
- After its publication, The Top 50 inevitably
- sparked lively debates in the media about
- which authors and books had been left out. 2
- One of the most frequently cited, for example,
1 CPSL, Wayne Visser (2009) The Top 50 Sustainability Books. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing 2 See The Guardian website for a healthy dose of the dialogue and suggestions http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ blog/2010/jan/27/top-50-green-books
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Figure 1 – Word Cloud for the CPSL 2010 Top 40 Sustainability Books (Titles). Created using Wordle TM www.wordle.net was Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air by Cambridges David MacKay, although this was published in 2009 after our book was released. There were also questions about whether the list had been too heavily weighted in favour of recent years, with more than half of the selected books published in the noughties (2000 and after). And there were suggestions that more popular practitioner books like Green to Gold by Daniel C Esty and Andrew S Winston should have made the list. Some felt that some high-impact classics like The Whole Earth Catalogue by Stewart Brand were missing, as were influential thinkers like Lester Brown, author of Plan B, among many others.
Since we never planned for our list to be exhaustive or definitive, we regard all the debate as good and healthy – and we hope it continues. At the same time, The
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Top 50 seemed to strike a chord with many. Crosslands Bulletin called it “quirky and fun but also engrossing and unsettling in a good way”, saying that “the list amounts to something far more than the sum of its 50 separate pieces.” And Ethical Performance concluded that it was “not only an excellent idea but, more importantly, well executed... It would be ideal if everyone read all these books in their original form, but this crash course is the next best thing.” Our sentiments exactly.
- The 2010 Top 40 Sustainability Books
- For this 2010 State of Sustainability Leadership
- report, we decided to take a fresh new
- look at books, this time focusing on those
- published in 2010. The Top 40 list included
- here was compiled by CPSL with input
- from its Senior Associates. Comparing this
- list to our Top 50 books, we can observe a
The 2010 Top 40 Sustainability Books
- A ccounting for Sustainability (Anthony Hopwood, Jeffrey Unerman & Jessica Fries)
14. Globalizing Responsibility (Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke & Alice Malpass)
2. Adaptation to Climate Change in Southern Africa (Steffen Bauer & Imme Scholz)
15. Finders Keepers? (Terence Daintit)
- A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Nicholas Stern)
16. Harmony (HRH The Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly)
- B uilding Social Business (Muhammad Yunus)
17. How Bad Are Bananas? (Mike Berners-Lee)
- C ents and Sustainability (Michael H. Smith, Karlson ‘Charlie’ Hargroves & Cheryl Desh)
18. Innovative CSR (Céline Louche, Samuel O. Idowu & Walter Leal Filho)
- The Climate Files (Fred Pearce)
19. Integrated Sustainable Design of Buildings (Paul Appleby)
- C orporate Community Involvement (Nick Lakin & Veronica Scheubel)
20. Nature and Culture (Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Prett)
- CSR for HR (Elaine Cohen)
- The New Pioneers (Tania Ellis)
- CSR Strategies (Sri Urip)
10. Dynamic Sustainabilities (Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones & Andy Stirling)
- The Economics of Climate Change in China (FAN Gang, Nicholas Stern, Ottmar Edenhofer, XU Shanda, Klas Eklund, Frank Ackerman, Lailai LI and Karl Hallding)
22. The New Rules of Green Marketing (Jacquelyn A Ottman)
23. Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid (Ted London & Stuart L Hart)
- Our Choice (Al Gore)
12. Factor Five (Ernst von Weizsacker Karlson ‘Charlie’ Hargroves, Michael H Smith, Cheryl Desha & Peter Stasinopoulos)
25. Peoplequake (Fred Pearce)
13. Freefall (Joseph E Stiglitz)
- T he Power of Sustainable Thinking (Bob Doppelt)
- The Positive Deviant (Sara Parkin)
The Sustainability Bookshelf: Our Pick of the Best 95
- Prosperity Without Growth (Tim Jackson)
- Requiem for a Species (Clive Hamilton)
- Responsible Business (Manfred Pohl & Nick Tolhurst)
- The Responsibility Revolution (Jeffrey Hollender & Bill Breen)
32. Smart Solutions to Climate Change (Bjorn Lomborg)
33. The Spirit Level (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett)
- Sustainability Education (Paula Jones, David Selby & Stephen Sterlin number of changes. The ‘All Time Top 50’ list included a fairly balanced coverage of social and environmental issues. By contrast the ‘2010 Top 40’ list is heavily skewed towards environmental challenges, and dominated by climate change. The Top 50 contained numerous treatises on capitalism and globalisation, while the Top 40 (in the wake of the financial crisis) has shifted almost exclusively to a focus on the economy. The Top 40 also has a much stronger emphasis on business responses and creating change. In fact, it is altogether a more pragmatic list, with titles that contain words like ‘plan’, ‘how to’, ‘strategy’ and ‘guide’. This shift to actionorientation is a positive development, as is the increase in the number of female authors (28%, as compared with 17% for the Top 50),
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35. Sustainability in Austerity (Philip Monaghan)
- The Sustainable MBA (Giselle Weybrecht)
- 37. Tackling Wicked Problems (Valerie A
- Brown, John A Harris & Jacqueline Y Russell
38. Too Smart for Our Own Good (Craig Dilworth)
39. The Top 50 Sustainability Books (CPSL, Wayne Visser)
- 40. The World Guide to CSR
- (Wayne Visser & Nick Tolhurst) although the gender imbalance remains.
- Among the books on our Top 40 list that have
- been creating a real buzz are Tim Jackson’s
- Prosperity Without Growth, Richard Wilkinson
- and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level and The
- Prince of Wales’s Harmony. Jackson’s book
- revives a much older debate about ‘economics
- for a finite planet’, led since the 1970s by the
- likes of former World Bank economist Herman
- Daly (Steady State Economics and Beyond
- Growth). Jackson restates the challenge starkly:
- “Questioning growth is deemed to be the
- act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.
- But question it we must.” While others like
- Jonathon Porritt (in Capitalism as if the World
- Matters) argue for ‘smart growth’ instead of
- ‘dumb growth’, the global financial crisis has given Jackson’s more uncompromising zerogrowth position a renewed resonance.
Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level, subtitled ‘Why More Equality is Better for Everyone’, is a highly complementary partner to Jackson’s book. Using a plethora of data and analysis, the authors build a case that countries should focus on equity rather than growth in order to create healthy societies. In countries of equal overall wealth, argue Wilkinson and Pickett, less equal societies suffer more social ills – shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; higher rates of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; poorer relationships between socio-economic classes; and higher environmental impacts through resource consumption. The book has created some controversy, and some dispute the authors’ arguments. Nevertheless, its message is timely and urgent.
Harmony is an entirely different book, which looks at social and ecological problems through a more aesthetic and philosophical lens. The Prince of Wales, together with Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, range far and wide across the intellectual and practical territory
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combining the best of modern science and technology with the wisdom of traditional ways, in order to restore the balance between humans and nature.
HRH The Prince of Wales, Patron of CPSL, photographed by Julie Bergman Sender
Harmony has now been made into a documentary film, which premiered on NBC in November 2010. It follows the great tradition of other educational films over the past ten years, such as The Corporation (2003), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007) and The Age of Stupid (2009), to mention but a few. In 2010, two new films that continued this tradition were Carbon Nation, which is described as “an optimistic (and witty) discovery of what people are already doing, what we as a nation [America] could be doing and what the world needs to do to prevent (or at least slow down) the impending climate crisis,” 3 and GasLand, which is an investigative documentary about the “trail of secrets, lies and contamination” behind the natural gas drilling boom in the United States. 4 of sustainability, questioning many widely held beliefs and modern assumptions about nature and society. The book reveals The Prince’s deeply held perspectives on the interconnectedness of life, and illustrates how this can be (and is being) applied to secure a more sustainable future. This beautifully presented and data-rich book proposes
3 IMDB, The Internet Movie Database – www.imdb.com
4 http://www.gaslandthemovie.com
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We look forward to hearing your views and suggestions about what books and films are pushing the envelope in 2011.
- The Top 50 Sustainability Books is available
- to order via the website of the University of
- Cambridge Programme for Sustainabilty
- Leadership, www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk , as are video
- interviews with a range of the featured authors.