Sixth Form Recommended Reading

Environmental Systems and Societies

“ Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do. ” Michel de Montaigne

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. In the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding of it grows. Now Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career, with new chapters on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral. Field Notes from a Catastrophe remains as necessary as ever, and a must-read for our moment.