The Green Book Club

Perhaps taking a cue from Oprah’s Book Club, the folks at Triple Pundit are running a contest to create a “must read” list for sustainability professionals of all stripes. Looking over the nominations, I noted several titles on my bookshelf I’ve read, including: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, and From Green to Gold by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston, and some others I’m currently reading including, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto by Adam Werbach and The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni.

Of all the books I’ve read on this topic over the past year, as a trained engineer I like the scope and insights of Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must Be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff and the “can-do” approach of The Step-by-Step Guide to Sustainability Planning by Darcy Hitchcock and Marsha Willard. Finally, although not a sustainability text per se as defined in the contest, one of my earliest inspirations in this arena came when I read Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller (without dating myself I’ll tell you he signed my copy).  I think his discussion of energy accounting, as an example, foreshadows the entire concept of carbon accounting as we now know it.

So dear reader, what are your favorite “green” titles?