Environment + Sustainability | Recommended Reading, Part 3
While Earth Week may look a little different this year as communities around the world are staying home, the changing environment is still top of mind at The New School. With centers, labs, research, courses, and degrees dedicated advancing climate policy and environmental justice, The New School is fully committed to environmental responsibility.
For this week’s Recommended Reading, we reached out to our community and asked what they’re reading during Earth Week.
“This is the moment to create an entirely new, resilient system.” -Timo Rissanen
Recommendation from Timo Rissanen, Associate Professor Fashion Design and Sustainability at Parsons, and Associate Director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center
I recommend Earth Logic by my Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion (UCRF) co-founders, Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham. It’s free to download here. While an action research plan for fashion, its fundamental position is the one for our time: we need to put Earth first, and we need to see ourselves and all we do as an intrinsic part of Earth. The economic growth logic that has governed our activities for decades has left us in a precarious position, tragically highlighted by the COVID-19 crisis. This is the moment to create an entirely new, resilient system, arising from an entirely different logic, and Fletcher and Tham guide us along in this work.
Recommendation from Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw, BFA Communication Design ’16 and BA The Arts ’16
I am into animism and the potential it has to make significant change in the ways in which humans relate to the environment. In my art and research, I am constantly thinking about the ways that the relationship between so-called individuals and their environments are a fractal, which lies somewhere at the crossroads of nature, culture, and psyche/spirit. I ask myself, how does this way of understanding the world break down the hierarchies made by a heteropatriarchal, white supremacist ordering of things, blurring the boundary between life/non-life, self/other, human/non-human? How can this change in orientation–a self-transformation–lead to, inform, influence, and coincide with cultural, societal, and environmental transformation, and vice versa? At this moment where our interconnectedness and interdependence is perhaps clearer than ever, it is the perfect time to meditate on some of these ideas and how they can be enacted–either now or in the future–to catalyze significant ecological (which includes the social) change.
There are many books–some academic, some fictional storytelling, some both–which have helped me to think about this. I recommend the following:
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives by Macarena Gomez-Barris
Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds by Marisol de la Cadena
Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing
Recommendation from Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
Instead of recommending a book, let me point you to the public syllabus and other resources I have put together with a small group of Milano faculty and students in relation to the Climate Emergency and broader matters of just sustainabilities, politics, and policies. This is a website we host through the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment, and it contains books, articles, videos, slideshows and a whole rationale to share with the public.
Recommendations from Dr. Emmanuel Cohen, Art and Design History and Theory faculty and First Year Coordinator and Faculty at Parsons Paris
I am planning to read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé. You can imagine that, in France right now — as it is the case and most countries actually — newspaper articles and TV and radio shows too are all discussing ways to cook in the current constrained world we live in. The topics of sustainability and waste keep coming up but my knowledge is really patchy on this topic. Although this book was written in 1971, this reference keeps coming up, so I plan on reading first and then move on to more recent books and articles. Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food from 2008 is also on my list, for quite similar reasons.
Recommendations from Mia White, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy — I recommend this book for Earth Day because despite erroneous claims of our belonging to a “post-racial” society, we very much don’t — and as such, we continue to benefit from nature writers of color who are often only considered “recommended” and not “required” reading. These writers write nature, and through their labor demonstrate how nature is not “outside” our experience — nature is very much a human praxis. This book offers a complex and rich set of nature accounts that pivot away from what is often the majority “despair” mode of climate-awareness, emphasizing the real diversity required for building liveable futures.
Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, with Jasmine Syedullah — I’ve learned to recommend this book as a support system to students who have often asked me how to maintain a sense of hope and optimism as they navigate course materials, research and social media which point to a dire environmental outlook. The challenge is that our environmental histories and ongoing challenges are marked by empire, colonialism, white supremacies, capitalisms, patriarchies, and an ongoing cult of the individual which together, can present lifelong traumas (and secondary traumas) for which we all require spiritual guidance. This book helps me as an educator, a parent and a lifelong student. I hope it may help others as well.
Also, a favorite poem “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay:
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
Recommendations from the Tishman Environment and Design Center
Earlier this year, the Tishman Environment and Design Center created a list of books published in the past decade that they believe essential in understanding the how’s and why’s of climate change and the systemic injustices that underline it. While every book on their list provides crucial insight into our current moment three of these books — The Winona LaDuke Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice by Winona LaDuke, and Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, and Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells — stood out as their must-reads for Earth Week 2020.
Recommendations from The New School’s Urban Systems Lab
The importance of taking an integrative look at our urban environment, and a systems approach to problem solving is needed now more than ever. With over 100,000 downloads Urban Planet: Knowledge towards Sustainable Cities, co-edited by New School Associate Professor Timon McPhearson, is an essential text for our challenging times. This open access resource includes perspectives of often neglected voices: architects, journalists, artists and activists on the major challenges we are facing, and the possibility of envisioning alternative futures. In addition, Urban Policy Lab also recommends the books:
Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal
Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Ric
Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why Environmentalists Should Care by Giorgos Kallis
Imaging the Future of Climate Change by Shelley Streeby’s
Oval by Elvia Wilk
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
Essays and articles:
“The Quarantine files” by the LA Review of Books.
“Maintenance and Care: A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations” by Places Journal
“Heaven Hath Limits” by Michael Sauter
Podcasts:
For the Wild podcast, Episode 138: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
No One Is Too Small to make a Difference by Greta Thunberg
As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke
Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace by Vandana Shiva
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki
My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
10 Billion by Stephen Emmott
Author’s note: If you’re interested in purchasing any of the books above, we hope you consider ordering through your local bookseller! We’ve linked each book to its respective website on IndieBound.com, for easy access in finding and supporting a bookstore near you.
Want more recommended reading? Check out Part 1: Poetry for Difficult Times, and Part 2: Cooking and Crafts to #StayHome.
