Apt, Jay, Michael Herlfert, and Justin Wilkinson. 1996.
Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth
. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 224pp. (This is a rich source of photographs from space, organized by continent and emphasizing land formations, geologic processes, weather systems, and human alteration of the globe.)
Carson, Rachel. 1998.
Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson
. Boston: Beacon Press, 267pp. (This collection of "youthful writing, newspaper essays, field journals, speeches, articles, and letters" of Rachel Carson includes her powerful January 1963 address to the Garden Club of America, entitled "A New Chapter to Silent Spring."
Carson, Rachel. 1962, 2002.
Silent Spring
(40th anniversary edition). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 378pp. (In his history of the global environmental movement, McCormick writes, "The single event most frequently credited as signifying the beginning of the environmental revolution was the publication in 1962 of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.")
Carson, Rachel. 1950, 2003.
The Sea Around Us
(an illustrated commemorative edition). New York: Oxford University Press, 274pp. (This recent edition well exemplifies Susan Sontag's "increasingly common way of presenting photographs in book form" by associating photographs with written narrative and "quotes.")
Gore, Al. 2006.
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It
. Emmaus, PA and New York: Rodale Books/Melcher Media, 328pp. (The book and the film have generated considerable interest in the general public and the scientific community.)
Marsh, George Perkins. 1864, 2003.
Man and Nature
. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 472pp. (Marsh's ground-breaking book on a broad range of ecological issues is remarkably current in its subject matter. A forward by Bill Cronon and an introduction by David Lowenthal set the context for reading
Man and Nature
one hundfred sixty years after its original publication.)
Miller, G. Tyler, Jr. 2002.
Living in the Environment: Principles, Connections, and Solutions
(twelfth edition). Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole -- Thomson Learning, 758pp+appendices. (This is the text I use for the AP Environmental Science course I teach. New editions appear in alternate years.)
Raven, Peter H., and Linda R. Berg. 2001.
Environment
(third edition). Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt College Publishers, 612pp+appendices. (Chapter 3 Addressing Environmental Problems, Part II includes an excellent overview of the environmental movement in the United States, with reference to key historical figures, a case study on "Old-Growth Forests of the Pacific Northwest," and an articulation of environmental ethics and environmental worldviews. Historical (pre-flooding) and contemporary photographs of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite exemplify the approach to environmental education that is the basis of this unit.)
Wilson, Edward O. 2002.
The Future of Life
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 229pp. (Edward O. Wilson is our leading scientist in the study of biological diversity and our most gifted naturalist-writer. From his prologue letter to Thoreau to his proposed solution to the long-term prospect of biological impoverishment on Earth, he makes a rational and impassioned case for the "preservation of the living world" in terms of "our material prosperity and health" as well as the "defining qualities and self-image of the human species.")
Wilson, Edward O. 1994.
Naturalist
. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 380pp. (This is a fascinating biographical account of Wilson's development as the world's spokesperson for the protection of biological diversity and environmental common sense.)
