Lots of books came out on energy, climate and the economy this year. Here are the best ones that integrate all three areas.
Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment. A couple titles focus on responses to the myriad conundrums that Richard Heinberg has dubbed “peak everything” and that are now converging to create a perfect storm for global industrial civilization.
Along with Heinberg, we list books by peak oil stalwarts John Michael Greer and Dmitry Orlov along with a few newcomers. Only one of the books this year is fiction, which we regret, since we think that peak oil writers have underused storytelling as a way to reach a wider audience by making complex and sometimes scary issues more accessible and less intimidating. We hope that next year, more novelists and short story writers will be inspired to take on peak oil. If nothing else, it would make a great premise for a variety of genres, from political thriller to science fiction to horror.
Heck, we won’t be satisfied until we’re at the checkout counter at Rite Aid and see peak oil as the background for a bodice-ripper romance. For now, there’s lots of good reading below. Enjoy.
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The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment by Chris MartensonJohn Wiley & Sons, 317 pp, hardcover, $27.95. More than a million people have watched Chris Martenson’s video series “The Crash Course” to prepare for financial collapse. The new book version is even better. |
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Lethal Trajectories by R. Michael ConleyBeaver’s Pond Press, hardcover, 486 pp, $24.95. A political thriller that offers the perfect geopolitical storm for the age of peak oil: threat of war with China, a Saudi coup and economic collapse at home. |
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The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times by Rob HopkinsChelsea Green Publishing, 320 pp, $29.95. Despite a heavy focus on the British Isles, the revised version of the beloved Transition Handbook still offers plenty for Americans and others who would re-localize their town’s economy. |
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The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered by John Michael GreerNew Society Publishers, 298 pp, $18.95. A thoroughly engaging and accessible revision of Adam Smith and classical economics that reminds us that wealth from either human labor or financial capital relies on resources that nature provides for free. |
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Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects by Dmitry OrlovNew Society Publishers, revised and updated 2011, 194 pp, $17.95. The latest edition of Dmitry Orlov’s doomer classic sees a Soviet-style collapse coming to the US. We won’t handle it as well as they did. But he finds hope if we can wake up. |
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The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler…The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl by Duncan CraryNew Society Publishers, 320 pp, $16.95. Printed adaptations of more than 100 hours of Crary’s online radio interviews with the colorful author of The Long Emergency and the World Made by Hand novels. |
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The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul GildingBloomsbury, 292 pp, hardcover, $25. This year’s weird weather from the US Midwest to Pakistan could be the climate disasters that environmentalists have said would end denial once and for all. Or not. |
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The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard HeinbergNew Society Publishers, 286 pp, hardcover, $17.95. Heinberg, co-founder of the Post Carbon Institute and author of numerous books on peak oil, now tackles the subject of economic growth. He argues our economy will need to learn to live without growth in the future and that this could be the best thing that ever happened to it. |
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Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby BlumeSkyhorse Publishing, 304 pp, $16.95. Since most people in the industrial world live in cities, urban homesteading is an increasingly desirable strategy to build household resilience. But it can feel intimidating. What’s it all about? Dig in to this accessible book to find out. |
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Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition by Carolyn BakeriUniverse, 201 pp, $25.95. Preparing for the peak-ocalypse involves more than storing cans in the basement. Former psychotherapist Baker provides mental tools for emotional and spiritual preparation. |
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— Erik Curren
That’s a great list of ten fine books, but out ahead in a different league is David Fleming’s ‘Lean Logic – A Dictionary of the Future and How to Survive It’
Lean Logic does not conform.
It is a community of essays about inventive, cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty.
Lean Logic acknowledges, with honesty, the challenges ahead in finding our way out of an economy that has all but destroyed the very foundations upon which it depends – the climate, the complex ecological system and the community and culture which gives meaning to life.
But rather than inducing despair, Lean Logic is rare in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our ecology back to health, to rediscover the importance of place and play, of community and culture, and of reciprocity and resilience.
It is not a book to read from start to finish. Begin in the middle, with something, anything, that sparks your interest, and let the signposts pull you through a chaotic web of ideas, brimming with humour and originality, with elegance and contradiction.
Lean Logic is a dictionary of empowerment..
Hardback 736 pages £30 from http://www.leanlogic.net/
Looks interesting, Biff. Thanks for the recommendation!
Excellent list.
+1 for Lean Logic. Rob (Hopkins) swears by it. It’s sitting on my desk waiting for me to finish a couple of others. David Fleming (RIP 2010) was the architect of Tradable Energy Quotas (probably the closest to a silver bullet I’ve seen – http://www.darkoptimism.org/2011/01/23/all-party-parliamentary-teqs-report-launch/) and started the Green Party (initially called the Ecology Party) in his kitchen many years ago.
Post Carbon Reader was pretty good too.
Yep, Lean Logic gets a vote from me too. I may be biased as the author David Fleming became a close friend of mine in the last five years of his life, but then again I may not, as the reason we became such close friends was because his ideas were so bloody interesting and inspiring! 🙂 More on him available on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fleming_%28writer%29
I’m still dipping in and out of Lean Logic, but I’m finding it packed with perspective-altering connections and brilliant insights.
Lean Logic fans are clearly very loyal! I have to admit that a 700-page reference book sounds daunting, but you’ve just about got me convinced. It sounds like some deep-think that’s worth digging into.
In addition I would add:
When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival by Matthew Stein and James Wesley Rawles (Nov 16, 2011)
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin (Sep 27, 2011)
Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate ChangeReclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by David Holmgren (Aug 23, 2011)
The Impending World Energy Mess by Roger Bezdek, Robert Wendling and Robert Hirsch (Apr 12, 2011)
Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse by Gillian Fallon, Richard Douthwaite and Richard Heinberg
Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it
Thanks for the suggestions, Three Es. The Third Industrial Revolution just come out and we’re eager to read and review it. Some of these titles actually came out in print in earlier years, though the Kindle Editions may be 2011, and I can also recommend Future Scenarios and Fleeing Vesuvius. And we put The Impending World Energy Mess on our top ten book list for last year: https://transitionvoice.com/2010/12/top-10-peak-oil-books-of-2010/.