Vera Said:

Environmental consulting career question - Essential Reading list?

We Answered:

This is a list of books and magazines about current environmental issues. One of the goals of Earth Day 1990, the twentieth anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970, was to initiate a new decade of environmental awareness and action, to match and surpass that of the 1970s, during which so many advances were made in assessing and combating the problems of our planet. The national library can best contribute to the environmental cause by suggesting representative sources of information. These and other recent publications on the environment may be available in your local public, university, or school library, or may be found or ordered in bookstores.

A great many significant publications have appeared since the 1994 edition. While sampling these and inserting a number of the relevant, diverse and provocative, we have continued to add contributions by and about precursors and founders of the environmental movement, while retaining many of the classic publications from earlier editions of this list. While some of these might be dated in various respects, they reflect the history of what we now call the environmental movement, and have lost none of their historical relevance.

Some of the titles in this list could have been placed in several categories. For example, problems documented in the section on biodiversity and biological conservation (part IV) depend greatly on other factors such as the population explosion, increasing consumption, and habitat loss, discussed elsewhere in the list. However, due to limitations of space, we have attempted to place each specialized entry under the most appropriate heading, without cross-indexing. (The quotation from John Muir, which begins this list, reminds us that everything is connected.)

The list is revised biennially.