Are you an SEJ member who's authored, co-authored or edited a non-fiction or fiction environmental book (published in 2009) you'd like included on this page? Please send the following to web content manager Cindy MacDonald:

1. a one-paragraph description
2. name of publisher and year of publication
3. ISBN number
4. .gif or .jpg cover image (optional)
5. Internet link to more information (optional) 

Members' books published in: 2010, 2008, or 2007 and earlier.

Advertise your 2009 or 2010 environmental book in the book-review pages of our quarterly newsletter SEJournal. For only $48 for four issues, keep your book title in front of the membership and subscribers for one full year. Download a form to fax or mail (requires free Adobe Reader ®). SEJ members only.

Non-Fiction

Air: Our Planet's Ailing Atmosphere

By Hans Tammemagi

The Earth's atmosphere is beautiful, complex and vital to all living beings. It also links all creatures and is the great commons. Air describes how scientists unraveled the complexity of the atmosphere, and also explains its declining quality including smog, acid rain, ozone depletion and global warming. With a rising population, more synthetic chemical production and ever more complex technology, even worse threats than global warming are on the way. Solutions are proposed. Air is a vital read on an issue of rapidly growing urgency. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-543007-3. More information.

The Crooked Mile: Through Peak Oil, Biofuels, Hybrid Cars, and Global Climate Change to Reach a Brighter Future

By Kevin Clemens

Americans love their automobiles. More than a mode of transportation, cars provide us with freedom, social equality, and entertainment. The price we pay for our infatuation with four wheels is high. Air pollution, global climate change, energy insecurity, injury and death, and urban sprawl are fair charges against the automobile. Some critics suggest we abandon the automobile. This is not likely. In The Crooked Mile, award-winning automotive journalist, Kevin Clemens, has rolled up his sleeves and met with the men and women who are working on the front lines in the search for answers to the planet's most pressing problems. From the cab of a roaring diesel-powered corn combine in Michigan, to the moonscape left behind by mountain top removal coal mining in West Virginia, to standing on top of the reactor vessel of an operating nuclear reactor in Minnesota, Clemens reports on a path through the challenges we face. Some of the people he encountered have names found in the front-page headlines — others have toiled for years in the relative obscurity of their laboratories. Each has a story to tell, and in The Crooked Mile, Clemens weaves together their experiences into a compelling narrative. Surprisingly, given the potential for gloom and despair, The Crooked Mile manages to find optimism that could eventually lead to a brighter future. 290 pages, 23 photographs. Demontreville Press, Inc. 2009. ISBN 978-0-9789563-3-2. More information.

Green Your Work: Boost Your Bottom Line While Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

By Kim Carlson

Eco-preneur, writer and green lifestyle expert Kim Carlson reviews the range of short-, medium- and long-term solutions to greening the workplace as a means towards reducing operating costs, fostering happy employees, cultivating business ethics and ultimately increasing revenues and profitability. "Every organization can benefit from greening their business," explains Carlson, who has greened five of her own businesses and hundreds of others over the course of 25 years. Everything from renovating an existing space to building from the ground up; choosing the appropriate greenery for landscaping; greening the fleet, product and package; and establishing policies and protocols are explained insightfully and practically by Carlson. She then goes on to suggest how to effectively market "green" to customers, constituents and the community, and even reveals some major blunders she's made along the road to environmental sustainability. Adams Media, 2009. ISBN 1-59869-905-9. More information.

How the West Was Warmed: Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies

Edited by Beth Conover, with essays by John Daley, Todd Neff, Michelle Nijhuis, Hillary Rosner, and Florence Williams

Melting glaciers. Pine beetle infestation. Drought. Carbon footprints. Green jobs and promises of a new energy economy... When the venerable Aspen Skiing Company starts talking about the "death of snow," even the most determined deniers start to wonder, what is going on? This enlightening collection of essays develops a portrait of the wide range of responses to climate change in the Rocky Mountain West. For more than two decades, this region has been a leader in addressing climate change, and today it is a hub of solutions to this pressing global issue. Written by more than forty veteran journalists (including SEJ members John Daley, Todd Neff, Michelle Nijhuis, Hillary Rosner, and Florence Williams), scientists, businesspersons, and policy makers, these essays show us how climate change has and continues to affect the ways in which we live, work, and play. An alternative to the many dry scientific books and how-to greening manuals about global warming, How The West Was Warmed provides insight, hope, and a little dose of humor for inspiration. Fulcrum Publishing, 2009. ISBN 193621802X. More information.

Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss

By Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite

"This is an exhaustive, timely, and devastating account of the destruction of Florida's wetlands, and the disgraceful collusion of government at all levels. It's an important book that should be read by every voter, every taxpayer, every parent, every Floridian who cares about saving what's left of this precious place." — Carl Hiaasen. Authored by Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite. University Press of Florida, 2009. ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3286-3. ISBN 10: 0-8130-3286-5. More information.

Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life

By Nancy Lord

For Nancy Lord, what began as a yearning for adventure and a childhood fascination with a wild and distant land culminated in a move to Alaska in the early 1970s. Here she discovered the last place in America "big and wild enough to hold the intact landscapes and the dreams that are so absent today from almost everywhere else." In Rock, Water, Wild, Lord takes readers along as she journeys among salmon, sea lions, geese, moose, bears, glaciers, and indigenous languages and ultimately into a new understanding, beyond geographic borders, of our intricate and intimate connections to the natural world. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8032-2515-2. More information.

Save Gas, Save the Planet

By John Addison

Millions of Americans are now reducing their transportation carbon footprint by riding clean, riding less, and riding together. Explore clean vehicles that are becoming available and affordable including electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, hydrogen vehicles, turbodiesels, and new cars with great mileage. See how the best employers promote flexible work and commute programs. Learn how families and friends are taking new approaches to sharing gas misers, gaining free time in the process. Develop new insights in the future of transportation, the auto industry, and into the great fuel race. This book, by John Addison, can be a helpful resource when writing transportation related articles. The solutions to saving money and saving the planet are now available. Optimark Inc., March 2009. ISBN 978-0-9722337-2-9. Look inside Save Gas, Save the Planet.

Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit's Hidden River

By Joel Thurtell and Patricia Beck

In Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit's Hidden River, Joel Thurtell and Patricia Beck tell how and why they explored by canoe 27 miles of Detroit's polluted, logjam-choked Rouge River. Thurtell, since retired, was a Detroit Free Press reporter and Beck is a Free Press photographer. The two journalists took newspaper readers where they could not go by paddling, towing, pushing, pulling, poling a canoe 27 miles up the river that lent its name to Henry Ford's massive Rouge automobile plant. Their October 2005 Detroit Free Press series won the 2006 Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Achievement in Public Education from the Water Environment Federation. While Beck recorded the trip on film, Thurtell described what happened on a digital audio recorder. It is a gripping tale. They captured the look and sound of the industrialized Lower Rouge and the secluded, urban wilderness of the Rouge Main Branch in Detroit. It was hard, dangerous work. The narrative and photos capture the tension and the awesomeness of the river. They struggled over, around or through 72 logjams, one dam and three dam ruins. They had close encounters with barges, combined sewer outlets draped with toilet paper, and near disasters as they traversed massive logjams. The stench of sewage at times was intense, yet they found beauty and astounding wildlife. A prologue and epilogue explain how the river came to be so polluted and discuss why, despite much improvement and huge expenditures of money, its condition is deteriorating. Wayne State University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8143-3425-6.

Fiction

2045: A Story of Our Future

By Peter Seidel

Global warming, environmental degradation, the rapid pace of technological innovation, and the economic stresses of globalization and concentration of economic power give rise to much concern for the future. How will these dynamic factors play out? In this dystopian novel, environmental expert Peter Seidel has created and brings to life a stark and haunting vision of a world on the near horizon. Prometheus Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-59102-705-8.

Primitive

By Mark Nykanen

A neo-primitive cult uncovers classified government data that documents terrifying new information about methane and global warming. To gain attention for their cause, the group kidnaps a model in the twilight of her career and holds her hostage, forcing this symbol of rampant consumption to act as their spokesperson in podcasts from their remote, hidden compound. As time runs out, the prisoner's estranged daughter allies with the American and Canadian political underground to rescue her, battling murderous agendas from the government and Big Oil along the way. Bell Bridge Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9821756-4-4. More information.