Here is a list of some of our favorite books from different authors. Please read them if you haven't already. If you have, spread the word about them!

1. Ishmael - An adventure of the Mind and Spirit.  By: Daniel Quinn

In 1989 Ted Turner created a fellowship to be awarded to a work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. The winner, chosen from 2500 entries worldwide, was a work of startling clarity and depth: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, a Socratic journey that explores the most challenging problem humankind has ever faced: How to save the world from ourselves.

The book opens with a deceptively ordinary personals ad: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world." Seeking a direction for his life, a young man answers the ad and is startled to find that the teacher is a lowland gorilla named Ishmael, a creature uniquely placed to vision anew the human story.

Ishmael's paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one.

That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren't born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the world.

Since Bantam first published Daniel Quinn's utterly unique novel Ishmael in 1992, the novel has grown into a bestseller. Ishmael has garnered rave reviews and has been adopted for classroom use in schools coast-to-coast, including Dartmouth, the Naval Academy and Stanford University. Along the way, Ishmael gathered a devoted following as thousands upon thousands of readers have written to Quinn to express how the book has changed their lives.

Quinn's first version of the award-winning novel was written in 1977 and was followed by seven more complete and distinct versions. The character Ishmael appeared only in the eighth, and final, version. This is also the only version written as a novel. "I was ready to admit defeat when Ted Turner announced his plans for the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship. I felt, if I read him right, he was looking for exactly the sort of book I was struggling to write, and this encouraged me to give it one more try. I'm certainly glad I did."

Quinn says Ishmael is a story about hope. "I think we have a much finer and more exciting destiny than conquering and ruling the world," he says. "This book shows that we can learn about what that destiny is from the life around us -- and in Ishmael it just happens that life speaks with the voice of a lowland gorilla."

2. My Ishmael ² – Daniel Quinn

Unbeknownst to the narrator of Ishmael, a second pupil responded to the ad in the paper ("Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world") -- twelve-year-old Julie Gerchak, whose interaction with Ishmael results in a dialogue strikingly different from the one found in Ishmael...

An excerpt...

"You know," I said, "there's something you could do that would help me a lot. I don't know if I have any business asking, but there it is."

Ishmael frowned. "Have I given you the impression that my program here is not subject to change? Do I really seem to you so rigid that I'm unwilling to accommodate you?"

Oops, I said to myself, but after thinking about it for bit, I decided not to be apologetic. I said to him, "It's probably been a long time since you were a twelve-year-old girl talking to a thousand-pound gorilla."

"I don't see what my weight has to do with it," he snapped.

"Well, all right, a hundred-year-old gorilla."

"I'm not a hundred years old, and I weigh less than six hundred pounds."

"Good Lord," I said. "This is beginning to sound like something from Alice in Wonderland."

Ishmael chuckled and asked me what he could do that would be helpful.

"Tell me what you think the world would be like if we actually did manage to 'start living a different way.'"

Some Reviews:

"My Ishmael isn't just a sequel to the original. Instead, the original must be seen as a springboard for this new penetrating look into the machinery of our own culture, with all the drama and intrigue that a culture's history has to offer. If you're not changed after reading My Ishmael, you're dead."

Lance Pierce, Editor, Illusions Magazine

"Enthralling, shocking, hope-filled, and utterly fearless, Quinn leads us deeper and deeper into human heart, history, and spirit. Thank God the Gorilla is Back! In My Ishmael, Quinn strikes out into entirely new territory, posing questions that will rock you on your heels, and providing tantalizing possibilities for a truly new world vision."

Susan Chernak McElroy, Author of Animals as Teachers & Healers

3. Beyond Civilization - Humanity's Next Great Adventure ³ – Daniel Quinn

Synopsis:

One of our most fundamental cultural beliefs is this, that Civilization must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance. This notion seems intrinsic to the human mind --self-evident, like The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Implicit in this belief about civilization is another: Civilization is humanity's ULTIMATE invention and can never be surpassed. Both these beliefs exemplify the cultural fallacy, which is the notion that one's beliefs are not merely expressions of one's culture but are intrinsic to the human mind itself. The effect of this fallacy is that it's almost impossible for the people of our culture to entertain the idea that there could be any invention beyond civilization. Civilization is the end, the very last and unsurpassable human social development.

No one is surprised to learn that bees are organized in a way that works for them or that wolves are organized in a way that works for them. Most people understand in a general way that the social organization of any given species evolved in the same way as other features of the species. Unworkable organizations were eliminated in exactly the same way that unworkable physical traits were eliminated--by the process known as natural selection. But there is an odd and unexamined prejudice against the idea that the very same process shaped the social organization of Homo over the three million years of his evolution. The people of our culture don't want to acknowledge that the tribe is for humans exactly what the pod is for whales or the troop is for baboons: the gift of millions of years of natural selection, not perfect--but damned hard to improve upon.

Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization benefits members at the top very richly but benefits the masses at the bottom very poorly--and this has been so from the beginning. Tribalism, by contrast, is nonhierarchical and benefits all members with notable equality.

It's out of the question for us to "go back" to the tribalism we grew up with. There's no imaginable way to reestablish the ethnic boundaries that made that life work. But there's nothing sacrosanct about ethnic tribalism. Many successful tribal entities have evolved inside our culture that are not ethnic in any sense. A conspicuous example is the circus, a tribal enterprise that has been successful for centuries.

Beyond civilization isn't a geographical space (is not, for example, somewhere you "go and start a commune"). Beyond civilization is an unexplored cultural, social, and economic space. The New Tribal Revolution is our "escape route" to that space.

4. Tropical Nature – Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America⁴

– Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata

 
Review
E. O. Wilson Tropical Nature is superior by virtue of its freshness and authority. It is an account of the extraordinary richness of the tropical forests by two gifted young biologists who have recently experienced it and are experts on their subject. They write with the crispness of journalists sending dispatches from the field.

Ernst Mayr Combines excellent science, often based on original observations, with a warm sympathy for creatures big and small. A worthy successor to the writings of the great naturalists of the American tropics. I know of no better introduction to tropical biology.

Newsweek Tropical Nature...seeks to provoke curiosity about the forests -- not just provide facts about them -- and succeeds splendidly....Tropical Nature evokes the magic and wonder of a world completely contained within itself.

Smithsonian It invites an appreciation of biology as few other books do and does so with extraordinary grace and humor.

Philadelphia Inquirer ...one of the best natural-history books in recent years. Lyrical, richly detailed and delightful to read.

 Clearly, Tropical nature is one of the greatest books we've ever read. Please consider reading this!!!

5. The Forest People⁵ – Colin M. Turnbull

"The forest people" is one of the best works written by Colin M. Turnbull. It describes the life of the African forest people-pygmies, in particular Bambuti tribe. The book is told not from the perspective of scientists or anthropologist, but from the perspective of a person who lived with pygmies and became their friend.

Describing their life, Turnbull shows us the harmony that exists between the pigmies and the Mother Nature, the harmony that our society really lacks more and more. The moral concepts and organization of life in pygmy society is based on the principles of collectivism, harmony and good treatment. They differ from other ethnos of Africa that they are able to live in the forest, “in real nature” and consider others to be “animals” because they are not able to do so..."

6. Ecological Literacy – Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World⁶

– Michael K. Stone & Zenobia Barlow
  

From NAAEE Communicator, the journal of the North American Association for Environmental Education, Autumn 2005

This spectacular collection of essays by Fritjof Capra, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, David Orr and Donella Meadows, to name just a few, is woven together with stories of the editors’ own journeys, over time, educating for sustainability. The book is organized into a system of four interdependent parts: Vision, Tradition/Place, Relationship, and Action. The reader can experience the book sequentially or can enter at any point and travel back and forth between the parts and between each essay and story. No matter where you enter, the book hangs together as a unified whole.

The editors have skillfully selected the authors and their essays to convey the essence of each of the four parts of book and have simultaneously used the essays to communicate the learning process in which they themselves have been engaged. Here’s just one of many examples:

"As we immersed ourselves in the life of communities and ecosystems, important strategies began to emerge. Through our collaboration with STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed) we became aware of a nationwide phenomenon: family farms on the urban edge were going out of business for want of a market. We also knew that city kids around the San Francisco Bay were going to school hungry. On a map of regional problems, we highlight urban fringe farms at risk, malnutrition, solid waste generated by students throwing away their lunches, underachievement, and vandalism. See these all together on the map, we recognized them not as isolated problems, but parts of one overarching problem of disconnection: of rural communities from urban life, of food from people’s understanding of its origins, of health from the environment — and of problems from the patterns that perpetuate them."

Both living systems and learning develop over time, and witnessing the congruence between the two is stunning. This book is classic and timeless.

Ecological Literacy is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what we mean when we say, "Education for Sustainability." The core content and the habits of mind that characterize Education for Sustainability are seamlessly and elegantly communicated by many of our most revered champions in the way that only learner-centered experiential educators can do.

Jaimie P. Cloud ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ) is president of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education in New York City.

Ishmael¹

My Ishmael²

Beyond Civilization³

Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America⁴

The Forest People⁵