The TEN green commandments of Laudato Si'  by Joshtrom Isaac kureethadam

The publication of Laudato Si’--a papal encyclical on a defining issue of our times—was a moment of great importance for Catholics and for the world. Now Fr. Joshtrom Kureethadam, one of the church’s top experts on the document, provides a thoughtful, passionate, and highly accessible commentary on its key ideas and themes. Faithfully attentive to the outline of the six chapters of the encyclical, Fr. Joshtrom has also insightfully arranged the book according to the See-Judge-Act methodology that is increasingly used in spirituality, moral theology, and the social sciences.
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If Pope Francis is right when he insists that the solution to our environmental problems cannot be found only in technocratic approaches by governments and institutions, but by a wide and thoughtful embrace by all of us of our common responsibility, then Fr. Joshtrom’s book is precisely what we need at this time.

Greening your Church
​  by norman Lévesque  

With increasing anxiety about ecological crises, many Christians have begun to seriously consider our impact upon the environment. Compelled to take action, communities have discovered an abundant wealth of Church teaching on environmental stewardship, yet few resources demonstrate how churches can reduce their impact on God's creation.

​ Greening Your Church shares with us the theology of creation care ministry and shows us practical ways to live in harmony with creation. Now faith communities have a helpful guide and companion to creating environmentally friendly churches.

the story of stuff
by anne Leonard

How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health - and a Vision for Change

We have a problem with Stuff. With just 5 percent of the world's population, were consuming 30 percent of the world's resources and creating 30 percent of the worlds waste. If everyone consumed at U.S. rates, we would need three to five planets!

This alarming fact drove Annie Leonard to create the Internet film sensation The Story of Stuff, which has been viewed over 10 million times by people around the world. In her sweeping, groundbreaking book of the same name, Leonard tracks the life of the Stuff we use every day where our cotton T-shirts, laptop computers, and aluminum cans come from, how they are produced, distributed, and consumed, and where they go when we throw them out. Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, The Story of Stuffis a landmark book that will change the way people think and the way they live.

​Leonard's message is startlingly clear: we have too much Stuff, and too much of it is toxic. Outlining the five stages of our consumption-driven economy from extraction through production, distribution, consumption, and disposal, she vividly illuminates its frightening repercussions. Visiting garbage dumps and factories around the world, Leonard reveals the true story behind our possessions why it's cheaper to replace a broken TV than to fix it; how the promotion of "perceived obsolescence" encourages us to toss out everything from shoes to cell phones while they're still in perfect shape; and how factory workers in Haiti, mine workers in Congo, and everyone who lives and works within this system pay for our cheap goods with their health, safety, and quality of life. Meanwhile we, as consumers, are compromising our health and well-being, whether it's through neurotoxins in our pillows or lead leaching into our kids food from their lunch boxes and all this Stuff isn't even making us happier!

troubled water:  what's wrong with what we drink  by seth m. siegel

​New York Times best-selling author Seth M. Siegel shows how our drinking water got contaminated, what it may be doing to us, and what we must do to make it safe.
 
If you thought America’s drinking water problems started and ended in Flint, Michigan, think again. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. 
  
Many are to blame: the EPA, Congress, a bipartisan coalition of powerful governors and mayors, chemical companies, and drinking-water utilities - even NASA and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the bottled-water industry has been fanning our fears about tap water, but bottled water is often no safer..
 
The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person.   
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Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the country and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. And it concludes with what America must do to reverse decades of neglect and play-it-safe inaction by government at all levels in order to keep our most precious resource safe.

Formerly known as food  by Kristin lawless

If you think buying organic from Whole Foods is protecting you, you're wrong. Our food - even what we're told is good for us - has changed for the worse in the past 100 years, its nutritional content deteriorating due to industrial farming and its composition altered due to the addition of thousands of chemicals from pesticides to packaging. We simply no longer know what we’re eating. 

In Formerly Known as Food, Kristin Lawless argues that, because of the degradation of our diet, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out. The billion-dollar food industry is reshaping our food preferences, altering our brains, changing the composition of our microbiota, and even affecting the expression of our genes. Lawless chronicles how this is happening and what it means for our bodies, health, and survival. 

An independent journalist and nutrition expert, Lawless is emerging as the voice of a new generation of food thinkers. After years of "eat this, not that" advice from doctors, journalists, and food faddists, she offers something completely different. Lawless presents a comprehensive explanation of the problem - going beyond nutrition to issues of food choice, class, race, and gender - and provides a sound and simple philosophy of eating, which she calls the "Whole Egg Theory".

Destined to set the debate over food politics for the next decade, Formerly Known as Food speaks to a new generation looking for a different conversation about the food on our plates.   
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the sixth extinction: An unnatural history
  by elizabeth kolbert

​Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.

​In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.​