This past week, Penguin Classics announced that they would launch a new series of books. Dubbed Green Ideas, the collection includes 20 great works in paperback that explore topics related to the environment. Publishing on August 26th, the range of titles includes works from Michael Pollan, Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, and Greta Thunberg.
Similar to Penguin’s Great Ideas series, each book comes with a stunning jacket design. In this case, the books are designed by Tom Etherington, a designer in Penguin Press’s art department. Collect all 20 copies, and you’ve got a soft, soothing rainbow gradient for your bookshelf—and some hardcore reading up to do! Luckily for you, each book is snackable content, and the short works focus on a range of topics from food and gardening to ethics and politics, all of which seek to broaden your scope on environmental thought.
Of course, they didn’t include Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, but we’ll forgive them the error.
“Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement,” said Penguin in a press release.
“These short books bring together the most important issues of our age and seek answers to the greatest question of all: can we sustain the habitable planet?” said George Monbiot in the same press release, author of the collection’s This Can’t Be Happening.
Each book in the collection is £4.99. I just did some quick conversions to the US dollar, and that comes in at a tidy $6.92. Not too shabby! Here is the full list of titles available in the series:
Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
Naomi Klein, Hot Money
Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological
George Monbiot, This Can’t Be Happening
Bill McKibben, An Idea Can Go Extinct
Amitav Ghosh, Uncanny and Improbable Events
Tim Flannery, A Warning from the Golden Toad
Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women
Michael Pollan, Food Rules
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species
Dai Qing, The Most Dammed Country in the World
Wangari Maathai, The World We Once Lived In
Jared Diamond, The Last Tree on Easter Island
Wendell Berry, What I Stand for Is What I Stand On
Edward O Wilson, Every Species is a Masterpiece
James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia
Masanobu Fukuoka, The Dragonfly Will Be the Messiah
Arne Naess, There is No Point of No Return
Rachel Carson, Man’s War Against Nature
Aldo Leopold, Think Like a Mountain