Most people don’t think of agriculture when they hear the term “solar farm” or “wind farm.” In fact, many fear that renewable energy installations are eating up prime farmland and threatening natural areas. But what if it weren’t an either-or proposition? What if wind and solar could go hand-in-hand with environmentally sustainable farming?

In Agri-Energy, Rebekah Pierce shows how this growing trend can be a win-win-win for people, power, and the planet. Pierce gives farmers, developers, environmental activists, and concerned community members the information they need to successfully pair renewable energy and agriculture. The result is a concise but complete primer on a little-understood phenomenon with enormous implications for economic, food, and energy security.
 

States have tremendous power to protect their residents’ health. In the absence of adequate federal safeguards against pollution and toxic chemicals, state regulations are the strongest tools available to create safe, sustainable environments. The good news is, around the country, red states and blue states are taking up the charge.

In A Healthy Union, Susan Kaplan highlights examples of groundbreaking state environmental health policies, from advancing environmental justice in California to reducing chemical use in Texas schools. These successful policies share key elements, including state-university-industry partnerships, collaboration across government agencies, and strong environmental health education. Kaplan explores best practices in policymaking and advocacy, showing how to build on effective health protections, one state at a time.
 

While challenging our car-centric systems can feel daunting for anyone who wants change, you can win, and this book is here to help. In If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight, transportation activist Carter Lavin provides a roadmap for transforming passion into political power. 

Whether your dream is protected bike lanes, better bus service, or expanded high-speed rail, this book provides transportation-specific strategies for organizing for change. It draws upon advice from advocates across the United States and Lavin’s own experience with over 100 campaigns. Action points at the end of each chapter enable readers to move from brainstorming into concrete action.
 
Accessible and inspirational, this book will help people who are starting out, as well as experienced advocates plan, launch, and lead any transportation-related campaign. 

Squirrels are a common sight, seemingly everywhere in wild and urban nature. Their chattering antics in city parks delight us while their raids on our backyard gardens and birdfeeders never fail to exasperate. But squirrels are more than amusing backyard entertainers, and few of us know much about them or fully appreciate their role in keeping the environment healthy. As stress on the natural world intensifies, should we be paying more attention to the plight of squirrels?

In Squirrel, Nancy Castaldo shines new light on this familiar backyard mammal, exploring their staggering diversity (they’re found on all continents but Antarctica) and the many surprising ways they shape our world, our communities, and our cultures. Squirrel is accessible and entertaining, perfect for anyone who has felt exasperation, curiosity, and kinship with our bushy-tailed rodent neighbors.
 

In The Unfinished Metropolis, Benjamin Schneider explores why America’s favorite things to build—freeways, single-family homes, malls, and downtown office towers—are keeping us stuck in the past. We deserve cities where housing is abundant, public transit is fast and seamless, and streets are for more than car storage. To accomplish this, we need to free ourselves from these outdated forms so we can experiment with new types of housing, new uses for streets, and new purposes for downtowns. We need to embrace the art of city-building. Talking to urban designers, planners, and community advocates, Schneider takes readers on an insightful and entertaining tour of how we can make our cities work better for us today and into the future.    

Ponderosa pine has long been a charismatic icon of the American West—yet a quiet unraveling has begun. In the past decade, in a vast area from Santa Fe to the Sierras, more than two hundred million ponderosa have died. While some will survive in cooler places, scientists estimate that by mid-century, less than five percent of the ponderosa in the American Southwest may remain. As the very character of this vast region shifts, what will be left behind? In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings readers on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn—and to celebrate—the forests that nurtured him. The result is a life-affirming tribute to one of America’s most cherished wild landscapes and a reminder that loss can be a pathway to connection. 

Free-flowing rivers in the United States are an endangered species. We’ve dammed and diverted almost every major river, straightening curves and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals, pushing many to the brink. Now a heartening new movement is helping to demolish harmful or obsolete structures, restoring new life to rivers and communities that depend on them. In doing so, it offers a pathway to undoing environmental harm to nature—and to ourselves.

In Undammed, environmental journalist Tara Lohan makes a case for the unexpected benefits of dam removal. By restoring rivers, she argues, we’re protecting our own communities by increasing climate resilience, improving water quality, enhancing public safety, and boosting fish populations that feed people and restore rights for Native American Tribes. Undammed is an inspirational look at our changing relationship with the natural world, showing the cascade of benefits that come when we no longer turn our backs on rivers.
 

In the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to Harlem.

New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit tells a classic story of good versus evil, pitting the mild-mannered Beach, a visionary inventor and entrepreneur, against the oafish tyrant Boss Tweed, the exemplar of corruption in the Gilded Age. It also tells the story of one of the most astonishing feats of engineering in American history, the surreptitious creation of the nation’s first operational subway.

Richly illustrated and populated with larger-than-life characters, New York’s Secret Subway will captivate readers and provide historical context for today’s clashes between public interests and powerful business and political groups. Algeo tells this amazing true story in full for the first time, and although it took place more than a century ago, it will at times sound surprisingly familiar.
 

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, brilliantly weaving together science and childhood memories with the apple’s storied history.

The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an “apple a day.” Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild.

Ryan Mitchell never thought he would go off the grid. Yet this self-described desk-jockey with no carpentry skills today lives on 11 acres in a house he designed and powers with solar, gets his water from a well, has a composting toilet and septic system, eats from his garden, raises baby quail, and runs his own business. His bills are a fraction of what they were when he paid rent and utilities, and he has infinitely more free time to pursue the things he loves.

If you’ve ever dreamed of this lifestyle, Living Off Grid will help you navigate the most important decisions you’ll need to make to create the reality that’s right for you. Whether you’re an urbanite who just wants to save some money (and carbon) with small solar arrays or you’re ready to purchase land or you’ve already taken the plunge and want a better way to deal with your wastewater, Ryan has done the hard work to set you up for success.
 

In Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, transportation planning expert Erick Guerra describes how the US roadway system became overbuilt, how public policy continues to encourage overbuilding, the scale and consequences of overbuilding, and how we can rethink our approach to highway building in the US.
 
Guerra explains that highway overbuilding stems from the institutions, finance mechanisms, and evaluation metrics developed in the first half of the twentieth century. While more funds are set aside for transit, walking, biking, and beautification, the investment paradigm has not changed. Planners and engineers have not adjusted the tools they use to determine which roads should be built, rebuilt, or widened and why.
 
Despite having too much roadway, the country is still operating in construction mode, using the same basic approach used to finance and build the interstate system quickly, Guerra states. The interstate was completed more than three decades ago. Overbuilt argues convincingly that it is time to move on.
 

Climate change affects every aspect of our lives—which means it plays a role in every news story. As a journalist, helping your audience understand these climate connections is part of the job, whether you cover healthcare, economics, politics, sports, or any other beat. We are all climate journalists now.

Yet most of us weren’t taught about human-driven climate change in journalism school or while reporting stories in our newsrooms. You may know the basic science. But how about the major policies that determine global climate action or the growing number of legal climate-related cases? Have you considered what it means to practice journalism that focuses on solutions or how race and climate intersect?  

Chances are, you could use some guidance on how to report on this endlessly complex issue. Hot Takes engages the big questions that will determine how climate change is covered, and the stories we tell our audiences and ourselves.

In Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement, Charles T. Brown, founder and CEO of Equitable Cities, examines why mobility is not afforded in the same way to everyone. He argues that the legacy of structural racism and White supremacy has led to disinvestment and over-policing in Black communities and communities of color, thwarting opportunity, as physical mobility and social mobility are intrinsically linked. This experience for Black people around the world is what Brown refers to as arrested mobility.  

Brown examines this condition that society has created through what he calls “The Four Ps”: Polity, Policy, Planning, and Policing and suggests solutions, some of which are already being implemented in the US. Drawing from research, his own experience, and the experience of other Black Americans, Brown shows that  change is possible and inspires and guides readers to un-arrest mobility together.  

Almost two centuries after British explorer Sir John Franklin and his men died amid paralyzing cold and ice in pursuit of the mythical Northwest Passage, the Arctic is melting at an alarming pace. Instead of working together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, countries are racing to control newly ice-free waters and the riches in the seabed below. But by choosing self-interest over cooperative action, they may be condemning the world to an uninhabitable future.

Arctic Passages reminds us that while we go about our lives, climate change is unspooling slowly but insidiously, spawning extreme weather events that will be increasingly difficult to ignore. Ultimately, the fate of the Arctic will be decided by the developed world and how it decides to take action—if it’s not too late.
 

In Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future, seasoned architect and former AIA president Carl Elefante addresses how buildings and cities can and must help resolve the looming climate emergency.  

For architects and the countless others who work together creating human habitation, the twenty-first century imperatives demand a profound mode shift, from an expansion mindset to one of reintegration and healing.  

Elefante explains that revitalizing communities by optimizing existing resources makes social, economic, and environmental sense and directs resources where they are most needed. He offers a decidedly alternative viewpoint, one informed by his career rescuing buildings from demolition and learning from the practices and wisdom embedded in built heritage.  

In Going for Zero Elefante offers a message of hope, with the urgency to act now.