Water Management fills a critical gap: providing a base of knowledge to understand and manage complex water problems. It is geared primarily towards students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, but will also be a helpful resource for practicing water professionals who are looking for new ideas or a broader view of the subject.

This text explores the entire gamut of water issues, from dams to desalination, from prior appropriation to pumped storage, from sanitation to stormwater. Rather than teaching from one disciplinary perspective, it examines water through a variety of lenses: hydrology, climate science, ecology, and engineering, but also law, economics, history, and environmental justice. The result is a comprehensive introduction to one of the most demanding challenges of our time: developing just and sustainable solutions to water management.

As unprecedented heat waves, storms of the century, and devastating fires impact cities across the country, the time to create climate resilient communities is now. While large-scale innovations in policy and technology are necessary to preserve the planet, the wisest and most lasting adaptation solutions originate at the local level. Each chapter will help readers scale up their actions, from identifying climate solutions that an individual or small group can pull off in a handful of weekends, like tree plantings or depaving parties, to advocating for change at the municipal level through coalition-building and data collection. It’s not too late for people of all ages and skill levels to create climate safe neighborhoods.
 
 

Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets.

In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.

Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets—and traffic engineers—in a new light and inspire you to take action.

In Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future cycling expert Daniel Piatkowski argues that the bicycle is the best tool that we have to improve our cities. The car-free urban future—where cities are vibrant, with access to everything we need close by—may be less bike-centric than we think. But bikes are a crucial first step to getting Americans out of cars.

Piatkowski offers pragmatic lessons drawn from the latest research along with interviews, anecdotes, and case studies from around the world. Electric bikes are demonstrating the ability of bikes to replace cars in more places and for more people. Cargo bikes are replacing SUVs for families and delivery trucks for freight. At the same time, mobility startups are providing new ownership models to make these new bikes easier to use and own, ushering in a new era of pedal-powered cities.

Bicycle City is about making cities better with bikes rather than for bikes.

One third of people living in the United States do not have a driver license. Because the majority of involuntary nondrivers are disabled, lower income, unhoused, formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, and the elderly, they are largely invisible.

In When Driving is Not an Option disability advocate Anna Letitia Zivarts draws from interviews with involuntary nondrivers from around the US and from her own experience, to shine a light on the number of people in the US who cannot drive and outline actions to improve our mobility systems.

When the needs of involuntary nondrivers are viewed as essential to how we design our transportation systems and our communities, not only will we be able to more easily get where we need to go, but the changes will lead to healthier, climate-friendly communities for everyone.

Gaslight is the story of an epic, six-year battle between one of the country’s most powerful energy companies and the everyday people who stood in the path of its massive fossil gas pipeline. On one side, an archetypal Goliath: a corporation that commands billions of dollars and unparalleled influence over state politicians and federal government agencies alike. On the other, a diverse band of Davids: lawyers and farmers, conservationists and conservatives, innkeepers and lobbyists, scientists, and nurses.

Their struggle took them all the way to the Supreme Court, but their larger fight was in the court of public opinion. Would the nation swallow the industry’s narrative that gas was “a bridge fuel” to a clean, green future? Or would the public recognize it as a methane bomb, capable of not only wrecking local communities but imperiling the planet? Vivid and suspenseful, Gaslight is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the urgent stakes of the energy choices we face today.

In Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert (“the cycling professor”) Marco te Brömmelstroet take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed and look at how they could be different. Verkade and te Brömmelstroet draw inspiration from the Netherlands and look at what other countries are doing, and could do, to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer.

Making our communities safer, cleaner, and greener starts with asking these fundamental questions: who do our streets belong to, how do we want to use them, and who gets to decide? To truly transform mobility, we need to look far beyond the technical aspects and put people at the center of urban design. Movement will change the way that you view our streets.

Climate tech is critical for averting planetary chaos. Half the greenhouse gas reductions required to reach “net-zero” climate targets in 2050 will need to come from technologies that have not yet been invented.  Making Climate Tech Work is an insightful analysis of how smart government policies can make those technologies a reality. Which approaches can lead us to a sustainable economy, and which are likely to fall short? Learn how Denmark became a wind energy superpower, Germany incentivized renewables, Australia phased out incandescent bulbs, and why carbon taxes have failed around the world – but could be designed for success. Alon Tal expertly distills each policy’s benefits and drawbacks, along with related ethical questions and public perceptions. The result is an essential primer for anyone interested in accelerating climate tech solutions.

“In this eye-opening debut study, Frerick, an agricultural policy fellow at Yale University, reveals the ill-gained stranglehold that a handful of companies have on America’s food economy…It’s a disquieting critique of private monopolization of public necessities.”  - Publishers Weekly, starred

Barons is the story of seven titans of the food industry, their rise to power, and the consequences for workers, eaters, and democracy itself. Readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will visit the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. Barons paints a stark portrait of corporate consolidation, but it also shows that a fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.

The first edition of Human Transit, published in 2011, has become a classic for professionals, advocates, and interested citizens.

Walker has updated and expanded the book to deepen its explanations. New topics include the problem with specialization; the role of flexible or “demand response” services; how to know when to redesign your network; and responding to tech-industry claims that transit will soon be obsolete.  Finally, he has also added a major new section exploring the idea of access to opportunity as a core measure of transit’s success.

No other book explains the basic principles of public transit in such lively and accessible prose, all based on a respect for your right to form your own opinion. Walker’s goal is not to make you share his values, but to give you the tools to clarify and advocate for yours.