America was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation’s ships and houses, barns, and bridges. It became a symbol of independence, adorning the Americans’ flag at Bunker Hill, and an economic engine, generating three times more wealth than the California gold rush. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the 19th century, clear-cutting had decimated much of America’s white pine forests. In White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes readers on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal. Weaving together cultural and natural history with a keen naturalist’s eye, Pastor celebrates the way humans are connected to the forest—and to the larger natural world.

The car-only approach in transportation planning and engineering has led to the construction of roadways that have torn apart and devalued communities, especially Black and Brown communities. Forging a new path and working to repair this damage requires a community solutions-based approach to planning, designing, and building our roadways. In Roadways for People, Lynn Peterson draws from her personal experience and conversations with leaders in the field to showcase new possibilities within transportation engineering and planning. The community solutions-based approach moves away from the narrow standards of traditional transportation projects and focuses instead on a process that involves consistent feedback, learning loops, and meaningful and regular community engagement.

Roadways for People is written to empower professionals and policymakers to create transportation solutions that serve people rather than cars.
 

We live under the illusion of progress: as long as GDP is going up and prices stay low, we accept poverty and pollution as unfortunate but inevitable byproducts of a successful economy. How did we all get duped into believing the fairytale of economics?

In The Progress Illusion, Jon Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his experience as a young economist inoculated in the go-go 1980’s era of "greed is good," Erickson shows how flawed economic thinking shaped our politics and determined the course of American public policy.

While the history of economics is dismal indeed, Erickson is part of a vigorous reform effort grounded in the realities of life on a finite planet. Crafting a new economic story, he shows, is the first step toward turning away from endless growth and towards enduring prosperity. 
 

“Informed, utterly blindsiding account.” - Booklist, starred review

It’s falling from the sky and is in the air we breathe. It’s in our food, our clothes, and our homes. It’s microplastic and it’s everywhere—including our own bodies. Scientists are just beginning to discover how these tiny particles threaten health, but the studies are alarming.
 
A Poison Like No Other is the first book to fully explore this new dimension of the plastic crisis. Matt Simon follows the intrepid scientists who travel to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the ocean to understand the consequences of our dependence on plastic. Unlike other pollutants that are single elements or simple chemical compounds, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity linked to diseases ranging from diabetes to cancer.
 
There is no easy fix, Simon warns. But we will never curb our plastic addiction until we begin to recognize the invisible particles all around us. 
 

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters is on the rise. Insurance, an often confusing and unpopular tool, will be critical to successfully emerging from the effects of these crises. Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities—and exciting possibilities—of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. 

Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future—and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood. 
 

Much of what you’ve heard about plastic pollution may be wrong. Instead of a great island of trash, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of manmade debris spread over hundreds of miles of sea—more like a soup than a floating garbage dump. Less than nine percent of the plastic we create is reused, and microplastic fragments are found almost everywhere, even in our bodies. In Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis, journalist Erica Cirino brings readers on a globe-hopping journey to meet the scientists and activists telling the real story of the plastic crisis. New technologies and awareness bring some hope, but Cirino shows that we can only fix the problem if we begin to repair our throwaway culture. Thicker Than Water is an eloquent call to reexamine the systems churning out waves of plastic waste.  

For decades, we’ve heard that local, renewable power is on the horizon, and that cheaper technologies will revolutionize our energy system. Michelle Moore has spent her career proving that this opportunity is already here—and that any community, no matter how small, can build their own clean energy future. In Rural Renaissance, Moore describes five pathways to clean power in rural America and strategies for building it, including energy efficiency, renewable power, resilience (including microgrids and battery storage), the electrification of transportation, and finally, broadband internet. This accessible guide offers a vision of thriving rural communities where clean power is the spark that leads to greater investment, vitality, and equity.

In Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate, urban planning expert William Fulton takes an engaging look at the importance of connecting to place, how cities are engines of prosperity, and how these two ideas – place and prosperity – lie at the heart of what a city is and, by extension, what our society is all about.

Fulton has been writing about cities over his forty-year career as a journalist, professor, mayor, planning director, and the director of an urban think tank in one of America’s great cities. Place and Prosperity is a curated collection of his writings with new and updated selections and framing material.             

Fulton shows that at their best, cities not only inspire and uplift us, but they make our daily life more convenient, more fulfilling, and more prosperous.
 

Natural disasters from heat waves to coastal and river flooding will inevitably become worse because of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Managing them is possible, but planners, designers, and policymakers need to advance adaptation and preventative measures now.

Managing the Climate Crisis: Designing and Building for Floods, Heat, Drought and Wildfire by design and planning experts Jonathan Barnett and Matthijs Bouw is a practical guide to addressing this urgent national security problem. Barnett and Bouw draw from the latest scientific findings and include many recent, real-world examples to illustrate how to manage seven climate-related threats: flooding along coastlines, river flooding, flash floods from extreme rain events, drought, wildfire, long periods of high heat, and food shortages.
 

Making Healthy Places surveys the many intersections between health and the built environment, from the scale of buildings to the scale of metro areas, and across a range of outcomes, from cardiovascular health and infectious disease to social connectedness and happiness. This new edition is significantly updated, with a special emphasis on equity and sustainability, and takes a global perspective. It provides current evidence not only on how poorly designed places may threaten well-being, but also on solutions that have been found to be effective.

Making Healthy Places is a must-read for students, academics, and professionals in health, architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, parks and recreation, and related fields.