Top ten green books

Fred Pearce is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environment, science, and development issues from sixty-seven countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, When the Rivers Run Dry, and the newly released The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth.

One of his top ten eco-books, as told to the Guardian:

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

I went to Montana, to the beautiful badlands on the American prairies, a couple of years ago. It is magnificently empty, dotted with abandoned shacks and haunted by big skies, the sound of wind and freight trains carrying coal west. I met a dentist who had a part-time ranch the size of the Isle of Wight. Raban's extraordinary bitter-sweet romance is about how this forgotten corner of America, once the new frontier for migrants, got this way. This empty. It is a story of broken dreams and recurring nightmares, of a socialist past and a sometimes rabid Republican present. It is about what happens when people and the land don't get along.

Read about another book on Pearce's list.

Also see John Mullan's list of ten of the best green stories in literature and Michelle Nijhuis's 2008 list of 15 green books to take to the beach.

--Marshal Zeringue