Environment

Environment: Why Read the Classics? presents six important essays by some of the world's leading environmental thinkers on six of the most emblematic books ever written on the environment. The books - Walden; A Sand County Almanac; Small is Beautiful; Silent Spring; The Limits to Growth; and Our Common Future - taken together have been hugely important in the development of global environmental awareness, activism and policy. The essayists - Timothy O'Riordan, Satish Kumar, J.B. Callicott, Jose Lima Santos, Marina Silva and Viriato Soromenho-Marques - invite readers to reflect on these ground-breaking works and examine their historical importance, as well as what they should mean to us today and what relevance they will have to future generations. These books are often considered as some of the environmental movement's most emblematic, and quite possibly its primary, promoters. More than just books about the environment, they are also philosophical, in that they increase our understanding of the natural world and of ourselves, calling us 'to weigh and consider', as Bacon put it. In particular, they make us reflect on the need to constantly redefine the purposes of progress, the economy and society. How we relate to nature seems to be a crucial aspect of how we programme our life projects, and every one of these books inspires a more respectful relationship, both with nature and humanity, and consequently with ourselves. The six essays in this book are the result of a series of conferences organised in Lisbon by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation with the support of the American Embassy in Portugal. Its raison d'etre was the need to revisit the ideas that have shaped the environmental movement, and so acquire the inspiration to deal with what seems to be a very challenging future. We need to revisit timeless ideas, and these books are full of them - ideas that keep their spark even in our difficult times - and it is this evergreen nature that makes them classics in a number of ways. This is a provocative book and will be essential reading for all those concerned about the state of the world.