We take our climate book recommendations very seriously. Currently, only two books must be read by everyone seriously concerned about the climate, environment, or sustainability. 

The newest one is An Inconvenient Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen. It has only happened once before that we have come across such an immediate must-read book in the climate area, but today there is a new one. Most of the Job One team and our advisory board are reading it now, but why?

This new book (like no other we have seen in decades) asks the challenging questions about the climate, environment, and sustainability that few others would dare propose. It then also offers potent insights into the direction of new and challenging solutions to healing in these survival and future-critical areas.

Few books can shake up and awaken long-time climate activists, environmental activists, and sustainability activists to expansive new levels of understanding of the big picture of our major crises, but this is one of those books.

This book is not just essential. It is critical to helping thousands of Job One members (and many others)make the intellectual, emotional, and attitudinal transitions to the new world we will soon inherit.

Special book warning

This book will challenge your current climate, environment, and sustainability beliefs no matter how long you have been interested or concerned about these topics. This book will make you uncomfortable many times over, but it does so in essential and necessary ways to help you evolve and prepare for what is required for you, your progeny, and the future to have some level of survival and eventually thrive.

This book contains some classical Christian metaphors, but neither author is religious. At times I and others had to look over and beyond these religious metaphors, but the points they were making with them were worth the discomfort.

On a personal note 

As the Executive Director of Job One, I took time off to finish the book quickly. I have read many books on climate, environment, and sustainability. However, this is one of the two best books I have read over the last six years. 

I could hardly put it down. It was disturbing and enticing at the same time.

If you're serious about getting prepared for the future as our climate and environment worsen, get this book today and plow through it till you're done. If you courageously take the time to face and think about the many unpleasant ideas and concepts being presented, you most likely won't be the same person after reading it.

You will be far better prepared for what needs to be done for a realistic, survivable, and better future. You will more likely also become someone others would want to work with within those communities with a better chance of navigating the difficult times ahead. 

We unequivocally recommend this book to everybody joining our community. We will soon be making it required reading for all new volunteers and all individuals wanting to become part of our new climate change-safer eco-communities project. 

Please also note that Job One For Humanity has written much about how to survive what is coming emotionally, psychologically, and physically on its website. It has extensively discussed the many eco-community-building design issues of creating climate change-safer and more equitable eco-communities for the future.

In fact, Job One is now developing and establishing four different models of eoo-communities (urban, rural, hybrid, and virtual) worldwide. Please consider joining one of our four eco-communitiy models. The future is going to be a rough ride. Being in a supportive eco-community will make the future a lot safer and easier.

 

 

Here are a few human crisis framing ideas derived from this new book, An Inconvenient Apocalypse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen

The Overshoot resource costs of extraction, processing, and waste disposal required to produce all the stuff humanity is now using is a core of our ecological crisis.

Behind the ecological crisis is a crisis of meaning where things versus people, knowledge and service, and other well-being issues fulfill our lives. 

We must create powerful new meanings, purposes, and goals to move people away from overconsumption. Meaning and purpose are learned. But it must be practiced within a social environment that reinforces these values—our solution is to change the culture.

If we do not transcend the unlimited growth economy delusion (Overshoot) there are hard times ahead, and if we do manage to construct a new economic order there are still hard times ahead. (Because of the damage we have already done.)

We must decide to down power and accept limits and growth within sustainable boundaries of the Earth.

There is no way to invent our way out of having less, using less fossil fuel, and having fewer people.

We need to get to fewer people living with less energy achieved by means of democratically managed planning to minimize suffering.

We will have to evolve existing infrastructure and organization to that which is consistent with a sustainable future.

We must honestly and boldly look at full cost accounting on all of the suggestions for any renewable energy solution, including electric cars.

We are far less capable of controlling modern technology than we think and we cannot manage the current high energy high technology infrastructure we have created for much longer.

We must move faster than we have been and faster than it appears we are capable of.

Eventually, a population of a species that expands beyond its carrying capacity will be reduced by starvation, predation, and disease. That is a quick look into our future, with predation being the most dangerous of all in the later phases.

It is critical to advocate collectively for setting limits as an important part of rational and responsible planning, which has to be based on an honest assessment of the current conditions under which we live and the conditions we expect to live tomorrow. 

Our advanced society is based on energy consumption. The economics of endless growth on a finite planet will always end badly. Because the endless growth delusion infects the whole planet, the bad ending will be global.

The techno-optimist fundamentalist acts as if human knowledge is adequate to run the world. To claim such abilities, we have to assume we have and can identify all the patterns in nature and learn to control all aspects of nature. That we still clearly cannot do these things does not disturb techno-optimists' fundamentalist faith... What we don't know still far outstrips what we do know and always will.

Any technology use should be directed mostly toward creating a soft landing for the remnants of humanity after the collapse.

Individuals and societies must connect significant changes much faster than we have been willing to do so far and faster than it appears that the human species has been capable of acting today, perhaps faster than we will ever be able to act. It's unwise to think that a species that is resisted taking collective action (on so many major crises) at the speed necessary will find even more rapid and dramatic change easy in the future.

To get An Inconvenient Apocalypse on Amazon, click here or click on the image above.

 

Sincerely,

Lawrence Wollersheim

Executive Director, Job One for Humanity

PS: The other must-read book for anyone who considers themself to be serious about the climate, the environment, or sustainability that I mentioned above is called Overshoot, by Willian Catton. Understanding the dynamics of the future in front of us makes this book also a must-read.

For more of our years of best climate book and video recommendations, click here.

 

 

 

 

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