Social Change

Cecile Andrews, Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre
     New Society Publishers, 2006          ISBN 0865715548
  We're hammered, we're slammed, we're out of control. Happiness is on the decline in the most affluent country in the world, and Americans are troubled by the destructiveness of a lifestyle devoted to money and status. Yet no one seems to have a clue how to exit from the fast lane. Slow is Beautiful analyzes the subtle consumer and political and corporate forces stamping the joy from our existence and provides a vision of a more fulfilling life through the rediscovery of caring community, unhurried leisure, and life-affirming joie de vivre. Offering inspiration and concrete ideas, the book will appeal to a broad audience of baby boomers nearing retirement, harried professionals with a social conscience, the one-time middle class, and twenty- to thirty-somethings who are now facing the sobering realities of constricted choices.

Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
     Viking, 2007          ISBN 0670038520'
  Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From multimillion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise a movement that has no name, no leader, no location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, explores the diversity of the movement, its ideas, strategies and hidden history. Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist and author. He has been involved in the startup of several businesses, including Erewhon natural foods and Smith & Hawken, the garden and catalog retailer. His other books — published in more than 50 countries — include Growing a Business (also a PBS series), The Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism.

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
     Back Bay Books, 1999          ISBN 0316353000
  

Claudia Horwitz, The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life
     Penguin, 2002          ISBN 0142196061
  The Spiritual Activist is a practical guide to individual and social transformation through spirituality and faith. It will help you to make opportunities to slow down, to build stronger relationships at home and at work, and to embrace the world around you. Claudia Horwitz shows you how to use reflection, ritual, silence, movement, and the happenings of daily life to help you find unity between your inner journeys and outer commitments.

Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
     HarperCollins, 2007          ISBN 0060852550
  Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

David C. Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
     Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006          ISBN 1887208070
  Korten makes the case that we humans are a choice-making species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response. A mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching. A convergence of climate change, peak oil, and the financial instability inherent in an unbalanced global trading system will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.
     We cannot avoid the unraveling. We can, however, turn a potentially terminal crisis into an epic opportunity to bring forth a new era of Earth Community grounded in the life-affirming cultural values shared by most all the world’s people and eloquently articulated in the Earth Charter.
     The Great Turning is an essential resource for those who understand this need and are prepared to engage what Thomas Berry calls the Great Work. It cuts through the complexity of our time to illuminate a simple, but elegant truth. We humans live by stories. We are held captive to the ways of Empire by a cultural trance of our own creation maintained by stories that deny the higher possibilities of our human nature—including our capacities for compassion, cooperation, responsible self-direction, and self-organizing partnership.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
     Penguin, 2007          ISBN 0143038583
  What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. In this groundbreaking book, Pollan — one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers —follows each of the food chains that sustain us — industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves — from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.

Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
     Norton, 2003          ISBN 0393050971
  Awise and inspiring exploration of the connection between money and leading a fulfilling life. This compelling and fundamentally liberating book shows us that examining our attitudes toward money--earning it, spending it, and giving it away--can offer surprising insight into our lives, our values, and the essence of prosperity. Lynne Twist, who is continuing her work through the Soul of Money Foundation, is a global activist and fund-raiser who has raised more than $150 million in individual contributions for charitable causes. Through personal stories and practical advice, she demonstrates how we can replace feelings of scarcity, guilt, and burden with experiences of sufficiency, freedom, and purpose. She shares from her own life, a journey illuminated by remarkable encounters with the richest and poorest people on earth, from the famous (Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama) to the anonymous but unforgettable heroes of everyday life.

Margaret Wheatley, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
     Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005          ISBN 1576753174
  Margaret Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time who has tested her ideas and perceptions in many different settings and cultures. Finding Our Way is a collection of her practice-focused articles, where she applies themes she has addressed throughout her career to detail the organizational practices and behaviors that bring them to life.
     Provocative, challenging, poetic, and often deeply moving, Finding Our Way sums up Wheatley's thinking on a diverse scope of topics, from leadership and management, to social change, to our personal role in these turbulent times; from provocative social commentary to specific organizational practices and more.

Anthony Weston, How to Re-imagine the World: A Pocket Guide for Practical Visionaries
     New Society Publishers, 2007          ISBN 0865715947
  Who says that all possible social and political systems have already been invented? Or that work — or marriage, or environmentalism, or anything else — must be just what they are now? This book is a conceptual toolbox for imagining and initiating radical social change. Chapters offer specific, focused, and shareable techniques:

• Seeking a Whole Vision: creating a pull and not just a push toward change.
• Generative thinking: Looking for "Seeds" and "Sparks", Stretching and Twisting Ideas, and Going Two Steps Too Far.
• Looking for Unexpected Openings: "Weeds" and "Wild Cards", Inside Tracks, Leverage Points, and Hidden Possibilities.
• Working at the Roots: Reconstructing the built world, cultural practices, even worldviews.
• Building Momentum: Playing to our Strengths; Reclaiming the Language; "Allying Everywhere"; Doing it Now, Going for Broke...