This section is dedicated to books suggested by the Ecology & Environment team members on topics of Earth stewardship, environmental justice, sustainability and spirituality.  We invite members of the Marianist Family to send us your reflections on these or other books you have read.  To suggest or review a book, please send the title and a brief (1-2 paragraph) review to Tara Poling at Tara.Poling@notes.udayton.edu .  To discuss the ideas presented in these books, please visit the MSJC Forum .  As new titles are listed, past titles will be archived under "Book Review Files" on the right.

Cradle to Cradle:  Remaking the way we make things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.  2002, North Point Press. 208 pages.  Recommended by Bro. Don Geiger, SM.

From the editors:  "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.

In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

The Great Work: Our way into the future by Fr. Thomas Berry.  2000, Bell Tower Books.  241 pages.  Recommended by Bro. Don Geiger, SM.

From the editors:  Thomas Berry is one of the most eminent cultural historians of our time. Here he presents the culmination of his ideas and urges us to move from being a disrupting force on the Earth to a benign presence. This transition is the Great Work -- the most necessary and most ennobling work we will ever undertake. Berry's message is not one of doom but of hope. He reminds society of its function, particularly the universities and other educational institutions whose role is to guide students into an appreciation rather than an exploitation of the world around them. Berry is the leading spokesperson for the Earth, and his profound ecological insight illuminates the path we need to take in the realms of ethics, politics, economics, and education if both we and the planet are to survive.

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing human impact on the Earth by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel.  Illustrated by Phil Testemale.  1995, New Society Publishers.  176 pages.  Recommended by Tara Poling.