Literary Guides to Turning Green

The book business has discovered that green is truly the color of money: publishers are rushing to cash in on the current enthusiasm for environmentalism. Books in Print lists roughly 6,000 titles in 50 subject categories related to the environment, and the number grows by dozens each month. With so many choices, would-be environmentalists are understandably bewildered. Which books are worth reading, and which were thrown together merely to exploit a fad?

Among the most popular titles are how-to guides like 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (EarthWorks Press; $4.95). Such books are well intentioned and useful, but they may have the half-life of New Year's resolutions. The defeat of California's Big Green and other ecological initiatives in the recent election demonstrated that voters are still confused about the best way to deal with environmental concerns.

One reason is that the movement is young, and the meaning of environmentalism is changing in subtle and profound ways. Not so long ago, "old thinking" had the environment tucked away in parks and rural areas, an amenity for the relatively affluent to appreciate on weekends. Implicit in this attitude was the idea that ecology was irrelevant to businessmen and policymakers concerned with the real issues of the day and that mankind could somehow get along without focusing on the environment.

In recent years, however, such problems as ozone depletion and deforestation have shown that mankind is threatening the systems that support its economic and social well-being. Americans pay lip service to this reality but tend to revert to old thinking when environmental reform threatens either jobs or life-styles. People thus need to undergo a fundamental shift in perspective, acknowledging their dependence on a healthy biosphere. Seeing earth as a whole erases the illusion that humanity is separate from the natural order. For that reason alone, The Home Planet (Addison-Wesley; $19.95), an elegant compilation of photos taken during American and Soviet space missions, might be the first text in a syllabus for environmental re-education. In quotes accompanying the pictures, cosmonauts and astronauts from more than a dozen nations struggle to express the transcendental experience of seeing how life has invested our planet with a luminous beauty. Writes Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: "So touchingly alone, our home must be defended like a holy relic."

The view from space also offers support for a scientific theory that is becoming the paradigm of the new environmentalism. First proposed by British inventor and chemist James Lovelock, this theory, called the Gaia hypothesis, argues that the earth functions as an organism and that life processes regulate the planet to maintain its habitability. According to Gaia, no single species, not even humanity, is necessary to the functioning of the biosphere.