Welcome to our library of suggested books!
The purpose of this library is twofold.
- To offer our community some ideas for insightful books. There are many interesting publications that can guide us toward a more skillful living.
- To give you an opportunity to share what you have read with our global community.
It is only by uniting our knowledge and efforts that we can improve and thrive!
If you wish to suggest a book for our community library, please send us an email at francisca@plantgrowsave.org.
Please note, the list below is ordered alphabetically.
Thank you!
A call for revolution
by the 14th Dalai Lama
A rallying cry for the whole world, by one of the most respected leaders of our troubled times.
This eloquent, impassioned manifesto is possibly the most important message the Dalai Lama can give us about the future of our world. It’s his rallying cry, full of solutions for our chaotic, aggressive, divided times: no less than a call for revolution.
An Appeal to the World: The Way to Peace in a Time of Division
by the 14th Dalai Lama
In this urgent “appeal to the world”, His Holiness the Dalai Lama addresses our time of division, calling on us to draw upon the innate goodness of our shared humanity to overcome the rancour, mistrust, and divisiveness that threaten world peace and sustainability. Working with trusted collaborator Franz Alt, the Dalai Lama calls on the better angels of our nature to tackle a wide range of contemporary issues, from war, violence and intolerance to climate change, global hunger and materialism. Applying the techniques and teachings of Tibetan Buddhism – from listening and contemplation to meditation and nonviolence – His Holiness provides a roadmap forward.
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
by the 14th Dalai Lama
Ten years ago, in his best-selling Ethics for a New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way.
Transcending the mere “religion wars”, he outlines a system of secular ethics that gives tolerant respect to religion, but, with the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, makes a claim for what the Dalai Lama calls a third way. This is a universal code of ethics that transcends religious boundaries, that recognizes our common humanity and advocates for a global human community based on understanding and mutual respect.
Business as an Instrument for Societal Change: In Conversation with the Dalai Lama
by Sander Tideman
Business as an Instrument for Societal Change: In Conversation with the Dalai Lama is the result of two decades of research and dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other leaders in business, government, science and education. Author Sander Tideman, a lawyer and banker who has maintained a friendship with the Dalai Lama over all these years, presents a practical framework and methodology to develop a new kind of leadership“ one fit to repurpose the business world and tackle escalating social, economic and environmental needs.
Tideman unites the scientific worldviews of physics, neuroscience and economics with the positive psychology of human relationships, and ancient spiritual wisdom, to formulate practical business leadership solutions.
At the heart of this book lies the journey to discover our shared purpose. This ignites new sources of value creation for the organisation, customers and society, which Tideman terms “triple value”. We can achieve triple value by aligning societal and business needs, based on the fundamental reality of interconnection.
Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama
by Tania Singer and Matthieu Ricard
Can the hyperambitious, bottom-line-driven practices of the global economy incorporate compassion into the pursuit of wealth? Or is economics driven solely by materialism and self-interest? In Caring Economics, experts consider these questions alongside the Dalai Lama in a wide-ranging, scientific-based discussion on economics and altruism.
Begun in 1987, the Mind and Life Institute arose out of a series of conferences held with the Dalai Lama and a range of scientists that sought to form a connection between the empiricism of contemporary scientific inquiry and the contemplative, compassion-based practices of Buddhism. Caring Economics is based on a conference held by the Mind and Life Institute in Zurich in which experts from all over the world gathered to discuss the possibility of having a global economy focused on compassion and altruism. Each chapter consists of a presentation by an expert in the field, followed by a discussion with the Dalai Lama in which he offers his response and his own unique insights on the subject.
In this provocative and inspiring book, learn how wealth doesn’t need to be selfish, how in fact, empathy and compassion may be the path to a healthier world economy.
Eco Literate
by Daniel Goleman (with Elizabeth Bennet & Zenobia Barlow)
Emotions play a vital role in how we relate to the world.
Emotional, social, and ecological intelligence must be approached in order to build a deep sense of respect toward every living system.
This book shares stories of pioneering educators, students, and activists engaged in issues related to food, water, oil, and coal in communities from the mountains of Appalachia to a small village in the Arctic; the deserts of New Mexico to the coast of New Orleans; and the streets of Oakland, California to the hills of South Carolina.
Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence: The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading Thinkers on Climate Change
by John D. Dunne and Daniel Goleman
Engage with leading scientists, academics, ethicists, and activists, as well as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness the Karmapa, who gathered in Dharamsala, India, for the twenty-third Mind and Life conference to discuss arguably the most urgent questions facing humanity today:
- What is happening to our planet?
- What can we do about it?
- How do we balance the concerns of people against the rights of animals and against the needs of an ecosystem?
- What is the most skillful way to enact change?
- And how do we fight on, even when our efforts seem to bear no fruit?
Emotional Intelligence
by Daniel Goleman
Everyone knows that having a high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue. in this book, Daniel Goleman shares a brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offering startling new insight into our “two minds” – the rational and the emotional – and their interplay.
Goleman explains how self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy add up to a different way of being smart – and they aren’t fixed at birth! Although shaped by childhood experiences, emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened throughout our adulthood – with immediate benefits to our health, our relationships, and our work.
Factfulness
by Hans Rosling
According to the book author, Hans Rosling, it turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we constantly worry about everything instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
In this book, Rosling shows that a lot of progress has happened in recent years, but that we can still do better. The book presents statistical data and demonstrates how some changes in thinking increase our understanding and help avoid biases.
Finding Mother Tree
by Suzanne Simard
In this book, Suzanne Simard brings us into the intimate world of trees. She explains that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp. Instead, they are a complicated, interdependent circle of life. Forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities.
Simard shares how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, how they recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics often ascribed to human intelligence alone.
Nature to Nurture
by Chhaya Taralekar
Chhaya Vikas Taralekar writes about her own experiences in growing a kitchen garden and the need for it in today’s changing world. The book will guide you to grow your own kitchen garden and reap the benefits of fresh and healthy vegetables.
Taralekar’s explanations go from composting to propper soil characteristics and watering requirements, specific to each species she addresses.
It is a hands-on guide aimed at helping you to kick-start your kitchen garden!
Our Only Home: A Climate Appeal to the World
by the 14th Dalai Lama and Franz Alt
Saving the environment is our collective duty. With each passing day, climate change is causing Pacific islands to disappear into the sea, accelerating the extinction of species at alarming proportions and aggravating a water shortage that has affected the entire European continent. In short, climate change can no longer be denied – it threatens our existence on earth.
In this inspiring new book, the Dalai Lama, one of the most influential figures of our time, calls on political decision-makers to finally fight against deadlock and ignorance on this issue. He argues that we all need to stand up for a different and more climate-friendly world, and to allow the younger generation to assert their right to regain their future.
From the voice of the beloved world religious leader comes this eye-opening manifesto that empowers the generation of today to step up, take action and protect our world.
Regenesis
by George Monbiot
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, the author reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming.
He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat.
Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Silent Spring is an environmental science book. The book documents the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting the industry’s marketing claims unquestioningly.
The book appeared in September 1962 and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement.
The Book of Hope
by Jane Goodall & Doug Abrams
Looking at the headlines – the worsening climate crisis, global hunger, loss of biodiversity, political upheaval – it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.
In this book, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams explore one vital – yet, often misunderstood – element of human nature: hope. During their amusing and thought-provoking conversations, Jane and Dough go through what Jane presents as her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.
Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action?
The Climate Book
by Greta Thunberg
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers, and meteorologists; engineers, economists, and mathematicians; historians, philosophers, and indigenous leaders.
Together, they equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disasters.
Thunberg also shares her own stories uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark.
She claims this is one of our biggest challenges, but also our greatest opportunity. If a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
“We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.” – Greta Thunberg
The Element
by Ken Robinson
The book’s central theme is education and the author argues that we all have what he calls the “element”.
Ken Robinson claims that we are all born with imagination, intelligence, sensitivity, intuition, spirituality, and physical and sensorial perception, but that we use it only partially.
The book is in itself, a challenge for us to seek our passions – our “elements” – so that we can be happy and hence contribute to a better world.
The Element shows the vital need to increase creativity and innovation and encourages a different look at the way education is structured, as well as how we organize human resources.
The Hidden Life of Trees
by Peter Wohlleben
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed.
Maybe closer to human beings than ever imagined, trees form communities, communicate with one another, and aid each other in times of distress.
As Wohlleben explains, as a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough life and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group.
What do they feel? How do they communicate?
These are some of the questions answered by Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees.
The Incredible Journey of Plants
by Stefano Mancuso
In the many different ways plants move, we can see the incessant action and drive to spread life that has led plants to colonize every possible environment on Earth.
Generation after generation, using spores, seeds, or any other means available, plants move in the world to conquer new spaces. They release huge quantities of spores that can be transported thousands of miles. The number and variety of tools through which seeds spread are astonishing: we have seeds dispersed by wind, by rolling on the ground, by animals, by water, or by a simple fall from the plant, which can happen thanks to propulsive mechanisms, the swaying of the mother plant, the drying of the fruit, and much more.
Mancuso explores how plants “convince” animals to transport them around the world, and how some plants need particular animals to spread; how they have been able to grow in places so inaccessible and inhospitable as to remain isolated; how they resisted the atomic bomb and the Chernobyl disaster; how they are able to bring life to sterile islands; and how they can travel through the ages, as they sail around the world.
The Plant Messiah
by Carlos Magdalena
Carlos Magdalena is a man on a mission: to save the world’s most endangered plants.
In The Plant Messiah, Magdalena takes readers from the forests of Peru to deep within the Australian outback in search of the rare and the vulnerable.
Back in the lab – at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, home of the largest botanical collection in the world – we watch as he develops groundbreaking techniques for rescuing species from extinction, encouraging them to propagate and thrive once again.
Magdalena’s passion for plants is undeniable. He tells his story and explains his career with the same attention-holding enthusiasm.
The Man Who Planted Trees
by Jean Gioto
The Man Who Planted Trees is a timeless eco-fable about the power individuals have in protecting the Earth.
The hero of the story, Elzéard Bouffier, spent his life planting one hundred acorns a day in a desolate, barren section of Provence in the south of France. The result was a total transformation of the landscape, from one devoid of life, with miserable, contentious inhabitants, to one filled with the scent of flowers, the songs of birds, and fresh, flowing water.
Since its first publication, over 250 thousand copies of the book have been sold, inspiring countless people around the world to take action and plant trees.
The Nation of Plants
by Stefano Mancuso
Humans are not the masters of the Earth, but only one of its residents. From the moment of their arrival, about three hundred thousand years ago – nothing when compared to the history of life on our planet – humans have succeeded in changing the conditions of the planet so drastically as to make it a dangerous place for their own survival.
The cause of this reckless behavior is partly based on our total incomprehension of the rules that govern a community of living beings. We behave like children who wreak havoc, unaware of the significance of the things they are playing with.
In The Nation of Plants, the most widespread nation on Earth finally gets to speak. Forming a short charter based on the general principles that regulate the everyday life of plants, it establishes norms applicable to all living beings.
Compared to our constitutions, which place humans at the center of the entire juridical reality, plants offer us a revolution.
The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically collapsed.
Scientists worldwide are currently monitoring the sixth mass extinction, predicted to be the most devastating series of events since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Honest, entertaining, and deeply informed, the writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before.
Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants
by Stephano Mancuso
This book opens the doors to a new understanding of life on Earth.
On the forefront of uncovering the essential truths about plants, Stefano Mancuso reveals the surprisingly sophisticated ability of plants to innovate, remember, and learn.
Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and actively adapt to new ones.
This book is a testimony of the eye-opening research that makes it more and more clear how remarkable our fellow inhabitants on this planet really are. In Mancuso’s hands, complicated science is wonderfully accessible; besides, he has loaded the book with gorgeous photographs that make for an unforgettable reading experience.
The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality
by the14th Dalai Lama and Richard Gere
After 40 years of study with some of the greatest scientific minds as well as a lifetime of meditative, spiritual, and philosophical study, the Dalai Lama presents a brilliant analysis of why both disciplines must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of the truth. Science shows us ways of interpreting the physical world, while spirituality helps us cope with reality. But the extreme of either is impoverishing. The belief that all is reducible to matter and energy leaves out a huge range of human experience: emotions, yearnings, compassion, culture. At the same time, holding unexamined spiritual beliefs, beliefs that are contradicted by evidence, logic, and experience, can lock us into fundamentalist cages.
Through an examination of Darwinism and karma, quantum mechanics and philosophical insight into the nature of reality, neurobiology and the study of consciousness, the Dalai Lama draws significant parallels between contemplative and scientific examination of reality. “I believe that spirituality and science are complementary but different investigative approaches with the same goal of seeking the truth,” His Holiness writes. “In this, there is much each may learn from the other, and together they may contribute to expanding the horizon of human knowledge and wisdom.”
This changes everything
by Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s a wake-up call for us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in so many ways.
Klein explains how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.
The author claims that a change in our relationship with nature and with one another is required to respond to today’s climate crisis. And she documents the inspiring movements that are already taking place, building the next, regeneration-based economies.
This Fragile Planet: His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Environment
by the 14th Dalai Lama and Michael Buckley
This Fragile Planet features 80 inspiring quotations from His Holiness the Dalai Lama on environment, matched with 120 eye-catching photos and visuals from a dozen professional photographers – all carefully curated and edited by Tibet expert Michael Buckley.
The book lays out the vision of His Holiness concerning secular ethics and environmental protection, great respect for all living beings, the importance of interdependence, and the concept of universal responsibility for protecting Mother Earth
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Thank you for visiting our community library!
If you wish to suggest a book and build on our community library, please send us an email at francisca@plantgrowsave.org or leave a comment in the comment section below.
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