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Essential Reading

There are books or articles that revolutionise a person’s vision of society. The following contributions identify those readings that transformed and inspired my thinking and analysis.

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1. Willy De Backer - 10 March, 2007

All the works of Herman Daly, one of the fathers of ecological economics have had a profound influence on my way of thinking about economy. Starting from Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” (1971), Herman Daly developed the basis for an economic analysis which recognises the physical and thermodynamic limits of the economic system. Daly’s “Steady-State Economics“ (1977) remains a fundamental work for anyone wanting to understand why we are in trouble with climate change and energy security.

Paul Roberts’ “The End of Oil“ opened my eyes to the debate on peak oil and the decline of the fossil-fuel based economy. His realistic analysis of the current energy world order and the need for a full-fledged transformation of that energy world order is brilliant. If you have no clue about the energy security issue, there are few better books to start from.

One of the darkest visions on the 21st century can be found in James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency“. Although the book occasionally goes over the top in radicalism, the chapter on the history of modernity and fossil fuels is an absolute must-read. Politicians will have to come to terms with Kunstler’s “converging catastrophes” if they want to find real solutions for the future.

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2. Patrick Worms - 16 May, 2007

An illuminating long-term perspective on the wider ecological impact of civilisations can be found in Jared Diamond’s works. As a biogeographer, his “Guns, Germs and Steel” is the only convincing non-racialist explanation I have ever read of the fact that Europeans, rather than say Australian aborigines, had such an impact on the world. And in his “Collapse”, he maps the contrasting fates of civlizations that have learned to manage their environments well – and those that don’t. The lessons, drawn from around the world, show that success (defined as survival over millenia) is not a function of technologies or political systems, but of an ability to integrate natural limits into the very cultural fabric of the civilization in question.

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3. Willy De Backer - 7 July, 2007

One of the best essays on the issue of population and sustainability is Albert Bartlett’s “Reflections on sustainability, population growth and the environment” (1998). A must-read for all those who believe Europe needs new birth policies.

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