Exceptional
Books
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 | Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. An amazing, must-read essay that I recently encountered in the dumpster at Blue Heron Middle School.
On page 11 Fuller notes: "People used to say to me 'Very amusing -- you are 1000 years ahead of your time.' I was amazed with the ease with which they were able to see a thousand years ahead when I struggled to see only a fortieth of that distance."
When I found the book, I was horrified to discover that it was out of print (no longer the case). Friends and I began to collect them and give them away.
And I began to read the book aloud into my hard drive. Some of the recorded material is available on my website in RealAudio format. |
 | "Biopiracy - The plunder of nature and Knowledge. An important book that should be read by anyone wanting to understand the global threat posed by the technological transformations of organisms, cells, and molecules and by their exploitation for profit" - Ruth Hubbard, Professor Emerita of Biology, Harvard University
This book prepares you for the detailed discussions of the unfolding catastrophe of the commons created in corporate and university labs that can be found on RAFI and other sites I have linked. |
 | Botany for Gardeners - a Guide and Handbook. This is the book I used to use as the textbook for my "Plants Have Sex" crash-course in the architecture of natural systems at Oregon Country Fair. Astounding Illustrations by Brian Capon that might show you what to look at and how to understand what you are seeing. The man is truly a brilliant illustrator and his drawings are both models of clarity and clear models - meaning that the unnecessary details have been removed to expose the structure and reveal the function.
Photographs and micrographs can never point you to the point like a brilliant line drawing. I wish I could draw this clearly. |
 | Just saying the words "Logic of Failure" has turned into the kind of shorthand that serves as a metaphor around these parts - since my dad gave me a copy and before I had even finished readinbg it, I bought a bunch more copies and gave them away. The description of the last few hours at Chernoble sets the stage for a fascinating study of the way humans make decisions.
This is the first piece of social psychology literature I have admitted to taking seriously since Lionel Tiger in the '70's. Dorner took an empirical approach - he put people on simulators of different scales - a county, a city, a business (each computer model had lots of variables to adjust) and monitored how they made decisions, hoping to learn how people could learn to run the models and why most people crashed them. |
 | Ecological Imperialism:The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. This rambling study reveals how Europeans were able to conquer the people of temperate lands through the successful environmental adaptation of the plants, animals and germs that they brought with them.
I have not yet found the time to read "Guns Germs and Steel", but I have been briefed on the premise that plants disperse longitudinally more readily than they do latitudinally. |
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