Drake, Frances. Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This well-written overview for college students can be read by any interested reader.
Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper Business, 1993.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991.
Edgerton, Robert B. Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. New York: Free Press, 1992. An excellent summary of the evidence disputing the notion of the noble savage that goes on to consider whether cultures adopt maladaptive beliefs and practices. The author concludes that all cultures do so. The text also attacks the currently trendy academic notion of "unconscious" problem-solving, in which primitive cultures are assumed to be acting in an ecologically sound fashion, even when they appear wasteful and destructive. Edgerton argues they aren't doing anything of the sort--theyare wasteful and destructive.
Edwards, Paul. N., and Stephen Schneider. "The 1995 IPCC Report: Broad Consensus or 'Scientific Cleansing'?"EcoFable/Ecoscience 1, no. 1 (1997): 3-9. A spirited argument in defense of changes to the 1995 IPCC report by Ben Santer. However, the article focuses on the controversy that resulted and does not review in detail the changes to the text that were made. Thus the paper talks about the controversy without examining its substance.
Einarsson, Porleifur. Geology of Iceland. Trans. Georg Douglas. Reykjavik: Mal og menning, 1999. Surely one of the clearest geology textbooks ever written. The author is professor of geology at the University of Iceland.
Etheridge, D. M., et al. "Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn."Journal of Geophysical Research 101 (1996): 4115-28.
Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Our experience of climate is limited to the span of our lives. The degree to which climate has varied in the past, and even in historical times, is hard for anyone to conceive. This book, by an archaeologist who writes extremely well, makes clear through historical detail how much warmer--and colder--it has been during the last thousand years.
Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. Feynman exemplifies the crispness of thought in physics as compared with the mushy subjectivity of fields such as ecology or climate research.
Finlayson-Pitts, Barbara J., and James N. Pitts, Jr. Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments, and Applications. New York: Academic Press, 2000. A clear text that can be read by anyone with a good general science background.
Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002. An astonishing text by a psychotherapist. In my opinion, the greatest problem for all observers of the world is to determine whether their perceptions are genuine and verifiable or whether they are merely the projections of inner feelings. This book says it doesn't matter. The text consists almost entirely of unsubstantiated opinions about human nature and our interaction with the natural world. Anecdotal, egotistical, and wholly tautological, it is a dazzling example of unbridled fantasy. It can stand in for a whole literature of related texts in which feeling-expression masquerades as fact.
Flecker, H., and B. C. Cotton. "Fatal bite from octopus."Medical Journal of Australia 2 (1955): 329-31.
Forrester, Jay W. Principles of Systems. Waltham, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press, 1971. Some day Forrester will be acknowledged as one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. He is one of the first, and surely the most influential, researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did groundbreaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behavior to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. His work was an early inspiration for the attempts to model the world that ultimately became the Club of Rome'sLimits of Growth. But the Club didn't understand the most fundamental principles behind Forrester's work.