Penguin Classics launch GREEN IDEAS, a new series of environmental works from Greta Thunberg to James Lovelock

Penguin Classics announces the launch of GREEN IDEAS, twenty short books, each a great environmental work.   The series publishes on 26th August 2021.  Each book is £4.99 in paperback.

Penguin Classics launch GREEN IDEAS

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement.

Here, in twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each one deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

George Monbiot explains the series, “These short books bring together the most important issues of our age, and seek answers to greatest question of all: can we sustain the habitable planet?” Monbiot’s book, ‘This Can’t Be Happening’ calls on us to stop averting our gaze from the destruction of the living planet.

Naomi Klein, author of ‘Hot Money’ which lays out the evidence that deregulated capitalism is waging war on the climate, says, “What an honour it is to be among so many of my ecological heroes in this library of short books that speak to the short time we have left to win a safe future for all.”

James Lovelock, at 101 the oldest living Green Ideas author with ‘We Belong to Gaia’ draws on decades of wisdom to lay out the history of the living earth, to show that it is not ours to be exploited.  Bringing different disciplines together in the way of GREEN IDEAS is an essential way to understand our planet, he says, “[Gaia] was not a popular idea among scientists who rejected it fiercely and saw it as a threat to their concept of science separated into disciplines, like biology, geology, physics, and chemistry. I followed the wise words of Alfred Lotka who said in the 1920s that it is better to think of the Earth as a whole and not try to explain it through a set of separated disciplines.”

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