John Feeney

Books

• Coming Home to the Pleistocene
  Paul Shepard on our deep connection to our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer ancestors. Highly worthwhile insights.
• Desert Solitaire
  Edward Abbey's classic appreciation of the high desert. A favorite for many readers. Recommended for those unfamiliar with the desert.
• Elements of Refusal
  A collection of essays by John Zerzan. An intriguing view of how civilization may have buried our true humanity.
• Endgame, Vol. I: The Problem of Civilization
  Derrick Jensen argues powerfully that civilization itself is inherently unsustainable.
• The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania
  Frank Marlowe's authoritative ethnography of the Hadza, one of the last immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies on Earth. Readable, informative as a reference, an important work.
• The Harmless People
  Chronicles Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's time spent in the 1950s with the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari. Illuminating account of the lifeways of one of the last immediate-return societies. Refined and updated in her later The Old Way.
• Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth
  Valuable collection of essays in response to the ecomodernist attack on wilderness and conservation. Highly recommended for anyone who values wild lands.
• The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum
  Robert L. Kelly expertly synthesizes and draws conclusions from a great deal of hunter-gatherer research, making this an exceptionally useful reference covering most of the major topics.
• Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment
  Useful as an anthropological collection with a range of articles on hunter-gatherer lifeways. Emphasis on immediate-return societies.
• Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
  Update of the seminal study of the problem of the modern growth imperative.
• Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change
  Exceptionally clear examination of the proximate cause of our modern ecological challenge. Many otherwise informed people fail truly to understand the nature of carrying capacity and overshoot. This is the book that can help.
• Sparing Nature: The Conflict Between Human Population Growth and Earth's Biodiversity
  Expands on Jeffrey McKee's (and colleagues') important study. A key source on the fundamental connection of the current mass extinction to human population size and growth.
• Wandering God
  Thoroughgoing, scholarly effort to examine immediate-return hunter-gatherer consciousness and how we moved away from it in the shift to delayed-return lifeways. Morris Berman offers a fascinating analysis, debunking widely held notions. A singular work.
• The scholarly literature!
  Not a book, but when working to understand these issues the original scientific/scholarly literature can be of more value than books for a popular readership which are often, at best, authors' biased interpretations of that literature.