My trolling the Internet has, in fact, led me off it.  If any of these books appeal, do yourself a favor and pick up a print copy.  The trees you kill will be offset by your reduced need for radiation treatment a few years down the line.  There’s no way that spending this much time with a laptop straddling your jewels ain’t gonna end up costing you one. 
 

• The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, by Andres R. Edwards, the founder of EduTracks, a NorCal design and fabrication firm that specializes in green building and sustainable education programs.  The book, written in layman’s terms, offers a history of the sustainability movement and describes pioneering projects and policies in the Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia and India.
• Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense, by John E. Ikerd.  If capitalism had rather benign roots as a political system meant to level the playing field, it has devolved into a ruthless system that requires expansion at all costs.  Ikerd’s book acknowledges the problem but offers capitalism as the solution—just a different kind of capitalism.   
• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben.  McKibben, author of the prophetic global-warming treatise “The End of Nature,” argues the need for a “deep economy,” a new paradigm wherein sustainable communities anchor and are anchored by local resources (farmers’ markets serving as a model for ‘the economics of neighborliness’).  Reviews proclaim him utopian to an impractical point, but perhaps his intriguing, provocative ideas can provide fodder for constructive change. 
• The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken.  Cool guy, Hawken.  His business philosophies—like gauging whether the work employees do is aesthetically pleasing and whether they’re having fun—sound like would make corporate types guffaw into their gazpacho.  Instead, unexpectedly, it’s Hawken (of the Smith & Hawken gardening supplies empire) who, by studying Vaclav Havel, Ram Dass, Peter Drucker and Wal-Mart, is laughing all the way to the bank.  
• Edens Lost and Found: How Ordinary Citizens are Restoring Our Great American Cities, by filmmakers Harry Wiland and Dale Bell.  Finally, something less depressing.  Much less depressing, in fact: ordinary people cooperating to re-green city streets, oversee eco-friendly watershed management, create rooftop and urban gardens, and restore parks.  There’s hope yet!