Best Books On Sustainable Living

The best books on sustainable living act as great references, but also as great gifts, inspiration, and decoration. Whatever the reason you’re searching, let us help with some of our favorites.

In order to save materials and emissions from production and shipping, we recommend reading on an eReader. (I haven’t left home without my Kindle since 2011, and that’s coming from an actual librarian. It’s not cheating.) Or, listen to an audiobook.

Of course, that’s not everyone’s jam, and that’s totally cool. We’ll offer as many options for purchase as possible with every title.

Scroll through our selections, or just jump to something here:

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: How Tos

There are a lot of books on this topic that offer short chapters, or lists of changes you can make. Books that you don’t necessarily have to read from cover to cover, but are inspirational or instructional on living a sustainable life. Here are some of our favorite “how to” books on sustainable living:

Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living by Kris Bordessa

Whether you live in a city, suburb, or the country, this essential guide for the backyard homesteader will help you achieve a homespun life–from starting your own garden and pickling the food you grow to pressing wildflowers, raising chickens, and creating your own natural cleaning supplies. (From the publisher.)

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Don’t Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy by Tara McKenna

Say goodbye to your bursting toiletries bag, fast fashion, and all the plastic crowding your pantry. It’s time to build less trashy habits for a more sustainable and ethical life. With relatable stories, compassion, and a realistic perspective, Tara McKenna will show you how in this ultimate guide to going zero waste(ish). (From the publisher.)

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A Zero Waste Life: In Thirty Days by Anita VanDyke

A practical guide to improving your life–and your impact on the world–in thirty simple days by radically reducing waste without losing your lifestyle. By incorporating thirty simple rules one day at a time, A Zero Waste Life is a manageable guide to forming a more conscientious, intentional life in just one month. Offered inside is guidance for tackling waste and making ethical choices when it comes to shopping, eating, travel, beauty, and more. (From the publisher.)

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Minimal: How to Simplify Your Life and Live Sustainably by Madeleine Olivia

Minimal makes simple and sustainable living attainable for everyone, using practical tips for all areas of everyday life to reduce your impact on the earth. Leading environmentalist Madeleine Olivia shares her insights on how to care for yourself in a more eco-friendly way, as well as how to introduce a mindful approach to your habits. This includes how to declutter your life, reduce your waste and consumption, recipes for eating seasonally and making your own natural beauty and cleaning products. (From the publisher.)

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Simple Matters: Living with Less and Ending Up with More by Erin Boyle

For anyone looking to declutter, organize, and simplify, author Erin Boyle shares practical guidance and personal insights on small-space living and conscious consumption. At once pragmatic and philosophical, Simple Matters is a nod to the growing consensus that living simply and purposefully is more sustainable not only for the environment, but for our own happiness and well-being, too. (From the publisher.)

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Live Green: 52 Steps for a More Sustainable Life by Jen Chillingsworth

Live Green is a practical guide of 52 sustainable living changes – one for each week of the year – you can make to be more self-sufficient and reduce your impact on the environment. (From the publisher.)

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Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste by Bea Johnson

In Zero Waste Home, Bea Johnson shares the story of how she simplified her life by reducing her waste. Today, Bea, her husband, Scott, and their two young sons produce just one quart of garbage a year, and their overall quality of life has changed for the better. (From the publisher.)

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Give a Sh*t: Do Good. Live Better. Save the Planet. by Ashlee Piper

It’s time to put your good intentions into action. It’s time to give a shit — about your health, your footprint, and your planet. Give a Sh*t guides you through the transition to a kinder, healthier, more conscious, and sustainable life like no book has done before. With a humorous and nonjudgmental tone, savvy eco-friendly lifestyle expert Ashlee Piper walks you through easy-but-impactful shifts anyone can make to live and be better every damn day. (From the publisher.)

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Sustainable Home: Practical Projects, Tips and Advice for Maintaining a More Eco-Friendly Household by Christine Liu

Sustainable lifestyle blogger and professional Christine Liu takes you on a tour through the rooms of your home – the living area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom – offering tips, tricks and 18 step-by-step projects designed to help you lead a more low-impact lifestyle. (From the publisher.)

See our in-depth review of this book here.

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: Ew, Plastic

It’s no secret around here that there is simply too much plastic in this world. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that there are myriad books dedicated to that one topic. Do a deep dive on our plastic addiction and see if you can finally eradicate it once and for all.

Plastic Purge: How to Use Less Plastic, Eat Better, Keep Toxins Out of Your Body, and Help Save the Sea Turtles! by Michael Sanclements

In Plastic Purge, ecologist, SanClements has put together the most up-to-date and scientifically-backed information available to explain how plastics release toxins into your body and the effect they have on your and your children’s health. Both approachable and engaging, Plastic Purge provides easy-to-follow advice for how to use less plastic, thereby reaping the benefits such as eating a healthier diet and living with less clutter. (From the publisher.)

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Can I Recycle This?: A Guide to Better Recycling and How to Reduce Single-Use Plastics by Jennie Romer

Taking readers on a quick but informative tour of how recycling actually works (setting aside the propaganda we were all taught as kids), Can I Recycle This gives straightforward answers to whether dozens of common household objects can or cannot be recycled, as well as the information you need to make that decision for anything else you encounter. (From the publisher.)

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F**k Plastic: 101 Ways to Free Yourself from Plastic and Save the World by Rodale Sustainability

The war on plastic has begun and you can help. In this book you’ll find 101 little things you as an individual can do to avoid single-use plastics and help save the world. You’ll find sweet and simple ideas like carrying around your own cutlery, getting ice cream in a cone instead of a cup, and buying loose doughnuts or pastries for snacks instead of packaged sweets. (From the publisher.)

See our more in-depth review of this book here.

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Best Books On Sustainable Living: Elevating BIPOC Voices

Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color often have specific, unique, and more detrimental experiences with climate change and environmental issues. Here are some of the best books that investigate the how and why, and how to move forward equitably.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). (From the publisher.)

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As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future. (From publisher.)

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Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman

Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. (From the publisher.)

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Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage by Diane D. Glave

With a basis in environmental history, this groundbreaking study challenges the idea that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. The discussion shows that contemporary African American culture is usually seen as an urban culture, one that arose out of the Great Migration and has contributed to international trends in fashion, music, and the arts ever since. But because of this urban focus, many African Americans are not at peace with their rich but tangled agrarian legacy. (From the publisher.)

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Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her–paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land–lie largely eroded and lost. (From the publisher.)

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: Fast Fashion

Your closet may play a bigger role in your sustainability than you think. Fast fashion wreaks havoc on our environment in many and surprising ways. Fortunately, we’ve got some books that break down the problem and present actionable solutions.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenny now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. And we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more. Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut. What are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more important, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being? (From the publisher.)

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The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good by Elizabeth L. Cline

Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it. (From the publisher.)

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Project 333: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge That Proves Less Really Is So Much More by Courtney Carver

In Project 333, minimalist expert and author of Soulful Simplicity Courtney Carver takes a new approach to living simply–starting with your wardrobe. Project 333 promises that not only can you survive with just 33 items in your closet for 3 months, but you’ll thrive just like the thousands of woman who have taken on the challenge and never looked back. Let the de-cluttering begin! (From the publisher.)

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: Climate Change

Sustainability and climate change are interwoven, but here are our choices for the best books that address the climate specifically.

Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson’s mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. (From the publisher.)

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: A Deep Dive

Consider this section and “everything else.” For a comprehensive understanding of the climate and environmental issues we’re facing, see some of the most well done non-fiction books.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough

Reduce, reuse, recycle urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, cradle to grave manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? (From the publisher.)

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The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability – Designing for Abundance by Michael Braungart

The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, one of the most consequential ecological manifestoes of our time. Now, drawing on the green living lessons gained from 10 years of putting the Cradle to Cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don’t just use or reuse and recycle resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve the natural world as we live, create, and build. (From the publisher.)

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Best Books on Sustainable Living: A Visual Scroll

Browse the list here. All links will take you to our Judgement-Free Green store at bookshop.org. Do you have a book on sustainability that you love? How about one that changed the way you do things at home? Let us know!

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