Brown hands know how to write, too: Joe Schnaier rattles off his reading list

Getting my hands dirty does not mean I will always be seen planting trees to save the planet. I, Joe Schnaier, wash my hands clean and pick a good hardcover perhaps from time to time, knowing that some of the best environmentalists are also writers in their own right.

Al Gore and “Our Choice”

This piece is classic Gore, the sheer persuasion and reason that come jumping right off at you. The text is filled with researched facts, but his way with words helped me understand scientific terms that would have otherwise stumped me: albedo, black carbon, halocarbons, etc.

Every environment junkie must read this because of three things:

First, if you rooted for An Inconvenient Truth, you may find this as its “non-sequel sequel” for inverting the ratio of the former book (10% about climate crisis, 90% about solutions).

Also, I, Joe Schnaier, got demoed on and bought this digitized version of “Our Choice,” which comes as an Apple-based app enriched with visual elements (it works well on my iPad; the iPhone version sometimes strains my eyes); you can tap, press, or hold your finger on the screen and the bar chart splits into smaller charts or the photo reveals where on the planet it was taken.

Definitely not the least awesomepart, his summary of the counterarguments of the deniers and the ensuing debunking statements make up the most substantive part of this eye-opening report.

Bill McKibben and “The End of Nature”

The title is a four-word challenge to the SUV driver, and to every skeptic out there. Time magazine dubbed its author “the world’s best green journalist,” a well-earned description indeed because of his mind- and heart-piercing accounts of the climate change, written in 1989. He is also known as the global warming prophet for being dead-on correct with his claim that “this buzzing, blooming, mysterious, cruel, lovely globe of mountain, sea, city, forest, of fish and wolf and bug and man; of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen–it has come unbalanced in our short moment on it.”

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