Our 10 Must-Read ESG and Sustainability Books for the Year

We asked our experts as well as polled Antea Group clients and friends about their favorite books on the topics of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and sustainability. Although you can argue that sustainability fits within ESG, we wanted our selection of books to go beyond sustainability to explore broader social and corporate governance considerations for businesses. 

We have rounded up the responses and curated this short top ten list of educational, impactful, and eye-opening must-read books: 

Leaving Planet Simple: Embracing Sustainability, ESG, and Resilience to Transform Your Business 

Author: Dr. Alex Gold

From the Back Cover: "Sustainability, resilience, ESG. What does it all mean? In his groundbreaking book, Leaving Planet Simple, Dr. Alex Gold cuts through the clutter and sensationalized headlines to explain how you can truly transform your business. Many business leaders today are stuck on Planet Simple. It’s a pleasant place―and state of mind―but it’s not the real world. Now, Dr. Gold, with a PhD in resilience science and extensive corporate experience, shows us that rather than trying to master it, nature has quite a bit to teach us. Dr. Gold explains that what often hinders business leaders today is an outdated mindset. This is life on Planet Simple, a world where businesses can operate in isolation, separate from the environment and the communities they inhabit. Instead, Dr. Gold shows us that a business, really any organization, is much more like a natural environment, an ecosystem where all the parts are interconnected and changing all the time. Business leaders must leave Planet Simple, abandon this simplistic mindset, and embrace a new resilience mindset better suited for Planet Earth."

Publisher: Forbes Books 

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse

Author: Dave Goulson  

From the Back Cover: "Drawing on thirty years of research, Goulson has written an accessible, fascinating, and important book that examines the evidence of an alarming drop in insect numbers around the world. “If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse,” he warned in a recent interview in the New York Times—beginning with humans’ food supply. The main cause of this decrease in insect populations is the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. What will happen when the bugs are all gone? Goulson explores the intrinsic connection between climate change, nature, wildlife, and the shrinking biodiversity and analyzes the harmful impact for the earth and its inhabitants."

Publisher: Harper

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard 

Author: Douglas W. Tallamy

From the Back Cover: “Douglas W. Tallamy’s first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. Nature’s Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy—you will walk away with specific suggestions you can incorporate into your own yard."

Publisher: Timber Press 

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Author: Naomi Klein

From the Back Cover: “In this book, Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds." 

Publisher: Simon & Schuster 

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis 

Authors: Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

From the Back Cover: “Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.” 

Publisher: Vintage

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

Sustainable Sustainability: Why ESG is Not Enough

Author: Rajeev Peshawaria

From the Back Cover: “The cry for a more inclusive form of capitalism is growing. But the irony is we are using the same tools that caused the excesses of shareholder capitalism—incentives and regulations—to drive responsible behavior. Incentives coupled with some regulations were to henceforth safeguard societal interests. Instead, incentives created bad behavior. Regulations were routinely bypassed with intelligent loopholes. Despite this—to encourage sustainability today—we are again using incentives and regulations. That’s predominantly what the ESG framework focuses on. And what do we see? Rampant greenwashing and box-ticking. To address today’s existential challenges, we need innovation of the highest order. Innovation can neither be legislated nor driven by extrinsic incentives alone. We need a values-driven revolution. We need steward leadership—the ability to create a win-win-win future for stakeholders, society, and the environment. ESG must upgrade to ESL, where the ‘L’ stands for Steward Leadership. In ESL, ‘G’ is a subset of ‘L’. Sustainable Sustainability lays out a practical, step-by-step playbook for any commercial entity that wants to succeed at marrying profit and purpose."

Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

Green Giants: How Smart Companies Turn Sustainability into Billion-Dollar Businesses

Author: E. Freya Williams 

From the Back Cover: “Green Giants examines nine companies--including Chipotle, Toyota, Unilever, Tesla, General Electric, and more--who have established the blueprint for sustainable success that anyone can follow. What do Brazil’s top beauty brand, America’s second-fastest-growing restaurant chain, and the world’s third bestselling car have in common--besides achieving enormous success with revenue in the tens of billions? They are doing it all while holding to their convictions of implementing sustainable principles that help consumers live better lives. But they aren’t the only ones. Author Freya Williams, an early pioneer of the modern sustainable business movement, discovered six factors responsible for the overwhelming success of these nine socially responsible companies.”  

Publisher: AMACOM

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

Fashionopolis: Why What We Wear Matters   

Author: Dana Thomas

From the Back Cover: "What should I wear? It’s one of the fundamental questions we ask ourselves every day. More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labor, the environment, and intellectual property—and in the last three decades, with the simultaneous unfurling of fast fashion, globalization, and the tech revolution, those abuses have multiplied exponentially, primarily out of view. In Fashionopolis, Thomas sees renewal in a host of developments, including printing 3-D clothes, clean denim processing, smart manufacturing, hyperlocalism, fabric recycling—even lab-grown materials. From small-town makers and Silicon Valley whizzes to such household names as Stella McCartney, Levi’s, and Rent the Runway, Thomas highlights the companies big and small that are leading the crusade."

Publisher: Penguin Books

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon 

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions 

Author: Greta Thunberg

From the Back Cover: “In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?” 

Publisher:Penguin Random House 

Where to Find It: Bookshop.org | Amazon  

Rewilding the Sea

Author: Charles Clover

From the Back Cover: “In this indispensable follow up to his acclaimed The End of the How Overfishing is Changing the World, Charles Clover chronicles how determined individuals are proving that the crisis in our oceans can be reversed, with benefits for both local communities and entire ecosystems. Rewilding the Sea celebrates what happens when we step aside and let nature repair the whether it is the overfishing of bluefin tuna across the Atlantic, the destruction of coral gardens by dredgers in Lyme Bay or the restoration of oysters on the East Coast of America. The latest scientific research shows that trawling and dredging create more CO2 than the aviation industry and damage vast areas of our continental shelves, stopping them soaking up carbon. We need to fish in different ways, where we fish at all. We can store carbon and have more fish by stepping aside more often and trusting nature.Essential and revelatory, Rewilding the Sea propels us to rethink our relationship with nature and reveals that saving our oceans is easier than we think.” 

Publisher: Witness Books

Where to Find It: Thriftbooks | Amazon 

Looking for more learning opportunities? Check out these other blogs: Stay On Top of Energy Transition With These Top 10 Podcasts and The 10 Best Sustainability Podcasts for Environmental Business Leaders. 

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