This is sort of a perfect storm of books: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky by Edward Burtynsky, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore. They reinforce each other. After reading all four you will want find a large parking lot and commit ritual suicide. Maybe that's overstating it a little bit but each is a very thought provoking book and should be read. First, how about a snack?

The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan

From Pollan's website:

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

This is certainly one of the most thoughtful books on food. He tracks the food for four meals from the source to the table: industrial, large scale organic, artisanal organic, and foraging/hunting. One of the major points that he keeps coming back to is that we are eating converted sunlight. Plants convert sunlight to grow and we eat the plants. Or animals eat the plants and we eat the animals. And then there is oil. Oil that is stored energy from the sun through ancient plant matter that has been formed under geological pressure and temperature. In the industrial food chain, we find oil everywhere. From fertilizer to antibiotics and too many places in between. The amount of energy input is huge for the amout of energy that is in the food that the industrial food chain produces. And that energy is from non-renewable oil and gas, not only for growing it, but also for moving it around the world. Read this book and be aware.

Michael Pollan

After becoming aware of how much most of our food depends on oil you might think about what would happen if the oil went away. You haven't? Well Jim Kuntsler has been thinking about it.

The Long Emergency:
Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by James Howard Kunstler

From Amazon:

Kunstler established a writing career criticizing American suburbia (e.g., The Geography of Nowhere, 1993), and his animosity against his bete noire does not abate here. It's a wide--casting, statistics-studded ramble through energy production and technologies, world economic and political history, and climatology that culminates in predictions that the suburbs are doomed. His assertions are always self--confident, sometimes immodestly so, as when he dismisses in toto any possibility that the market, or technologists, will rescue contemporary civilization from a world of declining oil production. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food. Credit Kunstler with an energetic argument, but whether he has achieved his stated goal--waking up an ostensibly somnolent public--via his relentless and alarmist pessimism remains to be seen.

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This is an uneven book but his core arguments are pretty sound. First, we are very close to peak oil. It may have already happened, or it may be happening as we speak, or it will happen with a very few years. Doesn't matter when. We will be having to live with declining supplies of oil and gas and their increase in price. And technology and alternate energy sources aren't going to save us. The energy in the oil we have been burning up these past 100 years or so was a one time deal. Kunstler looks at the alternate energy sources and, while they will be of some help, the are all require oil energy in the end. Our living arrangements (surburbia) and eating arrangements (the industrial food chain) are based on cheap oil. No cheap oil and our living and eating arrangements will need some radical changes. Most proposed solutions assume we will still be living in surburbia and doing the same things but in high-mileage cars. Not! Will Kunstler's predictions come true? Doesn't matter but there will be big changes. He has been thinking a lot about this and he provides food for thought for you to do your own thinking. You might want to think about this. He has a blog:

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

After all this heavy shit I got a nice picture book from the library.

Manufactured Landscapes:
The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky
by Edward Burtynsky

From Amazon:

Over the past twenty-five years, the internationally renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been an explorer of unfamiliar places where human activity has reshaped the surface of the land. His astonishing large-scale color photographs of the landscapes of mining, quarrying, railcutting, recycling, oil refining, and shipbreaking uncover a stark, almost sublime beauty in the residue of industrial "progress." The implicit social and environmental upheavals that underlie these images make them powerful emblems of our times. This handsome catalogue of the first major retrospective of Burtynsky’s work features essays by Lori Pauli, Kenneth Baker, and Mark Haworth-Booth, as well as a wide-ranging interview with the artist by Michael Torosian. The book includes sixty-four color plates.

Many of these photographs are on Burtynsky's website but these were taken with a large format camera and need to be seen large. Beautiful images. Disturbing images. The book includes,among others, pictures of rail cuts, mines, tailings, quarries, and ship breaking in Bangladesh. Pictures of landscapes altered by man. Check out his website to see the pictures. Get the book to really see the pictures.

Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

I missed the movie but Big Al has a book version.

An Inconvenient Truth:
The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It
by Al Gore

Our climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it is happening very quickly-and has become a true planetary emergency. The Chinese expression for crisis consists of two characters. The first is a symbol for danger; the second is a symbol for opportunity. In order to face down the danger that is stalking us and move through it, we first have to recognize that we are facing a crisis. So why is it that our leaders seem not to hear such clarion warnings? Are they resisting the truth because they know that the moment they acknowledge it, they will face a moral imperative to act? Is it simply more convenient to ignore the warnings? Perhaps, but inconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen. Indeed, when they are responded to, their significance doesnt diminish; it grows. -- Al Gore

This book has lots of pictures. But sometimes pictures tell the story. Big Al covers all the bases here. Not a lot of detail, but enough to scare the bejesus out of you. Very well done. (And to think we got Little George instead.) Kunstler only mentions global warming briefly in The Long Emergency. The effects of global climate change that Gore talks about are only going to make the effects of peak oil worse. At the end of An Inconvenient Truth Gore talks about what to do to fight global warming but the solutions are only half-solutions since they don't really take into account peak oil.

An Inconvient Truth

Four books that should give you pause.