By John DeFore

Published to coincide with the historic moment at which, for the first time, more humans live in cities than in the country — and, as the author notes, “one-third of these urban dwellers — more than one billion people — live in slums,” the exceptional photography book The Places We Live puts a human face on appalling environmental issues without resorting to sentimental clichés.

Photographer Jonas Bendiksen does this by not looking for the button-pushing universal image (the malnourished girl with watery eyes, say) but by meeting individual people, listening to their stories, and visiting their homes: The bulk of the book consists of four-panel spreads in which Bendiksen places his camera in the center of a single-room dwelling and photographs its four walls and the inhabitants who share them; accompanying the layouts are first-person narratives that can dispel myths about poverty (as with Shuresh Chandra, who shares an apparently bed-free room with three other grown men despite having a bachelor’s degree) and caution readers against pitying the subjects (”I don’t know how you see my house,” one man says, “but to me it’s beautiful”).

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By John DeFore
The sudden explosion of stories about food shortages resulting from diversion of crops to biofuels may prod Westerners to think, likely for the first time in years, about just what and how much people typically eat in other parts of the world.
The recent paperback Hungry Planet, then, is timely: Though stuffed with [...]

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By John DeFore
Standing out in the current wave of books about the environment — dire jeremiads, thoughtful analyses, and green-leaning coffee-table books — is a compact but weighty tome that is largely uninterested in conveying to readers any kind of “the time is now!” urgency. Rather, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau released April [...]

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By John DeFore
Tuesday sees the release on DVD of one of the higher-profile entries in the wave of documentaries about the environment, The 11th Hour. Like its big brother An Inconvenient Truth, it lands on retail shelves in slimmed-down packaging — this one replacing the usual bulky plastic case, with a paper sleeve recycled from [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
It’s no surprise that Big Energy gets the role of Goliath in Mat Hames’ and George Sledge’s Fighting Goliath: The Texas Coal Wars, a documentary produced and narrated by Robert Redford and The Redford Center at Sundance Preserve that follows a recent chain of events in which coal companies tried to fast [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
If timing is everything, then premiering a film that champions biofuels at a time when the news media’s aflame with stories about the problems with biofuels must be a tad discouraging.
But Josh Tickell, creator of Fields of Fuel, does not seem discouraged. Determined, but not discouraged. Tickell, who has been been on [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

Measured against green ideals, a glossy new coffee table book can seem a bit indulgent, even anachronistic. Where’s the soy ink and recycled paper?
Those are valid questions, but in some cases, we’d like to think that the educational and aesthetic powers of a truly fine collection of photographs and words can have [...]

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By John DeFore
Living by the reduce/reuse/recycle mantra can be a challenge, a chore, a karmic satisfaction or tangible improvement in lifestyle. But it’s rarely something one participates in avidly, anticipating it eagerly while at work or singing its praises at parties.
Lately, though, I’ve been obsessed with a novel way of reducing the world’s waste [...]

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By John DeFore
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, the subject of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, makes art out of the modern world’s refuse, traveling the globe to document waste heaps so vast they resemble the ruins of ancient civilizations: building-sized piles of discarded plastic parts, shipyards full of rusting freighter hulls, house-sized piles of rotary-dial [...]

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