GREEN READS

by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn Norton, 256 pages, $24.95

An admirably pragmatic organization on the green side is the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit run for more than two decades by Fred Krupp. The fund has distinguished itself by developing least-cost public-policy solutions to such complex environmental problems as acid rain. So one would expect Krupp's book, written with journalist Miriam Horn, to offer practical solutions to global warming, and it delivers.

Krupp and Horn introduce us to the next generation of energy sources -- gee-whiz technologies certain to be common knowledge in coming decades -- and the people who invent and finance them. The authors convincingly document a "new industrial revolution," eagerly bubbling away in laboratories and start-up companies in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, demonstration projects in Phoenix and Seattle, and venture capital firms, mostly in Silicon Valley, that are betting big. We learn of magical new approaches to harnessing the sun, wind, algae, ocean energy, the Earth's core heat and even plentiful coal -- if the complex problem of sequestering waste carbon dioxide can be accomplished safely, a dubious proposition. Instead, how about genetically engineered "bugs" that make oil the way spiders make silk and termites convert wood to energy, potentially producing gasoline for $2 per gallon by 2010!

The creativity of the capitalist marketplace will turn these start-ups into future Apples and Intels in enough time to control climate change, Krupp and Horn argue, if lawmakers make the one right policy choice: a "cap and trade" law that would reduce carbon waste while businesses pick and profit from their solutions. Some of us remember when rivers and lakes were used as free sewers; capping the use of the atmosphere as a free sewer is the fastest, cheapest way to bring clean energy to the electrical outlet nearest you.

One big quibble: Krupp and Horn include only a few sentences on nuclear power. Love it or hate it, fission is a proven energy source that is carbon-free and deserves an honest, not cursory, look.

by Brian Fagan Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $26.95

Fagan's many "we don't knows" nevertheless do not prevent him from making a host of suppositions in this book. That it is meandering and repetitious is too bad, because he has something important to say about the "possible" effects of a previous warming period in about 1100-1300 AD and what that history might mean for us as we face the "Great Warming" underway.

by Michael Shnayerson Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 336 pages, $25

Shnayerson, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, has penned a John Grisham novel, full of beleaguered small-time lawyers and simple rural folk vs. suited villains in corporate helicopters. Except the story is real, the heroes true Davids with legal-brief slingshots up against Goliath coal companies leaving permanent 100-acre footprints of flattened mountaintops across Southern Appalachia. Shnayerson has uncovered a national scandal -- the ruthless exploitation of the Appalachian landscape through the modern practice of blasting entire mountaintops to extract the coal below, filling nearby valleys and streams with rubble. Not to mention the exploitation of the people who have lived in these mountains for generations and the miners whose unions are broken as Wall Street-backed Big Coal gets its way, state and federal laws be damned.

Minnesotans have little to be smug about. We import our coal from 80-foot-high seams in the Dakotas and Montana, one reason Appalachian low-sulfur coal has to blast and fill to compete, essentially copying the methods of flatland strip-mines. Except these aren't flatlands, but some of the oldest, most diverse forests and mountains in America, blasted to rubble at the astonishing rate of 22,000 acres a year. Coal provides the cheapest electricity in the United States. "Coal River" reveals the hidden costs on landscape and people, not counting the Inuit and polar bears in an Arctic that's melting, partly because of coal's carbon-dioxide emissions. Read this book and fume.

by Ronnie Green Amistad, 288 pages, $24.95

Another against-all-odds thriller, this one featuring a four-street-wide neighborhood in Louisiana that is scratching the fence of a giant Shell Oil refinery. Margie Richard, a schoolteacher, watched her sister die of a rare lung disease and her friends and grandchildren get sick while she survived several plant explosions and batches of unbreatheable air. Having had enough, she organized to document the perceived wrongs and petitioned to have her tiny African-American community moved out of harm's way. Green, a prize-winning investigative journalist, tells Richard's story well, taking us on a tour down Chemical Corridor, the 80-mile strip of petrochemical facilities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that the locals call "Cancer Alley." Richard's determination, which won her the Goldman Environmental Prize, helped a reluctant Shell clean up its refineries, too. In the end she was featured in Shell's 2004 Annual Report.

In his introduction, Gore reminds us of Teddy Roosevelt's admonition: "We have gotten past the stage, my fellow citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of the country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation." McKibben puts that vision to good use, defining environmental writing not as nature writing but as "the collision between people and the rest of the world." He delivers a solid brick of a book full of practical and metaphorical fuel for a generation faced with unprecedented risks of climate change. Discover here Rhodes Scholar David Quamman and wonky physicist Amory Lovins, among other prescient scientists, gifted writers, naturalists, foresters and activists. It's a pleasure to find Janice Ray, discovered by Minneapolis' Milkweed Editions, alongside Wisconsin's Aldo Leopold and Minnesota's Sigurd Olson, among many others. "American Earth" is a bountiful harvest not only of good green writing, but also of good sense, for the most part. And when you finish, you can recycle it as a doorstop.

by Bill McKibben Holt, 464 pages, $18

McKibben cut his writing cuticles at the New Yorker and it shows. His reports from the underbelly of civilization are laced with passion tempered by grace buttressed by facts. These 44 bite-size essays are a good way to get inside a great environmentalist's head, and under our planet's fragile skin.