Here is a list of books to help connect you with the underlying themes of Shmita. Most were recommended by people on the shmita-network list serve. Thank you, to those whose suggestions appear here.
- The Case Against Competition – Alfie Kohn
- The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy – Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies
- Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible – Ellen Davis (Ellen Davis is a biblical scholar who is also a follower of Wendell Berry. A lot of great stuff on shmitta and the biblical perspective on land in general)
- Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver (novel explores feelings about climate change)
- No Impact Man – Colin Beavan (personal account of trying to live with no impact, which concludes that most important thing is community)
- 40 Signs of Rain – Kim Stanley Robinson (science fiction, this is first volume of trilogy on climate change, which explores politics of responding, very easy read)
- Deep Economy – Bill McKibben (non-fiction, on how to make our economy work for us)
- The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, Bill McKibben (brilliant commentary on Job relating to climate change)
- The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology – Ellen Bernstein (commentary on story of creation, short and amazing)
- The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World – Lewis Hyde (an underground classic about the idea of gift in contrast with the idea of commodity)
- The Myth of Progress – Tom Wessels (a great little book which critiques from a scientific point of view the economic idea of continual growth)
- He She & It – Marge Piercy (a novel that is both dystopian & utopian in its depiction of the mid-21st-century world, the USA, and an independent Jewish commonwealth named Tikva (Jewish-renewal and advanced computerist culture) where Boston used to be, before global ocean rise turned it into a group of islands in the Atlantic)
- Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization – Daniel Quinn
- The World until Yesterday – Jared Diamond
- The Fifth Sacred Thing – Starhawk
- Pretty sure there’s some good stuff in Leviticus
- Beyond Growth – Herman Daly
- Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought, Vol. 1 & 2 Edited by Arthur Waskow
- Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robin
- How Much Is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth – by Alan Thein Durning
- The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back – by Hannah Salwen
- Maaser Kesafim–Giving a Tenth to Charity edited by Cyril Domb
- We Gave Away a Fortune – Christopher Mogil
- The Generosity Plan – Kathy LeMay
- The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl – Timothy Egan
- Jayber Crow – Wendell Berry
- The Gift of Good Land – Wendell Berry
- Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects – Christopher D. Stone (Originally published1972, Southern California Law Review)
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants – Robin Wall Kimmerer
- What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice – Wen Stephenson
- Benstein, Jeremy, The Way into Judaism and the Environment (Part of the The Way Into Series), Long Hill Partners, Incorporated, 2008.
- Bernstein, Ellen, ed. Ecology and the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature and the Sacred Meet. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998.
- Bernstein, Ellen, The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2005
- Eisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
- Elon, Ari, Naomi Hymen, and Arthur Waskow, eds. Trees, Earth, and Torah: A Tu B’shvat Anthology. New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999.
- Hareuveni, Nogah. Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage. Kiryat Ona, Israel: Neat Kedumim, 1984.
- Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, ed. Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed Word. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Yaffe, Martin, ed. Judaisim and Environmental Ethics: A Reader. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001.