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Books about alternative and transitional communities:

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change
by David Holmgren
In Future Scenarios, permaculture co-originator and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of “energy descent” that faces us. Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probable futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign Green Tech scenario to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy
by Lyle Estill
Estill chronicles the failures and victories of an ongoing movement for sustainability and local resiliency in Chatham County, located in the piedmont region of North Carolina. Estill co-founded Piedmont Biofuels, a biodiesel co-op that went from backyard operation into an industrial plant in a few short years. Readers interested in academic arguments for local economies can find other books on the subject, but if they want a compelling story about noble attempts to walk the talk, Small is Possible delivers. Estill takes us on a loving stroll through his North Carolina neighborhood and shows us how small-scale sustainability - feeding, fueling, and financing locally - is both possible and preferable.

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
by Rob Hopkins
The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive outcome. These changes can lead to the rebirth of local communities that will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses using local materials. They can also encourage the development of local currencies to keep money in the local area. There are now over 30 “transition towns” in the UK, Australia and New Zealand with more joining as the idea takes off. They provide valuable experience and lessons-learned for those of us on this side of the Atlantic.

Creating a Sustainable World: Past Experience/future Struggle
by Trent Schroyer (Author, Editor), Tom Golodik (Editor)
Trent Schroyer and his co-editor Thomas Golodik have pulled together some of the most influential theorists and practitioners of sustainability from around the world Vandana Shiva, Wolfgang Sachs, Robert Engler, Peter Montague, Joan Dye Gussow and Michael Shuman, among others. These seminal essays offer critiques of the publicly accepted notion of sustainability that has evolved, devoid of democratic input and driven by market forces. Schroyer exposes the market-driven agenda underlying the dominant "sustainable development" paradigm and shows us what would be required to advance society without having the Earth irreparably harmed. The authors offer contrasting concepts of sustainability derived from civil society and grassroots communities These are models untouched by the global free trade system and come to us through the voices of people directly affected by "sustainable development" projects

Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice
by Julian Agyeman
Julian Agyeman argues that environmental justice and the sustainable communities movement are compatible in practical ways. Yet sustainability, which focuses on meeting our needs today while not compromising the ability of our successors to meet their needs, has not always partnered with the challenges of environmental justice. Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice explores the ideological differences between these two groups and shows how they can work together. Agyeman provides concrete examples of potential model organizations that employ the types of strategies he advocates.

Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns
by Sim Van der Ryn
Architects, community planners, ecologists and biologists contribute ideas for developing largely self-reliant communities, drastically cutting the use of fossil fuels and putting regional economies in balance. This book offers examples, real and proposed, of sound environmental planning for communities. Three case studies, Sunnyvale, California; Golden, Colorado; Philadelphia and a group of essays on the "Context for Sustainable Design" are included.

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature
by Douglas Farr
Written by the chair of the LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature is both an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to "sustainable urbanism"--the emerging and growing design reform movement that combines the creation and enhancement of walkable and diverse places with the need to build high-performance infrastructure and buildings. Providing a historic perspective on the standards and regulations that got us to where we are today in terms of urban lifestyle and attempts at reform, Douglas Farr makes a powerful case for sustainable urbanism, showing where we went wrong, and where we need to go.

Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments
by Mark Roseland
The third edition of this classic text offers practical suggestions and innovative solutions to a range of community problems--including energy efficiency, transportation, land use, housing, waste reduction, recycling, air quality and governance. In clear language, with updated tools, initiatives and resources, a new preface and foreword, this sustainable practices resource is for both citizens and governments.

Sustainable Communities: The Potential for Eco-neighbourhoods
by Hugh Barton
Examines the practicalities of re-inventing neighborhoods. Written by an interdisciplinary team fo social and environmental scientists, town planners and urban designers. A thought provoking and important contribution to both the theory and practice of the development of sustainable communities. Hugh Barton is with the Sustainable Development Research Group, University of the West of England.

Sustainable Community: Learning from the Cohousing Model
by PhD Graham Meltzer
A unique investigation of cohousing (environmentally and socially innovative housing projects) in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Dr Graham Meltzer is said to be the world's leading expert on cohousing. He is an architect, scholar and architectural photographer who consults, researches and lectures in the fields: environmental and social architecture, communal housing and communalism.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities
by Diana Leafe Christian
Creating a Life Together is the only resource available that provides step-by-step practical information distilled from numerous firsthand sources on how to establish an intentional community. It deals in depth with structural, interpersonal and leadership issues, decision-making methods, vision statements, and the development of a legal structure, as well as profiling well-established model communities. This exhaustive guide includes excellent sample documents among its wealth of resources.

Books offering insight into our economic system and suggestions for a new economic model:

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization
by Thomas H. Greco Jr.
Thomas Greco begins by showing that social justice, economic equity, personal liberty, world peace, and ecological restoration cannot be achieved until we give birth to a just and sustainable paradigm for exchanging energies. The roots of our current financial predicament are revealed and the need for something better is lucidly explained. This book is a concise and efficient way to get up to speed on the history of alternatives to conventional ‘money’ as well as enter the new world of technologically liberated exchange that has the potential to bring about the end of money as we have known it.

Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free
by Ellen Hodgson Brown
Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions, including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out and expanding the money supply. Web of Debt unravels the deception and presents a crystal clear picture of the financial abyss towards which we are heading. Then it explores a workable alternative, that was tested in colonial America and is grounded in the best of American economic thought, including the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth
by David C Korten
Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating "wealth" without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth. Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to create a new economy- locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits.

Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements
by Peter North
A firsthand view of local currencies that are providing alternatives to global capital, Money and Liberation examines the experiences of groups who have tried to build a more equitable world by inventing new forms of money. Presenting in-depth profiles of the trading networks that have been constructed both historically and more recently, including Local Exchange Trading Schemes (England), Green Dollars (New Zealand), Talente (Hungary), and the barter system in Argentina, Peter North shows how the use of currency has been redefined as part of political action, revealing surprising political ambiguity and a nuanced understanding of the potential and limits on alternative currencies as a resistance practice.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
by Bill McKibben
Challenging the prevailing wisdom that the goal of economies should be unlimited growth, McKibben argues that the world doesn't have enough natural resources to sustain endless economic expansion. Drawing the phrase "deep economy" from the expression "deep ecology," a term environmentalists use to signify new ways of thinking about the environment, he suggests we need to explore new economic

The Ecology of Money
by Richard Douthwaite
In this Schumacher Briefing, Richard Douthwaite argues that just as different insects and animals have different effects on human society and the natural world, money has different effects according to its origins and purposes. Was it created to make profits for a commercial bank, or issued by a government as a form of taxation? Or was it created by its users themselves purely to facilitate their trade? And was it made in the place where it is used, or did local people have to provide goods and services to outsiders to get enough of it to trade among themselves? The Briefing shows that it will be impossible to build a just and sustainable world unless and until money creation is democratized.

Funny Money: In search of alternative cash
by David Boyle
The new alchemists of the USA who have found new ways of conjuring money out of next to nothing. After reading this book, you will never think about money in quite the same way again.

The Future of Money
by Benjamin J. Cohen
An informative discussion of various currency arrangements, from exclusive reliance on a national currency to bimonetarism to the adoption of foreign currency as official legal tender, touching on both academic and practical arguments for each.
ideas. Rather then promoting accelerated cycles of economic expansion—a mindset that has brought the world to the brink of environmental disaster—we should concentrate on creating localized economies: community-scale power systems instead of huge centralized power plants and co-housing communities instead of sprawling suburbs.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, argue that the key is to recover Keynes's insight about 'animal spirits'--the attitudes and ideas that guide economic action. The orthodoxy needs to be rebuilt, and bringing these psychological factors into the core of economics is the way to do it. . . . The connections between their thinking on the limits to conventional economics and the issues thrown up by the breakdown are plain, even if they were unable to make every link explicit.

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
In End the Fed, Ron Paul draws on American history, economics, and stories from his own long political life to argue that the Fed is both corrupt and unconstitutional. It is inflating currency today at nearly a Weimar or Zimbabwe level, a practice that threatens to put us into an inflationary depression where $100 bills are worthless. What most people don't realize is that the Fed is actually working against their own personal interests. Congressman Paul's urgent appeal to all citizens and officials tells us where we went wrong and what we need to do fix America's economic policy for future generations.

Books offering an analysis of the economic crisis:

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillman Tett
At once a gripping narrative, an education in derivatives, and a most lucid origin-story for the current financial meltdown, the author of this volume is an award-winning Financial Times journalist. Taking readers back to the invention of credit-derivative obligations (CDOs) at J. P. Morgan in 1994, and the subsequent exponential growth of that market, Tett explains how credit derivatives seemed a win-win for the financial world, freeing up capital, increasing profits, and diversifying risk, but makes the missteps equally clear as the industry hurtles toward a largely-unforeseen wave of loan defaults (the worst since the Great Depression).

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Fox offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at academia's finest, complete with amusing anecdotes about the players and their theories, and illustrates how our economic behaviors and markets have been shaped by a gradually refined theory holding that the stock market prices are both random and perfectly rational.

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
by Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman claims it's time to cast conventional economic wisdom to the wind. The economy is in such a deep hole that he's calling for another $600 billion in federal outlays. This is in addition to the $700 billion already asked for by Treasury Secretary Paulson, and looks very similar to Obama's spending plans for next year. Krugman claims that the financial crises of 2008 is "functionally similar" to the Great Depression. He does not believe, however, that it will be as severe.