The Green movement in America in the 80s and early 90s was like the proverbial elephant and blind man. Depending on how you arrived at it and with whom you practiced it, you could have quite different perceptions of what it was about. Below is a list of the books I believe were most influential in the early stages of US Green activity, before it abandoned many of its non-dualistic ideas and solidfied into a Left-progressive group.

It's an eclectic collection, and I am definitely not saying I agree with everything said in all of them. Far from it. But if you were there, as I was, and you weren't strictly beholden to one ideology, then you might have read any or all of these in the process of understanding this new political groundswell. Note that this is not a definitive list of Third Wave/Green/Radical Middle/whatever reading, but a historic one to capture that moment. I am working on a shorter list of essential reading that also includes more recent stuff.

For some, the entry point was environmentalism. They may have been grassroots activists fighting nuclear power or developers or a toxic waste dump, or simply Sierra Club members who support those causes. Several early self-help thinkers expanded their scope to the whole society, seeing different structures and dysfunctions as social, not just personal, problems. Combined with the emerging New Age movement, this provided a spiritual entry point for the movement. Some feminists, especially those involved in spiritual work, …

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