Reading for Ideas and Inspiration

Here at The Green Hat Company, we receive our ideas, and inspiration, from many sources – including what we read. Here are some classics for you.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020). A popular science book by journalist James Nestor. 

Nestor's clear, accessible volume combines science and ancient custom to develop a unified theory of breathing, providing a revelatory account of how minor changes in the way we breathe can have profound benefits for health and wellbeing. The book examines breathing from a historical, scientific, and personal standpoint, with a focus on the differences between mouth and nasal breathing.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention (2022). Johann Hari - the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a ground-breaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back.

Why have we lost our ability to concentrate? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back? Johann Hari, the internationally bestselling author of Stolen Focus, went on a three-year journey to discover why our teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers only manage three minutes on average.

We believe that our inability to concentrate is a personal flaw in each of us. It is not. This has been done to all of us by powerful external forces. Our concentration has been stolen. Johann discovered twelve deep cases of this crisis, all of which have stolen some of our attention.

Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do. (2014) by Wallace J. Nichols.

Why do we gravitate to the beach on a nice day? Why does being near water relax our minds and bodies? Wallace J. Nichols' Blue Mind revolutionises how we think about these questions, revealing the astonishing truth about the benefits of being in, on, under, or simply near water.

Blue Mind will awaken readers to the vital importance of water to our health and happiness, based on cutting-edge studies in neurobiology, cognitive psychology, economics, and medicine, and made real by stories of innovative scientists, doctors, athletes, artists, environmentalists, businesspeople, and nature lovers - stories that fascinate the mind and touch the heart.

How Not To Die: Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease (2016) Michael Greger.

Dr Michael Greger explains how simple plant-based food choices can help us live healthier and happier lives. Dr Greger explains which foods to eat to avoid the leading causes of disease-related death and how a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, tubers, whole grains, and legumes can even save your life.

Experience and Education (1938/1997) by John Dewey.

This is a short book by John Dewey, a twentieth-century educational theorist. It offers a succinct and powerful analysis of education. Dewey emphasises experience, experimentation, purposeful learning, freedom, and other progressive education concepts throughout this and his other writings on education.

Dewey argued that the quality of an educational experience is critical, emphasising the importance of social and interactive learning processes.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. (2021) by Suzanne Simard.

A brilliant scientific detective story from the ecologist who first discovered tree language, Suzanne Simard, a world-renowned scientist, has done more to transform our understanding of trees than anyone else. She now reveals the secrets of a lifetime spent discovering startling truths about trees, including their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom, and sentience.

She was working in the forest service when she discovered how trees communicate underground via an enormous web of fungi, at the heart of which reside the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest. Her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, but data now strongly supports them. As her extraordinary journey demonstrates, science is not a separate realm from everyday life, but is inextricably linked to it.

She reveals in Finding the Mother Tree how the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for survival - teaches us profound lessons about resilience and kinship, and how it must be preserved before it's too late.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2020) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Robin Wall Kimmerer was trained as a botanist to use scientific tools to ask questions about nature. She believes that plants and animals are our oldest teachers and as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation she combines these two types of knowledge, indigenous and western science, in Braiding Sweetgrass.

Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. She circles towards a central argument in a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today: that the awakening of a broader ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. Only when we can understand the languages of other beings will we be able to understand the earth's generosity and learn to give our own gifts in return.

By Mark