Architect and author Lance Hosey mines the history of ideas—Aldo Leopold, Christopher Alexander, Diane Ackerman, E.O. Wilson, among many others—to shape an argument about the aesthetics of sustainability. It’s a convincing argument that moves from the small scale to the large, from forks and cars to landscapes and cities. Architecture makes up the bulk of the book, but the whole undertaking works well in bringing form and appearance into discussions that tend to focus solely on performance as an indicator of sustainability.