"What's your favourite 'green' book?" I get asked this question quite a bit and I always struggle for an answer. It presents the same problem as when you're asked to name your favourite song of film: the answer tends to change by the hour.

It would be much easier to compile a list of the top 50 books, which is exactly what the University of Cambridge's programme for sustainability leadership has just done. It asked its alumni – "around 2,000 senior leaders from around the world who have participated in its sustainability programmes over the past decade or more" – to list some of their favourite "sustainability" books.

The result is a pretty comprehensive rundown of the most influential and thought-provoking books of all time. There are many classics – Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, Small is Beautiful, A Sand County Almanac – but there are also a few omissions, too. Where's Henry David Thoreau's Walden? Where's Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded? Where's Bill McKibben's The End of Nature?

And should fiction be allowed onto the list, too? How about Cormac McCarthy's The Road? Or Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang?

Of course, there's always that debate about what you mean by the term "sustainability", but let us for the sake of argument say that in this instance it refers to books that make you think long and hard about how best to exist within a fragile biosphere blessed with finite resources.

Which books would make your own list?

The full list (in alphabetical order)

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the battle Against World Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus1999

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, by Janine Benyus, 2003

Blueprint for a Green Economy: by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward B. Barbier, 1989

Business as Unusual: My Entrepreneurial Journey, Profits and Principles, by Anita Roddick, 2005

Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, by John Elkington, 1999

Capitalism as if the World Matters, by Jonathon Porritt, 2005

Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity, by Stuart Hart, 2005

Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment, by Stephan Schmidheiny and WBCSD, 1992

The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, by Ervin Laszlo, 2006

The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship, by Simon Zadek, 2001

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond, 2005

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan, 2005

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, 2002

The Dream of Earth, by Thomas Berry, 1990

Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, 2000

The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken, 1994

The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, by Nicholas Stern, 2007

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, by Jeffrey Sachs, 2005.

Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resources Use-A Report to the Club of Rome, by Ernst Von Weizsäcker, 1998

False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, by John Gray, 2002

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side on the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser, 2005

A Fate Worse than Debt: The World Financial Crisis and the Poor, by Susan George, 1990

For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, by Herman Daly and John Cobb, 1989

Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, by C.K. Prahalad, 2004

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock, 2000

Globalization and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz, 2002

Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, by George Monbiot, 2006

Human-Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections, by Manfred Max-Neef, 1991

The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism: The Quest for Purpose in the Modern World, by Charles Handy, 1999

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, by Al Gore, 2006

The Limits to Growth, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, 1972

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler, 1993

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando De Soto, 2000

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, 2000

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, by Naomi Klein, 2002

Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, by George Soros, 2000

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller, 1969

Our Common Future, by The World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987

The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, 1969

Presence: An Explanation of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society, by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, 2005

The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future, by Elizabeth C. Economy, 2004

Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold, 1949

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, 1962

The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg, 2001

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E.F. Schumacher, 1973

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, by Vandana Shiva, 1989

The Turning Point: Science Society and the Rising Culture, by Fritjof Capra, 1984

Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, by Ralph Nader, 1965

When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten, 2001

When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? by Fred Pearce, 2006