Forgotten books can be lost trails of thought with interesting and sometimes important lessons still to tell. Often those lessons emerge because a book is forgotten. I bought two books off the table at Green Apple’s outlet, for 50 cents a pound.

In the mid 1950s, Wallace Stegner, an unknown professor at Stanford, was commissioned to write a company history of Aramco, the American oil conglomerate developing the Saudi oil fields. The book, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, was eventually published in 1971 (and recently reissued) and, as published, celebrates Aramco’s achievements: “It was magical. The applied skills and power as well as the results are awesome . . . unwilling as a democracy may be to take its own side in an argument, and meekly as it may believe the worst interpretations of its own motives, American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair.”

In 1987, Shell Oil subsidized the publication of an urban planning book by Michael Middleton. Man Made the Town’s pleasant pictures and quasi-coffee table layout hide a more serious, almost hectoring text that seems two decades ahead of its time in environmental conscience and urgency: “Society, as we do in our daily lives, has to make complex trade-offs between the options open to it. We have lived for a long time beyond our environmental means . . . By what right do we pile up problems of this magnitude for succeeding generations? . . . In truth, environmental quality is no longer, if it ever was, an optional extra. It has become fundamental to the very future of whole communities, whole peoples.”

Stegner’s book, ultimately, is a practically unreadable monograph of deal chronologies and the names of company executives, Saudi princes and local figures, but is remarkable as an early work of a award-winning eventual lion of the environmental movement. His estate has disowned the book, but as readers we should let it stand on its own as more or less reflecting Stegner’s beliefs - that pure business instincts from a democratic country could do another less developed country some good. Stegner emphasizes the extreme primitivism (I don’t think he would be afraid of that word in this context) of the Arabian peninsula well into the 20th century, and the changes wrought by the western oil economy as a step forward.

The Middleton book reminds us that Al Gore invented neither the Internet nor environmentalism, that responsible, long term environmental thinking has existed for decades, if not centuries, and that oil companies have been open-minded enough to fund such thinking.

With decades of hindsight, these books remind us of interesting things. Ideas such as profit motive are constant through history, but opinion of that motive varies based on time and perspective. Environmentalism is not always synonomous with anti-development. The closer one is to a materially poor, undeveloped state, the more one is likely to view materialism and development as positive. And, we collectively have known for a long time about the ill-effects of short term thinking. We have simply lacked the collective political will to act differently. Lessons, all from some random forgotten books picked up for about $2.