The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace Wells
Need to get up-to-speed on our climate emergency? The Uninhabitable Earth may be the book for you. In 200-odd pages, columnist and editor David Wallace-Wells deftly unpacks the past, present and future of life in the time of anthropogenic global warming. Remarkably, Wallace-Wells’s prose manages to convey not only the urgency (and anxiety) of our environmental crisis, but the opportunity we still have to seize the solutions right in front of us and turn things around. First you’ll get scared straight; then you’ll get straight to work.
Fisherman’s Blues - Anna Badkhen (FICTION)
Fisherman’s Blues paints a beautiful, yet haunting picture of the Senegalese fishing town of Joal. The novel narrates the lives of West African fishermen, as well as their families, detailing their vibrant culture, history and traditions. Badkhen describes the grim struggles of these already hurting communities in their effort to deal with foreign trawlers infiltrating their waters, overfishing and climate change. This book provides personal accounts that encompass the struggles of seafaring communities, most notably, in declining fish populations, rising sea levels and the changing geopolitical landscape of the continent.
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
David Attenborough said Silent Spring changed the scientific world the most, after Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Carson’s idea is this: one day, you come back to the springtime, and it’s silent - all the birds are gone, the insects killed and the animals dead. Carson shines a light on the apocalyptic effects of chemical pesticides, also delving deeply into the chemical industry’s vast web of disinformation and public deceit. Pesticides have horrific effects on both the environment and human body, and Carson, through her lyrical writing style that makes this book wander into fiction, stresses the paramount importance of the need for a critical eye when using chemicals with such catastrophic potential.
Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change - George Marshall
Why is our response to climate change so woeful? George Marshall explores how we make choices to act or ignore. And when it comes to climate change, it’s usually the latter. Climate change is a 'wicked problem,' Marshall writes, a complicated challenge with no clear enemy and no silver-bullet solution. To tackle this problem and mobilize action, Don’t Even Think About It argues we need science, but just as importantly, we need emotional, compelling narratives.
The Ends of the World - Peter Brannen
As we stare down the barrel of our own (man-made) catastrophe, science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a walk down memory lane over millions of years to examine the planet’s five mass extinctions. With paleontologists as our protagonists, The Ends of the World uses fossil records across the globe to autopsy our five mass extinctions and portend our future. While the topic might sound as dry as a fossilized trilobite, Brannen’s wit may leave you chuckling aloud, from Ordovician to Cretaceous — call it rock and droll.
Storming the Wall - Todd Miller
It’s time to open our eyes to the economic and political implications of climate change. In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller tells the story of climate change refugees that have been forced from their homes and paints a larger picture of how wealthy countries like the United States are putting up walls, militarizing borders and bloating detention centers to restrict those seeking refuge and maintain the status quo of the haves and have nots.
We are the Weather - Jonathan Safran Foer
While the environmental community has focused much effort on curbing wide-scale greenhouse gas emissions, we have done little to cut the greenhouse gases that stem from our appetites. Jonathan Safran Foer addresses this omission as he describes the detrimental environmental and climate-fueling effects of animal agriculture. We Are the Weather features a poignant historical parallel, which adds to its strong tone of urgency. Readers will surely appreciate Foer’s honesty as he shares his personal views and struggles.
The Overstory - Richard Powers (FICTION)
If your idea of a good time is hiking through a secluded forest, complete with dappled sunlight and leaves crunching underfoot, The Overstory is the book you need in your knapsack when you stop for a water break. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for good reason, deftly earving together eight unique lives through the connection between people and trees.
The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh
Do you ever feel disoriented when thinking about climate change? It’s not just you. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh explores our collective inability to 'to grasp the scale and violence of climate change' in three parts: stories, history and politics. Ghosh includes many stories from his home country, India, and how he witnessed effects of climate change there. This book will inspire and make you think. Like Ghosh says, 'Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.'
Rooted & Rising - Leah Schade
Are you or someone you love involved in climate advocacy? Rooted & Rising is the book for you. Published this year, this book of essays draws from diverse writers grounded in their faith. From Evangelical Christian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to Quaker Co-Founder of the Climate Disobedience Center Jay O’Hara, contributors reflect on how their faith journeys have informed their engagement through a time of existential crisis.
Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? - Frans de Waal
People have long assumed that complex thought and emotion were exclusive to humanity. Primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal challenges this assumption, outlining the evolution of human understanding of animal cognition and exploring case studies of animal problem solving, tool use and social structures. This book is a source of provocative research findings, a history and critique of the field and a personal narrative of de Waal’s own career evolution. The result drives readers to reevaluate what it means to be intelligent while deepening their appreciation for the unique and diverse talents across the animal kingdom.
Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward (FICTION)
Facts and figures may drive policy, but they rarely stir emotion with the strength that pure human storytelling can do. Jesmyn Ward comes from a place of enormous truth to tell the story of the Batiste family — bolstered by community, defined by pride and threatened by extreme heat and the battering of ever-stronger hurricanes. Like the book’s protagonist, 15-year-old Esch, Ward grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and lived through Hurricane Katrina, a category-5 hurricane that pummeled communities already made vulnerable by wetland degradation, local land subsistence and flooding. Ward’s prose rises above the cut-and-dried news coverage of the time to tell the story with a dignity and intensity that demonstrates all that we can create together and all that we stand to lose by climate change.
No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference - Greta Thunberg
Fittingly small enough to fit in your hands and under 100 pages, this book is a collection of Greta’s most powerful speeches in the past few years. Greta has spoken in front of the UN, EU and World Economic Forum to name a few, and this book will be a quick read, but not lacking in emotion.
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