100 books like A Bigger Picture

This book is also heavily dog-eared. It is full of chin-dropping facts about how we got here and why we need systems change to address climate change. The climate crisis is clearly exposed, but it is ultimately a positive book.

Klein explains how policies and actions to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions also offer an opportunity to reduce inequalities, redefine democracy, and bring back thriving local economies. The "market" can’t fix the climate crisis. We can use this crisis to reweave our relationship with nature and with each other to create a better world.

This book is a must-read for understanding the politics, economics, and undercurrents that have delivered us to the crisis we are now in.

I opt for this over some other options because of its frightening clarity on the consequences of unabated human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. With business as usual, we are speeding towards a 4-degree Celsius temperature increase by 2100, about one lifetime away. This increase would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable due to rising seas, extreme heat, and more. Already, climate change is taking its toll.

Wallace Wells explores a long list of devastating effects, including heat death, hunger, drowning, unbreathable air, wildfires, disasters that are no longer natural, like outsize tornados and hurricanes, lack of fresh water, dying oceans from acidification, plagues of insects and diseases, economic collapse, climate conflict, and the multiplier effect of these things acting together.

You must antidote this book with books 1 and 2. It is too depressing to read alone. 

Whilst not specifically about tech, I find this book a crucial intervention in clearly laying out how narratives can be weaponized for catastrophic negative impact.

I also really like how it focuses on the scientists themselves, amongst many other people, and their role in being part of the project of doubt – in understanding and unpicking hype, it’s crucial to consider all the actors involved in bringing science and technology into fruition, and this book expertly does just that. 

If there is only one book you read on the climate and other ecological crises, it is this. In fact, you will need this book after you read books 4 and 5 on my list. It is a book I constantly return to. Almost every page is dog-eared.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s zen teachings on deep ecology, engaged activism, community building, and collective awakening help to see ways forward in the face of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, injustice, and inequality. He offers guidance on how to use spirituality, meditation, and mindfulness to look deeply at ourselves and our world. We don’t need more material goods. What is available in the here and now is "sufficient to be nourished and happy."

This is a must-read and offers an antidote to the climate crisis facts in some of the books that follow. It offers ways forward in peace and positivity.

Fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 killed billions of animals in a climate disaster. The numbers are impossible to comprehend.

In this beautiful, elegiac book, Dr. Celermajer grieves the losses by telling of one of her beloved pigs. She moves outward to reflect on how individual stories allow us to remember enormous losses. She refuses to tell this story of a climate catastrophe by telling of a few wrongdoers.

In one powerful reflection, she concludes that it is essential if almost impossible to say ‘it is I, it is I’ when speaking of who brought these losses. 

We've all heard about climate change by now—but does constantly talking about it make a difference? Or does it matter more how you talk about it? Stoknes gives comprehensive explanations about the messaging that's most effective to get through to people about climate change from a psychological and marketing point of view.

A must-read for anyone who wants to talk about global warming, whether you're creating large-scale marketing plans or just trying to talk to family and friends.

When we think of climate change many of us feel despair. But this is where Katherine Hayhoe is so important as the book is all about hope – hope in people and hope in the future.

Katherine is a wonderful colleague she is a Canadian climate scientist living and working in Texas. She has one golden rule talk about climate change to anyone and everyone. Because as her book shows when we actively engage with people and realise we all have shared values then we can move forward with collective action to look after our amazing planet.

This is not another doomsday book about the end of the world but one about the power of people to change the world.

I get bored when aliens always seem to land on the National Mall in Washington or hover over Los Angeles, so I was delighted to discover that at least one alien ship prefers to land in the lagoon off Lagos, Nigeria.

It’s a city as big or bigger than New York, after all. There is the challenge of dealing with very enigmatic visitors, but the time is the present and readers get a whirlwind tour of one of the world’s megacities. It’s like having the most highspeed guide you can imagine… who happens to be one of the most compelling SF writers today.

This is a wonderful and diverse cross-section of stories from a variety of African countries representing a thematic focus on a world facing Disruption, whether via climate change, global pandemics, or a plethora of crises, that challenges us all with the necessity to find ways to join with each other if we are to survive. Stand-out stories for me were Zambian author Mbozi Haimbe's "Shelter" (shortlisted for a NOMMO Award this year—best in African Speculative Fiction 2022) and Kenyan Idza Luhumyo’s "Five Years Next Sunday," winner of the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing. I loved the vibrancy and range of these stories, all bristling with energy and providing novel ways of seeing and learning to confront our global challenges.  

The title says it all: It does not have to be this way—we can build a better, more just and kinder world together, if…we learn to act on our dreams/visions in order to make this happen. But this path—as Capetonian author Alistair Mackay outlines, in a passionate and riveting exploration of fraught existences in an increasingly divided and desertified Southern Africa—will always come at personal cost. What price are we willing to pay for a better and more inclusive human future? What artificial ways of seeing (and consuming) do we need to resist to see and value each other as we all truly are? I loved this book as it is both darkly funny and tragic, yet never loses hope for a new and better world.