I love being a college professor, teaching and learning from young adults. In fact, I wroteWhen Time Is Shortin close conversation with my students. As climate crisis and collapse loom ever larger on the horizon, more and more of them are sharing experiences of climate anxiety and even climate trauma. They are not alone. Many of us are almost paralyzed by such feelings. We need help processing and moving through them in order to find hope—deep hope, as opposed to shallow optimism, which easily slides into despair. These books, most of which I've used in my "Religion and Ecology" class, can help show us the way.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, and environmental activist. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an educator, strategist, and co-founder, with Johnson, of The All We Can Save Project. This thoughtfully curated anthology of poetry, essays, and visual art by women in the environmental movement is a treasure, offering a diverse variety of voices that inspire active hope in the face of climate crisis and potential collapse. These voices don't always harmonize, nor should they, given all the uncertainties we face. The different perspectives offer many different ways to break through what can be paralyzing climate grief and climate trauma in order to engage in action with compassion and justice.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.
“A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?”—The New York Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it’s clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they…
Joanna Macy is an environmental activist and a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology. Her writing is at once direct and gracious, inviting us to explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. Central to her message of hope is what she calls the "Great Turning," a revolution in which humankind will turn from industrial capitalism, which seeks infinite growth through extraction, to a sustainable civilization of compassion and interdependence. This new edition of Active Hope, co-authored with Chris Johnstone, acknowledges that the Great Turning may in fact happen in the midst of a massive societal and ecological collapse, a "Great Unravelling." Yet, even in the midst of collapse, we can find deep hope by investing heart, mind, and strength in the Great Turning. "What's the best we can hope for? And how can we be active in making that more likely or even possible?"
The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, the depletion of oil, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play…
Larry L. Rasmussen is a scholar of environmental and religious ethics and professor emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in New York. He wrote this book about climate crisis as a series of letters to his two young grandchildren. Infused with love and concern, he anticipates the uncertainties and hardships, known and yet unknown, that they will undoubtedly face in the decades to come. At the same time, and as importantly, he asks that they never lose sight of the astonishing grandeur of the world around us. "What I most want for you and your baby brother is that you let yourselves be overwhelmed by wonder and lose yourselves in the 'kaleidoscope of creation'—not to escape this harsh world but to better inhabit it." He reminds us that "wondering is a way of experiencing truth."
For the first time ever, love letters consciously written by elders of one geologic epoch to the young of another.
Our children's and grandchildren's generation will face a different world, one affected by climate instability, mass uncertainty, and breathtaking extinction. In fact, the next generation will face the reality that human activity is changing the planet from one geological epoch to another.
From this vantage point--two generations across two geological epochs facing a fundamentally changing planet--Larry Rasmussen writes to his grandchildren. As a grandfather invested in a green earth and climate justice as well as a scholar of faith-based earth…
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a professor of environmental and forest biology, director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This book is a beautifully written, deeply thoughtful meditation on her own experiences and perspectives as a scientist, a mother, and a person of Potawatomi heritage. She graciously brings us to a deeper awareness of our ecological crisis, inviting us to let go of our delusions of mastery and dominion and to learn fresh, new ways of living in an interdependent relationship with other beings, living and nonliving.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
Octavia Butler was an award-winning science fiction writer and formative influence on Afrofuturism. First published in 1993 and set in the mid-2020s, this dystopian novel tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a Black teenager learning to survive and thrive amid ecological and societal collapse. Between journal reflections on her life in a world of pandemics, urban wildfires, and rampant violence, she writes verses of Earthseed, a new religion in which "God is Change" and the living must learn to work with that change, to go with its flows, in order to participate in positive transformations. Raised by a Baptist minister, her story and her religious vision remind us that there are always things we can do, no matter how dire our situation, and that working toward change in a broken world often calls on us to reimagine our inherited traditions in fresh ways.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
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We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
This is not another “before it’s too late” book. This is a “what if it’s already too late?” book. What if it’s already too late to stop, let alone reverse, climate collapse? Maybe it’s not, and we should be doing everything we can so that it isn’t. Still, what if it is? Shouldn’t we be talking about that too?
When Time Is Short is a meditation on our denial of death as a species, how religion has contributed to that denial, and how religion might also help us to break through that denial and find hope—deep hope, as opposed to shallow optimism. Because what matters most when time is short is always what matters most.
I am a Harvard- and MIT-trained physician-scientist, and I am drawn to research problems that bridge the basic and the practical – how a better understanding of cells and tissues can inform new therapies for cancer and other diseases. As children, we are all scientists – mini-hypothesis generators trying to make sense of the world. I suppose I never outgrew that curiosity. My list of best science books credits writers who bring to life the excitement that comes from looking at the natural world in a new way, a spirit that I try to emulate in my own writing. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
FROM ONE CELL is a dive inside the cell and its evolutionary prerogatives to explain how these "endless forms most beautiful," as Charles Darwin called them, come about. Along the way, we learn about the scientific process, filled as it is with serendipity, as the story is told through the eyes of the scientists who informed…
From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine
Every animal on Earth begins life as a single cell. From this humble origin, the nascent creature embarks on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster-yet with astounding regularity, it reaches its destination intact. From One Cell illuminates this epic transformation-still one of nature's most mysterious feats-to show where we all come from and where we're going.
Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling the secrets of development, we see how all the information needed to build a human fits into a fertilised egg, and how the trillions of cells that emerge know what to become and where to…
