The best books for the facing climate crisis without losing your shit

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.

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?"

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."

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. 

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.