I’ve been writing comics and graphic novels for over twenty years. Many of my stories feature superheroes you probably know: in 2000, for example, I became the first woman to launch and write a Batman comic series. Lately, though, I’ve been worrying that the framework of superhero stories—the idea that someone with uncommon power or skills will come to save us from a threat not of our own making—is inadequate in the face of global warming. The climate crisis is a problem we created, and can only address, together. I wrote Rewild to explore those concerns, and to call forth a new kind of hero: you.
Rewild, an original graphic novel by acclaimed writer Devin Grayson and rising art star Yana Adamovic, is a contemporary fable about the climate crisis. Borrowing from the rich history of fairy tales and magic realism, the story sets two troubled young adults in a fictional New England city against a band of furious, pollution-ravaged fae intent on reconnecting humanity to the natural world. Lyrical, moving, and urgent, Rewild is one of the first graphic novels to venture into the burgeoning genre of Cli-Fi.
This Pulitzer Prize winner was one of the principal inspirations behind my own book. The story’s magic stems from decentering its human protagonists; though the book follows its characters through several decades, the heart of the story’s world—and theirs—is arboreal. The biology, language, and necessity of trees expand through the center of this novel like the rings of a redwood, changing the way we see. After finishing it, I took my dog for a walk and was stopped in my tracks by the beautiful Heritage River Birch trees lining the street near my home. They’d been there all along, but this book taught me how to see them and reminded me to look. From the origin of life to contemporary biodiversity collapse, Powers reintroduced me to the awe-inspiring world of trees.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
I was ready to hate this book. It was recommended to me by a doctor who thought I was being too pessimistic about the dismaying research I’d consumed while writing my book, and I was hugely annoyed that he was holding up a book of fiction as a potential antidote to that. But Ministryearns its hope. An intoxicating mix of scientific treatise and imaginative fiction, the story illuminates a potential near future to masterfully illustrate the problems we’re facing and the ways we might fix them. Robinson’s book speaks through the voices of various human characters as well as elements from the natural world, ranging from a carbon atom to the sun itself. It’s authoritative and clear and made me want to force random strangers to read it. So read it.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
All We Can Saveis a collection of nonfiction essays, art, and poems, by an inspiring group of women at the forefront of the climate movement. While studying global warming, I frequently found myself overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenges we collectively face. The best antidote was access to unique and diverse voices that reminded me I wasn’t facing the crisis alone. This anthology is bursting with them. From the life-affirming commitment of an indigenous leader protesting pipelines in Minnesota to the gallows humor of an undercover writer entertaining deliriously optimistic pitches from oceanfront property real estate agents in Miami, All We Can Save tells the stories of the climate crisis—our challenges, failures, and best hopes—through a chorus of determined and welcoming voices.
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…
Humanity is arguably the antagonist in this lucid, brilliantly researched history of our evolution on Planet Earth, from roughly three hundred thousand years ago to the present moment. Kolbert’s characters include the Panamanian Golden Frog, the great auk, the Sumatran rhino, and the humble brown bat, all of which are former or soon-to-be-former inhabitants of a world disappearing beneath our bipedal feet. By combining journalism, field research, science reporting, and personal accounts, Kolbert traces our evolutionary history and lays bare not just our likely future but also the lack of future we portend for all the biodiversity lost in this unprecedented age of the Anthropocene.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions of life on earth.
Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Elizabeth Kolbert combines brilliant field reporting, the history of ideas and the work of geologists, botanists and marine biologists to tell the gripping stories of a dozen species - including the Panamanian golden frog and the Sumatran rhino - some already gone, others at the point of vanishing.
The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most…
I was fortunate enough to see Joanna Macy speak at Spirit Rock with my mom back in 2015. She warned us away from the “ditches of paralysis and panic,” which were the exact things I found myself stuck in after completing my book in 2021. Macy is so many things—an activist, a translator of Rilke, a Buddhist scholar, a moving speaker, a mother, a teacher—and this book, created in celebration of her ninetieth birthday, is a lovely introduction to her writing and that of those she’s inspired. I felt so grateful to discover it and be reminded of something else Macy told us that day: that by tapping into our deeper “ecological selves” we can feel supported by this planet we belong to even as we work to save it.
Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology whose decades of writing, teaching, and activism have inspired people around the world. In this collection of writings, leading spiritual teachers, deep ecologists, and diverse writers and activists explore the major facets of Macy’s lifework. Combined with eleven pieces from Macy herself, the result is a rich chorus of wisdom and compassion to support the work of our time.
“Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not…
