The best books to help Christians navigate the climate crisis

This book was my gateway into Christian climate action 16 years ago.

When my older brother came home from a semester abroad in New Zealand and told my conservative Christian family that he was now a vegetarian because of his environmental convictions, he handed me this book to help me understand why.

It was the first time that I was given permission to engage pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change because of my faith, rather than in spite of it. Nothing has ever been the same.

I used to think that the ultimate Christian hope was in life after death. NT Wright convinced me I was wrong.

The true hope of the gospel, says Wright, is “life after life after death”. In other words, resurrected life in a renewed heaven and renewed earth. This book completely reframed what I believe about the end of God’s story for creation and held out for me a gospel way bigger than the one I had been given before.

Understanding that God has a good future in store for his entire creation and that, even now, he is reconciling all of it back to himself means that we live differently right now. This book remains my theological anchor for my climate advocacy.

This may seem like a strange choice. Kimmerer is a poet, a botanist, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Band of Oklahoma, and—as far as I know—not a Christian

But the beauty and poignance of this book had me in tears often. Kimmerer has a way of training our modern, Western eyes to encounter creation not as inert raw material meant for little more than firing our industrial machines, but as sacred kin shot through with the glory of God.

Her indigenous wisdom is a crucial counterpoint to the prevailing post-Enlightenment worldviews and ideologies that most of us swim in every day, and it helps us get closer to the Hebrew cosmologies and anthropologies of the Bible. Cosmologies and anthropologies which are, after all, indigenous themselves. 

I get asked a lot in my line of work about hope.

How do we find hope in the midst of climate calamity? And I always had a hard time finding an answer that didn’t feel trite. Until I read this book. Yes, we need hope, says Rah, but the right kind of hope.

Not a saccharine, false hope that ignores the dire facts on the ground. Rather, we need to recover a truly biblical hope. What is the biblical formula for hope? It is a hard-won, clear-eyed hope that has lived in and become comfortable in lament first.

It is a hope that rejects triumphalism, that centers those most harmed, and that moves forward together through lament into new creation.

I used to think things like beauty, joy, and affection were indulgences that I just didn’t have time for if I was going to solve the climate crisis.

I used to do my climate work bare-knuckled and through gritted teeth. And I burned out. Fast.

Then I had a friend suggest to me that I read Mary Oliver.

I’ve since come to understand that meditation and contemplation on the beauty of creation, on the joy and delight of being in communion with it, and on the affection that God has for all his handiwork are necessary ingredients for sustained, effective action.

And nobody helps me focus my buzzing mind on the goodness of God’s creation better than Oliver.