Here are 100 books that Climate fans have personally recommended if you like
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All my life, I’ve been aware that there are many layers to reality, many of which are human fabrications. Some are physical, like roads. Some are social, like healthcare. But the ones that control our lives the most, and that determine our global outcomes (poverty, war and ecological degradation for example), are ideological. The most powerful of these is our economic system. If we are to address the meta-crisis, I feel passionately that we need to be able to question and reimagine the economy. All the books I’ve chosen have been really important in helping me to think differently about things we usually take for granted.
I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.
I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.
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…
I’ve been obsessed with making the future a better place since I was 8 years old and spent my evenings hanging out in a local community center. I realized that things got better when people who cared showed up for each other. I am now a philanthropic futurist and have spent my career dedicated to helping visionary leaders build a more beautiful and equitable future. All of the books on this list have inspired me, and I hope they inspire you, too. If we all do our small part, we can ensure we have a Star Trek future and not a Hunger Games future.
I don’t usually read science fiction, but this book completely changed my perspective. It was an eye-opening experience, vividly illustrating what the climate crisis could look like if we don’t take significant action now. I was hooked by how realistic the scenarios felt, even though the story is fiction.
I found myself thinking deeply about the potential consequences of inaction and how urgent it is to address the climate crisis. The fictional eyewitness accounts made it even more impactful, giving me a sense of immediacy and personal connection to the issue. I didn’t expect a science fiction novel to be so relevant to our current world, but this one is a must-read for everyone.
“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…
I am a product of Sputnik and the threat of nuclear war. Both turned me into a long-time reader of science fiction and a perpetual student in trying to understand how the world works and why? If we have free will, why do so many things seem to be predetermined? If we are rational beings, why do so many of our choices seem so absurd? And if a new world is possible, why can’t we bring it into existence? I was a professor of politics for 30 years (and I was respected! See “Soylent Green.”) and most of my research and writing try to answer these questions.
Callenbach’s tale of ecological secession by Washington, Oregon, and Northern California remains an inspiration to those who believe another world is possible.
Callenbach imagined cheap solar electricity and newspapers being delivered through what was, essentially, street corner fax machines. Right on the first, wrong on the second. Unfortunately, Callenbach’s novel is sexist and even a little racist in places, and its utopian vision is unlikely to ever materialize.
Twenty years have passed since Northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States to create a new nation, Ecotopia. Rumors abound of barbaric war games, tree worship, revolutionary politics, sexual extravagance. Now, this mysterious country admits its first American visitor: investigative reporter Will Weston, whose dispatches alternate between shock and admiration. But Ecotopia gradually unravels everything Weston knows to be true about government and human nature itself, forcing him to choose between two competing views of civilization.Since it was first published in 1975, Ecotopia has inspired readers throughout the world with its vision of an ecologically and socially…
I’m fascinated with techno-utopian schemes. Decades ago, I had conversations with a friend who believed that humanity needed to evolve and leave the planet, just as early life once left the oceans. It was an intriguing idea that I have tried to follow up, critically, in Star Settlers. My book is a history not so much of the technology and nuts and bolts of space travel (although I do cover some of that), but of the rationale behind it—the idea that humanity’s ultimate destiny is in the stars. The idea is beguiling—but, likely, wrong-headed. To write the book, I spoke with physicists, science fiction writers, and space enthusiasts of all stripes.
The Biosphere 2 project was the wackiest multimillion-dollar enterprise to emerge from the New Age movement. This book is a nonfiction account of how a New Mexico commune, with a charismatic leader, developed a plan to test the viability of off-planet living by creating a sealed-off biosphere, which would be a self-sustaining and organizing ecosystem in which humans could survive. The goal was to create not a sterile environment but one that supported life that would make off-planet living appealing. The four men and four women sequestered for two years in the 3.14-acre domed-off area outside Tucson grew into two factions that hated one another. All came close to starvation, CO2 poisoning, and madness. For readers that simply must have narrative in fiction form, T. Corraghesson Boyle’s The Terranauts isbased on this same early 1990sepisode.
Biosphere rises from southern Arizona's high desert like a bizarre hybrid spaceship and greenhouse. Packed with more than 3,800 carefully selected plant, animal, and insect species, this mega-terrarium is one of the world's most biodiverse, lush, and artificial wildernesses. Only recently transformed from an abandoned ghost dome to a University of Arizona research center, the site was the setting of a grand drama about humans and ecology at the end of the twentieth century.
The seeds of Biosphere 2 sprouted in the 1970s at Synergia, a desert ranch in New Mexico where John Allen and a handful of dreamers united…
Officially a professional philosopher, author of fifteen books and textbooks on a wide range of subjects including ethics, critical and creative thinking, social change, and teaching. Wikipedia calls them “unconventional”, but honestly I prefer the ad copy for my own modest ecotopian book, which calls me a philosophical provocateur. My green credentials start with growing up in the Wisconsin countryside under the distant influence of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Aldo Leopold; later, long wilderness trips intertwined with edgy environmental philosophizing (you need some real edges for that!); and over the last decade the endlessly consuming project of designing and building Common Ground Ecovillage in the Piedmont of North Carolina.
Architect-philosopher Paolo Soleri writes in an oracular style introducing his way-outsized book of designs for hyper-dense, concrete-megastructure cities in the deserts or oceans or even in space, none actually realized except for a very small prototype called “Arcosanti” in the high plateaus north of Phoenix, a campus that could have been built in a summer by a middle-sized reinforced-concrete contractor but in fact has been slowly erected by trainee-volunteers and a diehard community of followers over the last half-century. But there is something to it. “Tightly-woven minimalist packages will become mandatory.” I recommend the tabloid-sized original edition: it fits the buildings.
This edition contains all the text and illustrations found in the giant Arcology, photographically reduced somewhat to allow a lower price and enhanced handleability.
"In the three-dimensional city, man defines a human ecology. In it he is a country dweller and metropolitan man in one. By it the inner and the outer are at 'skin' distance. He has made the city in his own image. Arcology: the city in the image of man." âPaolo Soleri
Officially a professional philosopher, author of fifteen books and textbooks on a wide range of subjects including ethics, critical and creative thinking, social change, and teaching. Wikipedia calls them “unconventional”, but honestly I prefer the ad copy for my own modest ecotopian book, which calls me a philosophical provocateur. My green credentials start with growing up in the Wisconsin countryside under the distant influence of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Aldo Leopold; later, long wilderness trips intertwined with edgy environmental philosophizing (you need some real edges for that!); and over the last decade the endlessly consuming project of designing and building Common Ground Ecovillage in the Piedmont of North Carolina.
How many times have I reread it? Science/futurist fiction in the style of an Odyssey-scale and -style epic poem about (yes) the terraforming of Mars, a spectacular interplanetary saga framed against the background of the struggle against a misanthropic and authoritarian “Ecotheism” that has taken over Earth, and ending with a long and compelling hymn to the result, a new start on our transformed sister planet. Ecotopia, in short... on Mars!
Originally published in 1988, Genesis was the first major work of fiction that addressed the idea of terraforming Mars. It not only suggested the idea, but provided a feasible solution for doing so. During its initial publication, Genesis was on the list of recommended reading at NASA, and has since gone on to enjoy cult status. Its acknowledged list of admirers includes such literary luminaries as Brian Aldiss, Amy Clampitt, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas M. Disch, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Merrill. It is with great pride that Ilium Press brings this influential and prescient work…
As an evolutionary biologist and an advocate for women, and in particular, mothers in the sciences, I love to read about the stories of other female scientists talking about their work and the challenges they’ve faced. We need more accounts of what it’s like to grapple with both the idea and the actuality of becoming a mother in a competitive, male-dominated field that requires so much of its scholars.
Upon opening this book, I was quickly caught up in Jahren’s lovely prose. Her story is one of a woman trying to make a career in plant biology despite struggles with mental health, sexism, and lack of funding, but it’s the way she tells the story – lyrically and with such vivid imagery – that makes it such an excellent read.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER •NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist.
"Does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.” —The New York Times
In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary…
I grew up moving around through so many different countries that as an adult I became fascinated with the impact cultural lenses have on the way we think about nature and our place in the world. As a biologist, I’ve found that science is not as objective as it seems, and that my understanding is always deepened by a human context—be it personal, political or cultural. As a young adult, I tried to strip my world of the human context entirely—I worked in many remote field camps as a young adult and wrote a book about my experience in Antarctica.
This is such a rich, lush book that will completely reframe the way you think about animals, yourself, and the world we live in.
Weber mixes science with expansive philosophy to argue (among many other things) that every being has an innate subjectivity, experiences pain and pleasure, that life recognizes life, and that the world is co-created by those that inhabit it.
I found myself coming back to this book again and again—the ideas have stayed with me despite having read it over 5 years ago. If you are interested in deeply interrogating the way Western science describes and positions humans within the world, then this is the book for you.
The disconnection between humans and nature is perhaps one of the most fundamental problems faced by our species today. The schism between us and the natural world is arguably the root cause of most of the environmental catastrophes unraveling around us. However, until we come to terms with the depths of our alienation, we will continue to fail to understand that what happens to nature also happens to us. In The Biology of Wonder author Andreas Weber proposes a new approach to the biological sciences that puts the human back in nature. He argues that feelings and emotions, far from…
I am a former Shakespeare scholar who became increasingly concerned about the climate crisis after I had a son and started worrying about the world he would inherit after I died. I began to do research into climate communication, and I realized I could use my linguistic expertise to help craft messages for campaigners, policymakers, and enlightened corporations who want to drive climate action. As I learned more about the history of climate change communication, however, I realized that we couldn’t talk about the crisis effectively without knowing how to parry climate denial and fossil-fuel propaganda. So now I also research and write about climate disinformation, too.
This book shook me to my core. I felt so frightened by its vision of a world destroyed by global warming that I became even more determined to help get climate deniers out of power.
I know that other people who read this book were equally inspired to learn more about climate change or even join the climate movement. It’s really one of the most influential books of our time.
**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard
Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New Statesman A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019 Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says…
Climate Studies is a massive, cross-disciplinary field that exceeds the grasp of everyone involved, myself included. I start from my home discipline, philosophy, and follow the leads wherever they take me—a practice I learned from decades as a Freud scholar. The climate books I admire most are those that take this vast literature and synthesize the issues. This means I admire and respect the work being done by smart journalists like McKibben, Klein, and Wallace-Wells, who are perfect jumping-off points to thinking carefully about the future of life today. They are the ‘journalist-philosophers’ who are attempting these essential first drafts of history. Start with them and see where it all leads.
Scranton is polarizing because he wallows in doom and flirts with an unpleasant form of nihilism. But even so, he provides an honest, sometimes searing introduction to the big troubles we are facing today—and he does so at the right level of analysis, our entire civilization. It is also very short and punchy. If, however, readers prefer less doom and more hope, then read instead Naomi Klein’s smart, serviceable collection of short essays, On Fire.
"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying…
