100 books like Environment

Before becoming a published writer, I was a lawyer litigating primarily large, multi-district environmental insurance coverage cases. I became familiar with the many ways by which we damage our precious natural resources, be it groundwater or soil or the air we breathe. Beginning with Rachel Carson, we have rich literature that speaks to the degradation of the planet, including the devastating changes wrought by global warming. The stories in this anthology speak to the physical and emotional topography of our current climate crisis, from a Sami woman who studies fish populations to a Wisconsin man contemplating the animals who make his trailer a portal to a world unsullied by humans. Fish & Water is a smart collection on a topic we ignore at our peril.

While many folks turn to Braiding Sweetgrass first, I read Gathering Moss first and was completely enthralled: this is a book that makes the work of science personal.

I love how Kimmerer brings the tiny worlds of moss to life – it’s completely enchanting! It changed my understanding of these tiny plants.

Marco Wilkinson writes about his mother who moved from Uruguay to the States, who he knows well, and his father, who he doesn’t. Wilkinson understands his childhood and complicated adulthood as a story intertwined with the plants he’s learned about. In Madder, the narrator details plants’ xylem and their weediness, their Latin names, and their unpredictable growing habits while peeling away the internal systems of his own plant-like self. Wilkinson pairs plant with human to show how growth, thirst, rootedness, and supportive nutrients make for resilient bodies.

Wilkinson takes such care, too, to pull back the weeds and to pull them apart—Thanks to his careful attention to every part of the plant, I can see through the plant as well as inside the workings of the plant. I am physically in the body even though I get that it’s a big metaphor for the mind.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s first book, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir taught me how memoir can be compiled through multiple lenses—one that invites into the author’s self-view and another through which you can learn about place and environmental degradation. With two (or more) questions, who-I-am becomes complicated and textured. Antonetta’s new The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here illustrates that understanding ourselves comes only through looking at those selves through other texts, other people, our current understanding of ourselves, science, place, and our childhood’s vision of the world.

Antonetta takes quantum entanglement, her grandmother’s Christian Science beliefs, and her own account of spending summers at the shore in a small hut with her family whose history of mental health—and professional accomplishments—is complexly textured. In a section called “The Problem of the Past,” Antonetta describes the behavior of photon particles. In the double-slit experiment, if you send one beam of light through… show more.

The impending doom of climate change has been stressing me out for over a decade. It feels like my son will inherit a world that resembles the dystopian futures of Mad Max or Blade Runner. But the future we’re entering into will be more nuanced than that. 

This book helped me realize that the future may not be as bleak as I had once imagined. The environmental alarmists may have good intentions, but their efforts might be causing more harm than good.

Earth Emotions is a landmark guide to new concepts and vocabulary to represent the complex new ‘eco-emotions’, a spectrum of positive and negative emotional responses caused by recent environmental and life changes. From a mental health perspective to social sustainability, this book is valuable for many people currently processing their eco-emotions. One lesson from my research journey is that emotion and shared empathy as forms of sustainability knowledge are underestimated in favor of more rational approaches, when affect and cognition are intrinsically linked. This book advances our understanding of holistic emotions as sustainable information. Having conducted research into knowledge ecosystems, I can relate to the proposed shift from the Human Age (anthropocene) of isolation and despair to a Symbiotic Age (symbiocene) defined by positive mutually beneficial relationships between different groups.

A great anthropological read about the past 150 years of death care in this country. She discusses the ingrained traditions held so closely by the public over decades of death. There are so many destructive practices we cling to when someone dies. Suzanne unpacks the sack of societal behaviors that have been none-too-friendly on our precious environment. Our customary American demise practices, which include the procedure of embalming, hardwood and metal caskets, and concrete burial vaults and grave liners, only strengthen this saga.

In a clear, but profound way, Laura Alary’s picture book, Here, helps children to see the scope of their existence.

She starts with something familiar, “This is my home. I live here. But I am not the first.” Then she takes the reader back in time and space to show some good things (gardens) and some bad things (a garbage dump) on Earth. Charming illustrations by Cathrin Peterslund pair well with the text.

While it doesn’t specifically mention God, it calls on the responsibility of each person to take care of “This Dot We Call Home.”

As a former vice president of the United States, Gore was the best-known American political figure to make climate change a priority personal and professional issue as early as the 1980s, literally forcing it into the United States and world political discourse, meanwhile using mass politics as a springboard to publicize the importance of the issue in the present world and for many generations to come.

As with many people who study the subject, Gore made combating climate change a large part of his life’s work, as he went on a lecture circuit with a ladder and magic marker to show how quickly the concentration of carbon dioxide had risen during the past few centuries.

I placed at least 30 post-it notes in this book as every page includes practical and compassionate advice for planning an affordable and sustainable green burial. This book’s pragmatic step-by-step suggestions were especially useful as I took my one-year journey to revise my own final wishes with climate and community in mind. The author operates the first green funeral home in the Portland, Oregon area, and she draws on her experiences to help you avoid exorbitant funeral expenses while helping the Earth and your community.