100 books like Environmental Melancholia

What’s not to love about a book structured as a tree? This is a vast, episodic novel that takes traditional storytelling and turns it on its head.

A cast of characters connect through stories that grow from seed to trunk to limb. I finished this long read and immediately wanted to start again. It’s the kind of book that rewards a second or third pass. Complex, rife with science and faith and desperate longing, this book is a celebration of the tree, a clarion call to return our attention to our roots before it is too late.

One of Powers’ characters asks, “What do all good stories do?” He answers, “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” I think that’s true of all of these books, and most definitely this one.

Ray is a colleague and an environmental studies professor at Humboldt State University. After witnessing firsthand the rising emotional distress in her students, she was compelled to respond with empathy and supportive resources. She began to recognize that teaching about climate impacts was not enough, and perhaps it even contributes to the problems if the emotional responses are not addressed in tandem. Written primarily with Gen Z in mind, I find the perspectives and resources are useful for anyone experiencing eco-anxiety, and she incorporates strong and insightful social justice perspectives.

If I’m being completely honest, I bought this book because of my very large professional crush on both of the editors. I work in climate science, so I have signed up to have my heart destroyed over and over again. I read about all the species that are dying and threatened, the ecosystems collapsing, the fishermen fighting for their livelihoods, and the coastal communities slammed by storms.

This book covered all these topics, but if you’re going to learn about this, (as we all should), we also have to be given the reasons to keep at it. We have to not lose the will to fight or the ability to see beautiful, generative, and imaginative solutions and outcomes. This book helps with that, too. 

You’re probably seeing a theme by now: Addressing eco-anxiety is a much deeper, more complex, and nuanced approach than simply learning how to calm our nervous systems with mindful breathing (although that is a really helpful tool!). I appreciate the clear, grounded voice that Mitchell brings to the conversation, sharing some of the “original instructions” and Indigenous cultural values for being in a harmonious balance with the living world. She was born and raised on the Penobscot Indian Reservation, is an attorney, and promotes heart-based activism. She is perhaps the most articulate writer I have come across in describing the characteristics and impacts of a colonized mindset, with compassionate guidance for shifting to a more Earth-attuned way of life.

Important novels do not have to be very good novels. Quatrefoil, published in 1950, is billed as the first modern book to portray homosexuality in a positive way. Positive? The snobbish young hero (echoing the “expert” opinion of the time) describes himself as “beset with melancholia. emotional frigidity, or the homosexual symbolism he found in himself.” The novel is rife with unconscious class prejudice and ugly hostility towards women. But this story of a young naval officer and his older gay mentor is the sincere attempt of a gay author to imagine how a love relationship between two men could work in the context of family and the closeted world they knew. To me, it was rain in a desert of ignorance. 

This is a little-known book that delves deeper and more effectively into the challenges of defining oneself than any other book I have read.

The book is an attempt by a famous critical theorist to speak to the common person who is struggling with the various pieces of advice and guidance that they receive from different sources. It is more complex and difficult than the others on the list, but I got so much out of it. 

This is one of the first books that “blew my mind” when I was a young university student: it remains the one I constantly return to because it seeks to understand the psychoanalytic foundations of racism under French colonialism.

Fanon was only 27 when his book was first published in 1952, but his reflections provide a stunningly passionate and layered view on how anti-Black racism (de)forms the subjectivity of both white and Black people, locking them into constructions of whiteness/blackness that require constant questioning.

His arguments on the psychoanalytic and political underpinnings of racism remain as relevant today as they were in his time.

James Hillman called for the revisioning of psychology based on art, culture, and imagination. Of his many books, The Myth of Analysis, offering three essays on psychological creativity, language, and femininity, is the one that I reference most, especially his position that “the language of psychology insults the soul.” Social science and the therapy jargon of the “establishment” are not getting better, and as Hillman says, we become ill in sync with it. He said to me that art therapists can “be the carriers of imagination into the culture at the grassroots level. I really do want to encourage them with all my heart.”

This book gives an excellent overview of Freud’s thoughts about human psychology, and also shows the way he thought. Freud’s brilliance shines through. I hasten to say most, though not by any means all of his hypotheses are wrong. I read this book at 15 and knew when I finished it I was going to be a psychologist. Some of my work gives strong support to a few of his hypotheses about the unconscious. Ironically, Freud himself didn’t believe his ideas could be tested by psychology experiments.

Carl Jung’s discoveries in psychoanalysis and alchemy caused a revolution in 20TH Century psychotherapy, and the breakthroughs he made have had a huge influence on contemporary spirituality.

My book is deeply based on Jung’s research in general, and then this is his greatest book.

Ancient alchemists were supposedly trying to turn lead into gold, yet now we know they were activating many dimensions in their consciousness to attain the gold—personal transformation, even transfiguration of their souls—Jung’s fundamental discovery.