56 books like One Plastic Bag

I love that this book is based on the true story of a former garbage collector who became famous for building his own library… starting with a discarded copy of Anna Karenina that he’d found on his route.

The story tells of “two Josés” who lived in Bogotá, Colombia—a young one and an old one. We follow them throughout the week, until their favorite day—library day, when the older José welcomes the younger one and other children into his hand-collected library.

As someone who loves thrifted, upcycled, and re-used treasures, I felt delighted by this heart-warming and inspiring story for book-lovers of all ages.

When former basketball star Will Allen notices a problem in his community—too many abandoned lots and not enough fresh food—he sees opportunity. This biography tells the story of Will Allen’s inspirational journey to create urban farms that heal both the land and the people harvesting and eating the bounty. Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table is the perfect book to talk to kids about how there is often more than one way to solve a problem and get them excited about growing their own fresh food. Plus, any picture book that includes worms is a picture book I want to read with my kids—and worms play a starring role in Will Allen’s vision.

The city of San Diego, California, is lush and leafy now in large part due to the efforts of tree-loving Kate Sessions, who in the early 1900s missed the redwood forests of her childhood when she relocated to dry, dusty San Diego. A scientist and naturalist, she procured seeds from experts far and wide to find species that might thrive in San Diego—and she started planting. She used the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park as a reason to plant thousands more trees that residents, wildlife, and visitors enjoy to this day. No one told Kate to plant all those trees; she did it because she wanted to make the world a brighter, more beautiful place.

Drought has hit a Malawi village and everyone’s crops are failing. Fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba figures out how to bring electricity to the village by building a windmill out of scraps from a junkyard. I love this story because it highlights the importance of education, and along with determination, William was able to build this windmill bringing electricity which helped lift this community up and bring hope. Education is the best way to lift communities up from poverty. Elizabeth Zunon provides gorgeous illustrations that enhance the text.  

Conservation success isn’t always about saving animals or an ecosystem. Sometimes it’s about learning to live with nature.

Richard Turere’s story is a wonderful tale about how he protected his family’s cows – the first duty of a Maasai warrior – with an invention of his own making. And he was only twelve years old! His lion lights became so popular, they are protecting other Maasai families’ herds, too. I love this story of ingenuity, STEM, and learning to decrease human-wildlife conflicts to coexist.

Human progress is often bad for wildlife. Our roads, housing developments, and stores often disrupt wildlife migration corridors. We are the problem, but Meeg Pincus writes an uplifting book about how we are also the solution.

Make Way for Animals! is a book about coexisting with wildlife. When we put our heads together there is always a way to meet our needs and the needs of the creatures with whom we share this planet.

You might be wondering why I included a book about valuing the birth of girls on a conservation list.

Shyam Sundar Paliwal quit his job at the marble quarry because the owners refused to plant trees to help heal the land after the mining process. When he’s elected the head of his village, he proposes that every family plant 111 trees every time a girl is born.

At that time, girls were considered a burden to their families and welcomed with silence. Slowly, Sundar changed the villagers’ minds. The trees and the girls grew up together and the village continues to prosper.

I love this story of gender equality and healing a devastated land.

Rewilding is a book for older readers (ages 8+) organized in a browseable format.

The authors give a brief two-page overview of several conservation success stories. You’ll find some overlap between Rewilding’s stories and books I’ve written, like freeing the Elwha River (A River’s Gifts) and re-introducing black-footed ferrets into the wild (Zoo Scientists to the Rescue), but you’ll also find new stories about rattlesnakes, snot otters, Arabian oryx, tigers, meat-eating plants, and more. 

Toby Green’s book is a magisterial history of West Africa and West Central Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

Exploring a large array of sources from three continents the book tells the history of African societies such as the kingdoms of Kongo and Dahomey, by showing how Africa was connected to the rest of the world earlier before Europeans reached the Atlantic coasts of the continent.

With the rise of the Atlantic slave trade Africa exported currencies such as gold, whose great value persisted over time, but kept importing cloth, cowries, iron, and copper, whose value decreased over time.

The book helps us to understand the roots of the inequalities among Africa and the Global North and shows us that these unbalanced economic and diplomatic exchanges were tied to cultural, religious, and artistic dimensions, in which material culture also played a central role.

This study of West African writers who used pseudonyms has prompted me to think about the importance of anonymity for female writers throughout the ages.

Newell looks at Ghanaian authors of the early twentieth century who used a range of pseudonyms, often for quite playful and experimental reasons.

Some of these writers were, of course, women, and they found that a pseudonym gave them increased respectability. But the pseudonym could be a double-edged sword.

A pen name was a useful cloak of anonymity allowing a woman to write.

But it also means that the true identities of these female writers are hard to discern. In other words, women writers’ frequent use of the pseudonym has rendered them both visible and invisible.