100 books like One Small Hop

It is a healing gesture to honor Indigenous Americans and others during the month-long celebrations intended to remedy the omission of groups, whose origins are not European. We need more! Let's create inclusivity! In an inclusive society, who are the "them" and who are the "us?" We all need to be recognized as citizens of our country instead of occasional entertainment for "drive-by" tourists of diversity. Inclusivity also means caring for all who share our planet:  all other animals; waters; terrains; plants, etc. My award-winning books have usually been about Native peoples of North America, particularly the United States, and how we have always been here and still exist. 

I adore depictions of the natural world, I've always been fascinated by how humanity interacts, describes and catalogues birds and animals. I’ve collected books on birds for as long as I can remember and sought solace in the golden hues of the gardens and parks of my childhood. My own book is a reflection on what can be described as ‘queer nature writing’, the exploration of an environment that does not judge our identity or gender. The motivation of all my work is to challenge injustice in subtle and surprising ways and my ongoing mission to share my work from Pansy Boy, The Pansy Project, and Birds Can Fly. 

When I was a kid, I often felt powerless. I felt like adults made the decisions and children were often told to be “seen and not heard.” Then, when I was in high school, I went to a United Nations-sponsored summer camp where I met teens from around the world. My friends were refugees who had escaped from wars. They came from cities like Belfast, where they lived under the threat of political violence. Their experiences were so different from my own that their stories made a lasting impression on me. Ever since, I have loved reading and writing stories–real and fictional–about kids who are working to repair our world.

I began as an activist in high school, knocking on doors to enlist support for clean water and air, and more recently, for my favorite candidates for local, state, and federal office. Some of my most meaningful work was as a lawyer and volunteer on land conservation deals for an agricultural land trust. Fiction has an amazing power to recharge us and to shift our perspectives to imagine the world differently. My favorite books are always ones that teach me something interesting. My recent activism has been motivated by my frustration with our political process, including the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United declaring corporations to be “persons” under the law.

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. 

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.

I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism,  environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.

I have a certain degree of scientific expertise deriving from the education leading to my Ph.D. in mathematics and a deep interest in ethical issues, which led to my pursuing a second Ph.D. in philosophy. I am passionate about the issue of climate change, because (among other reasons) I have four grandchildren who will be living in the new world that is being created now. As I often said to my students during my last few years of teaching, “You are living at the time when the most momentous event in human history is unfolding. Historians of the future—if there are any remaining—will write extensively about this period, about what happened and why, about what those of us alive today did or did not do.”

I have always been fascinated with plants. Their shapes, their colors, their beauty, even the plants that are known to be harmful to humans (poison ivy, puncture vine) had appeal to me. Plants are, by far, the most prolific, the biggest, the oldest, the most complex of organisms. And yet, as a pre-med student, classes on botany were never recommended. Sad. These books delve into the complexity, the wonder of plants, and how they interact with humans. From the sheer poetic pronouncements of Michael Pollan to the straightforward prose of Richard Manning, here is a chance to see the breadth and depth; our rewards and struggles with the plant kingdom.  

I’m a science fiction writer who loves my chosen genre for the promises it makes for the worlds that we can have—and the warnings that it offers for the worlds that might be ours if we don’t take care. I’ve picked books for people who like their thinking to be challenged, and who also long for the world to be a much better place. These are the kinds of books I love to read—and the kinds of books I try to write.