100 books like Our Biggest Experiment

Gaia’s book came out at a time when climate change wasn’t a hot literary topic and Greta Thunberg hadn’t yet painted “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” on a sign. The Anthropocene marks a new Geological age, the Age of Humans, and Gaia, an editor at Nature, set out to discover what that means for the planet, her, and us. In her words: "I set out to discover whether our species will survive, and how". In so doing she became the first female winner of the Royal Society science book prize.

This book has always inspired me and one of the reasons I wrote my own books on climate change. 

What Mike does so brilliantly is take all the problems we are worried about such as climate change, world hunger, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics, pandemics and provide solutions. These solutions are ones that make us all safer, healthier, and wealthier – and are so obvious you will ask yourself why are we not doping them already.

Mike never preaches, instead he shares his insights with humour and warmth. But underneath all of this is a very clear message we only have one precious Earth and there really is ‘No Planet B’ (even if Elon finally makes it to Mars).

Joe Shute’s book brings us right up to date, opening with the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, and that strange, momentary blip of nature remerging as humans retreated to their homes. Shute looks at the climate crisis through the window in more ways than one – how seasons and weather patterns are changing, and how that shifts our cultural and ancestral connections with nature. It’s a poetic read told by a true nature lover. 

There’s a lot of thoughtless talk by techno-optimistic philosophers about futures in which we all get to become superintelligent and live for thousands of years if we can apply the right tech to ourselves.

Sykes describes fascinating research on the Neanderthals, beings who were almost, but not quite, us. Reading her book, I wondered what it might have been like to grow up as the child of a union between a Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal. I found this especially useful when we consider future relationships between people determined to remain human and others who want tech to make them posthuman ASAP.

There’s so much information to gleen from Sykes to help us guess at how posthumans might treat beings whom they view as different and possibly inferior.

I worry that people don’t hear enough about solutions to the climate crisis, but, thankfully, Paul Hawken and his collaborators lay many of them out in this book.

They focus not on the flashy technologies that often grab headlines—and not just on the reduction of fossil fuels—but on the power of a healthy, living Earth to heal itself. Of course, we need to be partners in this healing, and Hawken illuminates the people, organizations, and approaches that are doing just that.

I met Clive Hamilton at an event in London in 2011 shortly after the book’s launch. At the time the climate science community was still reeling from the disaster of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit.

As rationalists, we were asking the question: “Why is the scientific evidence not being listened to?” Hamilton provided answers – about humanity’s free market consumerist fetish, the insidious role of mainstream economics, and our denialist tendencies, alienation from nature, and hubris.

He explained that “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained our sense of the world as a stable and civilising place.”

Dismissing techno-solutions such as Carbon Capture and Storage and ‘Clean Coal’ as diversionary tactics by powerful interests, the book offers an ethical and moral basis for reconstructing the future. Rereading it 13 years after its publication, I am… show more.

By now, we all know the Earth needs saving. And most of us try to do our part – recycling, composting, using less plastic, etc. But it’s hardly enough...yet still, what more can we as individuals do? That question didn’t stop the young activists in Girl Warriors. These young women have Stepped Up! Over and over again, I found myself awed at the stories that included speaking at a UN Climate Change Conference (Isabella Fallahi) and organizing a Global Cleanup Day that included 27 countries (Lilly Platt). The young women profiled are not afraid to tackle large, seemingly insurmountable problems if it means saving the Earth. I loved how in-depth the profiles went on the various actions being undertaken. If they can do it, why not me? Or you?

As a climate activist and lover of glaciers and glaciation, I took a special interest in David Archer’s book, The Long Thaw. Archer takes us in and out of ice ages, explaining with surprisingly understandable prose just how ice ages are formed, their predictable cycles, why they’re important, and how with current climate change trends and impacts, we just may have missed the onramp to the next one. That could put us into a Hothouse Earth scenario not seen since the times of the dinosaurs. Archer masterfully brings science to the layperson. If we think that the year 2100 is a marker in the sand for climate change, think again. Archer reveals that the chilling (or heating) reality of climate change just might be forever. 

Dahr Jamail’s End of Ice threads his life experiences as a prized reporter, mountaineer, and climate activist, sharing personal human stories and experiences that reveal the difficult, cold, and hard evidence showing us that our cryosphere is irreversibly changing before our eyes. His easy-to-read prose, supported by well-researched and irrefutable science, gives us a unique introspection into the Anthropocene, chronicling the profound changes we are witnessing to Mother Nature and the demise of our frozen resources. I was enthralled by Jamail’s reflections on the end of ice.

This book provides a perfect balance between presenting realism and providing hope for the future. It is a mixture of personal accounts from individuals and communities who have had to face the harsh realities of climate change, as well as accounts from those who have found ways to alter their livelihoods in order to adapt.