100 books like The Planet You Inherit

This book is an instant classic. It took me years to finish reading it because I did not want it to end.

Kimmerer’s writing appealed to the dreamer in me while also explaining the science of the natural world in ways that were unforgettable. This beautifully written book connected me to my physical home and the people around me. I will come back to it again and again. 

I used to be paid to ponder the end of the world as we know it: I was a health editor during the early years of the COVID pandemic; at the same time, I was editing environmental stories.

What I loved most about this book is that the worst has already occurred, and the protagonist, a teenager, chooses her own new way to navigate what’s still to come. I was engaged by the concepts of resilience as a survival skill, reinvention as a necessity, and rebirth as an act of personal and global faith.

I am not a fan of religion as such, but this book made me believe.  

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. 

Joanna Macy is an environmental activist and a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology. Her writing is at once direct and gracious, inviting us to explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. Central to her message of hope is what she calls the "Great Turning," a revolution in which humankind will turn from industrial capitalism, which seeks infinite growth through extraction, to a sustainable civilization of compassion and interdependence. This new edition of Active Hope, co-authored with Chris Johnstone, acknowledges that the Great Turning may in fact happen in the midst of a massive societal and ecological collapse, a "Great Unravelling." Yet, even in the midst of collapse, we can find deep hope by investing heart, mind, and strength in the Great Turning. "What's the best we can hope for? And how can we be active in making that more likely or even possible?"

I used to think things like beauty, joy, and affection were indulgences that I just didn’t have time for if I was going to solve the climate crisis.

I used to do my climate work bare-knuckled and through gritted teeth. And I burned out. Fast.

Then I had a friend suggest to me that I read Mary Oliver.

I’ve since come to understand that meditation and contemplation on the beauty of creation, on the joy and delight of being in communion with it, and on the affection that God has for all his handiwork are necessary ingredients for sustained, effective action.

And nobody helps me focus my buzzing mind on the goodness of God’s creation better than Oliver.

(Disclaimer, some of my own work is included in this book.) The author’s preface says, “This book is intended to stimulate new ways of thinking by illustrating an…approach to design that encourages people to tread more lightly, so that people may inherit a healthy planet.” Even as we are half a century into environmentalism, there is still a perception that “green” design is ugly: all burlap and granola. This book is chock full of examples of furniture, clothing, accessories, kitchen utensils and the like that prove otherwise. And in the decade-plus since it came out, there’s even more like this, more of what I call Transparent Green: designs that don’t shout greenness.

When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain “capital-T” Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor — and what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to survive.

I love the way that this novella offers a deeply intersectional view of the climate crisis, and how critical it is to find solidarity among vulnerable populations whose vulnerability increases during disasters.

I get asked a lot in my line of work about hope.

How do we find hope in the midst of climate calamity? And I always had a hard time finding an answer that didn’t feel trite. Until I read this book. Yes, we need hope, says Rah, but the right kind of hope.

Not a saccharine, false hope that ignores the dire facts on the ground. Rather, we need to recover a truly biblical hope. What is the biblical formula for hope? It is a hard-won, clear-eyed hope that has lived in and become comfortable in lament first.

It is a hope that rejects triumphalism, that centers those most harmed, and that moves forward together through lament into new creation.

When fifteen-year-old Cuban American Mariana Ruiz’s father runs for president, Mari starts to see him with new eyes. Throughout his successful political career, he has always had his daughter’s vote, but the campaign brings a whole new level of scrutiny to Mariana and the rest of her Cuban American family. As Mari begins to learn about the details of her father’s political positions—particularly some very questionable stances on the environment— she realizes that her father is not the man she thought he was. As the climate crisis escalates around them in Florida, she begins to connect with activist teens.

I love how this novel traces a young woman’s political awakening, and how sometimes standing up for what you believe in begins with standing up to your family.

Brevini gives us something real to worry about—climate change. Did you know that using ChatGPT to look something up can take up to ten times as much energy as doing a Google search? 

To most of us, AI seems like something that just happens in thin air (the cloud). But, in reality, the data centers needed to train and run AI rely on a variety of scarce resources and eat up vast amounts of energy in doing their calculations. This little book of just 109 small pages lays out the many ways in which AI is contributing to climate change. 

An AI-centric world will be a hot and stormy one, increasingly inhospitable for both humans and machines. And that has me worried.