The most recommended books on climate change

I was in Parliament Square at Samhain, 31 Oct 2018, when the Extinction Rebellion began. Greta Thunberg spoke there, but the mic broke so she paused at every sentence for the front rank to call out her words to those behind. The potent archetype of a virgin girl-child speaking truth to power worked its traditional magic, by exalting a thousand people, including me. Fast-forward a few years, and millions on the streets, and this little book condenses the motivation and message of climate activism: “Everyone and everything needs to change. Make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy. We must start today. We have no more excuses.” Greta offers everything important that we have been trying to say for decades. She encourages us to unify our divided minds and purposes. To me this is worthy of the most passionate engagement.

I read this book to stay true to my commitment, inspired by John Stuart Mill, to always make an effort to understand the strongest against your own convictions (a key reason for always including Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom in my political philosophy courses). Like most progressives in the 70s, I was part of the anti-nuclear movement, not just opposition to nuclear weapons, but to nuclear power as well. I did not expect this book to radically shift these commitments—but it did. Not the first one, but the second. I realized on reading this book that I had not thought seriously about these issues in decades. The issue of climate change was not on the table in those days, and I had not paid much attention to the development of nuclear power since then. The issue today is too urgent to ignore. Looking at the evidence presented in this book… show more.

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.

The Fate of Rome is a fascinating, but also unnerving reminder that so much has changed, and at the same time so little. It was a stark reminder to me and every other reader of the book that civilization is a fragile construct, and that it only takes a few systemic shocks to transform or destroy it.

In a nutshell, The Fate of Rome makes the case that the Roman Empire was unalterably transformed by a shifting climate and several pandemic disease outbreaks. Sounds exactly like the kind of book someone would write post-COVID outbreak, but amazingly Harper actually wrote this book before we got a modern reminder of how devastating global pandemics can be. 

A book for those whom the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton termed “prospective survivors,” this book is unsparingly honest in taking a hard look at our likely climate future—and moving from close examination to action rather than despair. By combining deeply personal reflections with broad-based scholarship, millennial Wray establishes a broad foundation for how to psychologically approach climate breakdown. Her overall analysis is highly readable, while her lists of action items that close out every chapter comprise a ready how-to guide suitable for taping up on your solar-powered fridge.

John Englander brings rising tides to our dinner table discussions. As a Florida resident living 5 minutes from the beach, this is a very real issue to me. But no matter where you live, sea-level rise will change your lifestyle, whether it’s because of the changing coastline, or due to entire economies that will change as the oceans advance over land, because of affected property values across entire countries and regions, or because of the waves of climate refugees that will have to seek new homes.

Entire countries like Maldives, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu are already planning a mass move to new terrain. Englander masters climate science to show us just how the seas have, are, and will continue to change in our currently accelerating climate warming.

These gentle mini-stories make up my favorite introduction for picture-book listeners to the uncertainties of our changing planet.

A weasel in a henhouse reminds the writer to look for beauty everywhere, and a playful octopus surprises her into seeking common ground with everyone. Montgomery never mentions climate change but shares how animals have taught her lessons for our time in empathy, curiosity, courage, and, especially, hope. 

Studies of early childhood have revealed that kids need to fall in love with nature before they can develop commitments to care for the Earth. Montgomery’s passion for wildlife beams from every page, and I couldn’t resist her messages of compassion and human-animal interdependence. I’m ready to read and re-read it to any little one, enriching our love for a planet still brimming with wonders well worth protecting.

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. 

Because the speed at which the atmosphere is warming is unprecedented in human history, we are prone to assume we are facing an unprecedented climatic challenge. However, this is not entirely true.

Archeologists Fagan and Durrani remind us that, at least locally, the climate has changed several times in the past, profoundly affecting the history of civilizations that were less advanced than ours. Some societies were able to deploy technical and social innovation to buffer environmental shocks. Others proved too rigid, slow and eventually collapsed.

To me the lesson is clear: history can be an important ally when charting the policy path ahead in a warming world. 

Bunny is an American teenager in Azerbaijan. Her father is a diplomat. She grows up in a world where oil is everything, listening to the language of the adults around her as some want their share of the profits reaped by this energy source while (a few) others point out the inequities in this industry and its potential long-term effects on the world.

What is fascinating as well is how she herself becomes part of this same world when she is an adult, almost as if she cannot help but be subsumed by the vast structure of the oil industry.