Top 10 Climate Books That You Should Read | World Book Day 2021
Storytelling is one of the key battlegrounds on which climate activism takes place. We must strive to tell it as best as we can. The climate and ecological breakdowns of our time touch every aspect of society and every subject we can think of.
It has its heroes and its villains. It has its fill of outrage and horror, with room for creativity, engagement and opportunity, too. It has as much to do with ecology as it does with politics, social equality as much as psychology, racism and economics, the non-human as much as the human.
As a topic of such scale and importance, it also has its cliches, its myths, and its delusions to be pushed against. At Bloom in Doom, we want to tell this story with all its nuance and urgency.
for World Book Day, we thought we’d share some of the books that we feel do just that.
Illustration by Alicia Hayden (@aliciahaydenwildlife)
The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells
If ever there was a book to really wake you up to what’s going on, it’s this. An incredible feat of environmental journalism, Wallace-Wells shows us how to capture the climate crisis in all its drama and urgency. The book takes us through what runaway climate change could mean for us over the next decades, illustrating the extent to which we have hardly begun to contemplate the details of a warming planet. The book makes a convincing case for the power of fear in narrating climate change, but argues that this is not merely ‘alarmism’—actually, the facts are alarming enough, all on their own. There is an important nuance, however: this is not the kind of alarm that disarms you, that leaves you in that familiar ditch of hopelessness. Rather, you emerge certain that you want to make a change, that you must do something, to play some part in staving off the worst effects of warming that are already ravaging the globe.
2. The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis By Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac
If David Wallace-Wells shows us the value of outrage and alarm, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac embody what they call a gritty, stubborn optimism in the face of climate change. There might be no two people better equipped for this—the two played crucial roles in the historic Paris Agreement, the most significant global agreement to mitigate climate change to this day. The optimism we encounter here doesn’t shy away from the horror of climate breakdown, but rather uses this urgency as fuel for action. Crucially, climate change is seen as an opportunity to bend the arc of history to a more regenerative, interconnected, fairer world. Perhaps the most effecting parts of the book are these visions of what the future could be, if we act in time—a reforested world with green cities, clean, breathable air, and a new-found recognition of our reliance on and entanglement with the natural world. Humanity, they say, was ‘only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our one true legacy.’ It is a glimpse into what the world could look like, were we to meet this crisis with creativity, urgency and gritty optimism.
3. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass will transform the way you see, feel, love and interact with the natural world. Rooted deeply in Kimmerer’s indigenous heritage, this book puts forward the overarching theme of reciprocity with the natural world: the natural world will continue to bring you gifts, so long as you give back to it, too. Through a series of thoughtful, self-aware anecdotes, Kimmerer navigates the relationship within her culture and the methods of ecological study within Western science. The book is written with passion, compassion, humility and a deep sense of responsibility to respect the land we step on and nurture it. The urgency of this relationship with the natural world has never been more obvious than today.
4. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is one of the most rigorous political thinkers writing today. This Changes Everything unpicks, in fabulous detail, the crucial intersections between the climate crisis and the capitalist, neoliberal system in which we exist. This is a system that is extractivist by nature, reducing the natural world to recourses to be stockpiled. It is also one in which we are all unavoidably implicated. Klein offers a deep dive into the roots of this and so many other crises in the neoliberal world, which we image to be so infallible. The book also offers insight into why so many find it hard to even believe in climate change in the first place, and why political action has been so indecisive—it implicates the entire system in which we live, and therefore every action we take. The brilliance of this book, as with all Klein’s work, is that she shows that the world is infinitely more complex than we are sometimes willing to admit. It asks us to give, a truly global crisis, the depth of thought and attention it really requires.
5. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
We are now, and have been for some time, losing entire species at many times the background rate – the natural cycle of extinction. It’s estimated that up to 50% of the world’s species will disappear by 2050. That’s around a million species. For some perspective, it would take 14 days (without sleeping) just to count to a million—so one species every second. Yet, as ever-present as it is, extinction can be hard to notice as we go about our daily lives, sectioned cleanly off from the biosphere and the natural world. We might ambiently notice the vanishing of a particular butterfly, or that insects don’t seem to hit our windscreens when we drive at night. But our world grows poorer every day, as do we, even if we fail to notice. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction is the fascinating, appalling wake-up call we need. A staff writer at The New Yorker, Kolbert’s vivid reporting takes us to the front lines of the Earth’s sixth extinction event—the Amazon to the Andes, the Great Barrier Reef to her own back yard—and lays it all out. She details a complete unravelling of the biosphere that is happening everywhere, under our feet and just below our attention; a crisis which, if we could only look squarely at it, we might find the heart to do something about.
6. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich
For an understanding of the political story of how we got here, look no further than Nathaniel Rich’s fascinating Losing Earth. The book centres around the decade (1979 to 1989) in which we came this close to getting a handle on climate change. It’s hard to imagine that there was once a time when climate was bipartisan in the United States, when prominent Republicans were calling for urgent action. But this was indeed the reality when climate first emerged in political consciousness. The book spotlights the handful of people, climate scientists and activists, who first sought to ring the alarm bells, and fought to gather political momentum so that they could avert the crisis we now see in full swing today. Though we know that apathy, short-termism and disregard for the future eventually won out, the tirelessness of these scientists and activists is inspiring, and also instructive. As Rich says, ‘There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without an understanding of why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.’
7. Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons have Shaped South Asia’s History by Sunil Amrith
Water has been central to South Asia’s colonial past, and will be for its socio-economic and environmental future. Floods and monsoons have been regular occurrences in India for centuries. Spending eight years researching through archives, Amrith takes a deep dive into the water management decisions made by the British and Indian governments by way of building thousands of gigantic dams, as well as the dire consequences it has for local communities, farmers and the natural world. Pollution, climate change and glacial melt have exacerbated the problems with unsustainable and inequitable water management, yet over 400 dams are planned to be built in the Himalayas by several Asian nations. It is the book to read for a better understanding of the converging lines between water, climate change, politics, development and community within South Asia. Unruly Waters is a fabulous book to engage with complexities of climate change outside of a singular Western setting. It offers historical depth to the crisis, and explores the deep, unavoidable connections between colonial pasts and climate futures.
8. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot
George Monbiot’s outstanding Feral is a love letter to rewilding our land, sea and air. It explores our disconnect with nature in the UK, touching on the old ways we have long since abandoned. It also reveals the ways in which the countryside around us is not, in fact, natural at all. Monbiot paints a surprising picture of our landscapes as grotesque products of human manipulation through agriculture, drainage and deforestation, all but emptying it of all wildness. He also touches on the disturbing notion of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, whereby generation after generation become more accustomed to depletion of species regarding conservation issues of their time. Feral longs for a real wilderness. It mourns the disconnect that has grown larger over centuries. But it also dreams of a wilder Britain, of a ‘raucous summer’ and the tantalising opportunity we have to reintroduce long lost species and restore some semblance of what the natural world once was.
9. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
In The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh delves into the fascinating intersections between climate and literature. His arguments are particularly relevant as the ‘climate fiction’ genre begins to emerge and garner, finally, the attention it merits (Ghosh’s own novel Gun Island would be one great example, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s phenomenal The Ministry for the Future). Ghosh asks why literature has failed, historically, to pay sufficient attention to the climate and ecological crises we currently face—and why, when authors have, the work has been reduced to something unserious, dismissed as science fiction. He points to the vital role storytelling and literature plays in our understanding of the world and our place in it, and claims that a failure to process the deep, unsettling shifts of the Anthropocene ‘has to be counted as an aspect of the wider imaginative and cultural failures that lie at the heart of the climate crisis.’ The Great Derangement is a call for writers and artists to consider the climate crisis as a subject more than worthy of artistic attention, and to think very carefully about how best to engage with it, to process the seismic changes it’s causing.
10. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton
For a slightly different angle, the philosopher Timothy Morton offers valuable insight into these profound shifts, what he calls our ‘traumatic loss of coordinates’. There is, he argues, a deep incomprehensibility at the core of the climate crisis: they are conceptual facts so huge and all-encompassing; they force us to think of time in increments of eras rather than years; and they ask us to think beyond our individual lives to a kind of species consciousness, a planetary awareness. Hyperobjects gives us a language for why it can be so challenging to think about climate change, the difficulty of grappling with the dynamic entanglement between humanity and the world we share with so many rapidly disappearing species and ecosystems. With this dense, challenging, but always mind-bendingly profound book, Morton captures the weirdness of a world falling into ecological disarray (he calls our time the ‘age of asymmetry’). But Hyperobjects is also thoroughly useful: it helped us to really process, to better understand, why we have been so indecisive on climate so far, why we can often fall into denial or, on the other end of the spectrum, hopelessness, and how we might act with more humility to those among us who haven’t yet awoken to the crises of our time.
George Richards
George is currently doing his Masters in creative writing poetry at the University of East Anglia. He graduated from the University of Exeter in 2019 and has also spent time in Hong Kong teaching English as a foreign language. He has previously been an editor at '“Enigma”, a university journal for creative writing, and contributes ecology and climate articles to the Hong Kong-based site Earth.org. He is an avid reader, writer and hiker. An online article editor here at Bloom in Doom.