Books for understanding the climate crisis now
According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we’re facing a dire environmental outlook: the world is warming, human activity caused it, and it’s going to require major changes in human activity to avert total disaster.
Even with successful
and effective climate policies in place, the world will still warm and bring
hardship and even devastation in a number of ways.
In light of the scope of the crisis, what are individuals to do? What policies should we support? What’s the right way to think about the inevitable climate impacts of our day to day lives? Can any decision truly be “climate friendly” or are we doomed to only make things worse along different time scales? These eco-anxieties are now fairly common and researchers in psychology and ethics are exploring how to cope with them. If we’re going to get through this, we need to be able to at once believe that the future is worth surviving for, and it’s only through deliberate actions that we’ll all get there.
Ironically, climate anxiety can mean that when humanity scores a win, it can feel tempting to either give in to blind optimism and not press for more (we’ll always need more), or to dismiss partial solutions as too-little-too-late. We need a reliable yardstick for measuring the kind of incremental progress that it’s going to take to slow the warming of the planet for all people, which introduces another concern…
It’s increasingly clear that the negative impacts of climate change haven’t been evenly distributed. Groups that have been historically marginalized are situated to feel the worst of the effects of climate change—whether that’s living in a low-lying area that sees extreme and irregular rainfall, or the most treeless parts of cities where summer heatwaves are at their warmest.
Several recent books tackle these problems from a variety of directions, and we’ve gathered them here to help you cope with climate anxiety while still pushing for effective and equitable change and staying hopeful about the future.
Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
If it feels like people aren’t paying enough attention to climate change, you’re right—and our neurobiology is to blame. Fortunately, communications specialist and environmental activist George Marshall can explain why our brains are able to respond to some threats with urgency, while ignoring others. And most importantly, he explains how to effectively communicate the stakes of the climate emergency in a way that human brains can grasp with appropriate urgency.
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A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind
“The environment” isn’t one thing: each of us occupies different spaces with different environmental conditions. Science writer Harriet A. Washington explains how race factors into our immediate environment—where even the air is worse in marginalized communities—both in terms of how it got this way and what we know the present effects to be. And she makes recommendations for how to protect future generations from this harm.
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A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
For Canadians specifically looking for what should be done to get on the right course for slowing or stopping climate change, Seth Klein lays out an ambitious and, as he argues, achievable plan for a Green New Deal in the Great White North.
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As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker was inspired by the 2016 protest at Standing Rock to write the history of indigenous resistance to environmental degradation over centuries. It’s an inspiring and humbling story that has a lot to teach current environmental movements.
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Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Try as we might, we’re not going to left-brain our way out of the climate crisis. Britt Wray, the researcher and author of the Gen Dread newsletter which discusses emotional health in the face of the climate crisis, says we should feel our dreadful feelings because they’re a normal and healthy response to the circumstances. She speaks with a variety of mental health professionals about the future of therapy and coping strategies in this brand new study of climate anxiety, one of the first books of its kind.
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How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World
Sometimes you just need a win, and energy transition journalist Chris Turner has assembled a bunch of them here. Solar panel factories, sustainable communities and workplaces—it’s all here in this book about where humans are making the right moves for the planet.
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The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet
In this book-length essay, activist Leah Thomas explains the links between environmentalism, racism, and privilege in a way that makes clear how we’re not going to save the planet if we can’t make space for the dignity of all on it.
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