In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned that the birds were dying from DDT, so many canaries in America’s figurative coalmines. Since then, more portentous, unacknowledged canaries have died. Climate change, the biggest existential threat to our collective humanity, has already, and will continue to, disproportionately affect the poor, the marginalized and oppressed. But every year, emissions increase. Free market capitalism enables carbon output. Indigenous people are stripped of their land stewardship. There are toxins in environments that people cannot leave, that have devastating effects on their lives. Changing weather displaces them.
Article continues after advertisement
As our policymakers fail to combat it, where else can we look? The following books take disparate, but deeply researched and thoughtful, angles on climate justice, through indigenous wisdom, scientific innovation, grassroots activism, anthropology, and botany. Perhaps, most unlikely, a rare mushroom might reveal a way forward. Stronger than independence is interdependence.
*
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, 2015
In The New York Times Book Review, Rob Nixon wrote that This Changes Everything was “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring.” Naomi Klein, award-winning author of acclaimed international bestsellers, equates the belief that technology might save us, or that incremental divestment from fossil fuels is enough, with its own kind of denial. Klein “superbly dramatizes the seemingly intractable ways that global capitalism is locked into a carbon death spiral,” contending, simply, that the same institutions that got us here are not going to save us (Rolling Stone). The book is not just a polemic because it thoroughly describes solutions; in fact, in many ways the book is optimistic.
“There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she writes, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” Bill McKibben, award-winning environmentalist, author and journalist, calls it “the best book about climate change in a very long time…because…it sets the most important crisis in human history in the context of our other ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a livable one.” This Changes Everything was included on The New York Times’ list of 100 notable books for 2014 and was adapted into a documentary by the same name.
NYT Bestseller • 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction • 2015 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing • Finalist for the 2015 PEN Literary Awards in Nonfiction
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015
The Mushroom at the End of the World has a double meaning. “The mushroom is at the end of the known world because it’s hard to find,” but also it represents, “the end of the world as we know it, given our instinct for extracting as much from the earth as we can” (Hua Hsu, The New Yorker). Anthropologist Anna Tsing uses the matsutake mushroom as both metaphor and teacher. It is no coincidence that the mushroom she chooses for this exploration was reportedly the first living thing to grow from the soil in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.
The book “brilliantly turns the commerce and ecology of this most rare mushroom into a modern parable of post-industrial survival and environmental renewal” (The Guardian). Though environmental justice is not purported as the book’s main endeavor, Tsing lands at environmental justice from the inside out; The matsutake serves as focal point but, “not for one instant does” the book “lose from view its purpose of tracking the new nature of capitalism and exploring the possibility of living among its ruins” (MIT Press).
2016 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing (Society for Humanistic Anthropology) • 2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize (Society for Cultural Anthropology) • Times Higher Education Book of the Year
Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, 2018
Climate Justice must be situated in the career of its author. Mary Robinson was the President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, she served as the UN’s High Commissioner of Human Rights from 1997 to 2002. And then, in 2014, she served as the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change. In 2010, she founded The Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice. The book is powerful because Robinson writes “climate justice issues from a narrative perspective,” giving voice to grassroots activists worldwide, and her insights have led to direct action through her humanitarian work. It’s compelling that with a career such as hers, the issue she is dedicated the rest of her life to is climate change. “Those least responsible for climate change are suffering from its most detrimental effects,” the book makes clear that “climate change, human rights, equality and individual empowerment are all inextricably linked” (The Guardian).
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, 2019
Dina Gilio-Whitaker is an Indigenous researcher, university lecturer of American Indian Studies, and consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. As Long as Grass Grows “is a primer on the Native environmental movement, and a long chronicle of fighting back against government and corporate power with varying degrees of success” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “To be a person of direct Indigenous descent in the US today is to have survived a genocide of cataclysmic proportions,” Gilio-Whitaker writes.
“Extractive industries, commercial agriculture, grazing, dam-building, track-laying, and road construction”—things many Americans consider progress—all contributed to that genocide (LARB). Because of this, Indigenous people have always been at the forefront of environmental justice, “from Standing Rock’s stand against a damaging pipeline to antinuclear and climate change activism” (Jace Weaver, author of Defending Mother Earth). And As Long as Grass Grows delineates new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. The New York Public Library and BuzzFeed News both suggested the book as recommended reading for the 2020 United States elections on the subject of climate change.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 2015
Indigenous botanist and MacArthur “genius,” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass became an unlikely National Bestseller. At the time, she was not a well-known writer and her publisher had only a small marketing campaign. In this case, the book’s commercial success speaks directly to its success as a text, directly to the desire readers have for wisdom outside of the mainstream channels. Kimmerer told the New York Times that she thinks her message is resonating, because “when we’re looking at things we cherish falling apart, when inequities and injustices are so apparent, people are looking for another way that we can be living. We need interdependence rather than independence, and Indigenous knowledge has a message of valuing connection, especially to the humble.”
Braiding Sweetgrass speaks to the helplessness we feel at ecological devastation, “by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia” (Lit Hub). “I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer,” Richard Powers author of The Overstory writes, “for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual,” she “opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate” (Krista Tippett, host of On Being).
#1 New York Times Bestseller • Washington Post and LA Times Bestseller • New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick • A LitHub Best Essay Collection of the Decade
Richard Powers, The Overstory, 2019
Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Overstory is a “sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world.” As a writer, Powers has continuously eschewed traditional character-centric narrative in favor of larger-scale ideas, histories and sciences that, told in this way, reflect back the humans driving these phenomena. As such, “it was only a matter of time before he took on the greatest existential crisis human civilization faces: the destruction of the natural conditions necessary for our own survival” (The Atlantic). There are characters, nine in fact, that the book follows, but the book deftly focuses on trees.
As the Pulitzer Prize committee put it, the book is “an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.” On top of that, “Powers suggests that the solution to Earth’s environmental woes might lie with this other consciousness,” that consciousness being of life on this earth on a grander scale, “rather than with humans alone—if only we could learn to empathize with trees in the same way we’re able to empathize with other humans” (The Kenyon Review). “This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction” (The Washington Post). One might ask how the book does all that, but as with most truly great novels, it seems, you just have to read it.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction • Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize • Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List • One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review • New York Times Notable Book • A Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
Dorceta Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility, 2014
Dorceta Taylor is a distinguished scholar, environmental sociologist and Professor of Environmental Justice at Yale School of the Environment. Toxic Communities is hailed as a “standard-bearer” for environmental justice scholarship, “chronicl[ing] the contamination of minority and low income communities in the US.” Though an academic and “intellectually weighty book,” Toxic Communities also “elevates the discussion of environmental justice,” bringing “nuance and accountability… to the discussion” (Art Journal, Choice).
“Rather than simply demonstrating the fact that people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and accepting simple explanations for this phenomenon, Taylor goes to the heart of the matter and explores why and how environmental racism remains an enduring wound on the American social landscape” (David Naguib Pellow, co-author of The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden).
Jake Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, 2024
Jake Bittle is a journalist who covers climate change and energy. “The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.” The Great Displacement is not only telling a story of future survival, but survival that is urgently occurring, for many people across our country, right now, for those on the front lines of early-stage climate displacement. It is “a bracing, vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view and warning us of what’s to come” (David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth).
Bittle’s book is “an exemplary representative of a specific genre of climate non-fiction, one in which the author (usually a journalist) acts as a meandering tour guide through the brave new world of climatic instability and environmental change” (Cleveland Review of Books). The Great Displacement poses the urgent question: “when we are forced to leave the places that have long defined us, what will we encounter on the other side?” (Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, 2020
How to Blow Up a Pipeline contains no actual instructions for blowing anything up—instead the book powerfully addresses Andreas Malm’s “frustration with movement orthodoxy…as he inveighs against what he calls ‘the demise of revolutionary politics,’” against an issue that deserves the attention of revolution (Los Angeles Review of Books). Malm is a Swedish author and associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University. He “advocates powerfully against despair and powerlessness,” “brutally dispatch[ing] with ‘climate fatalists’…who argue that we should all just give up” (The New York Times). For Malm, giving up would be morally equivalent to being a passive bystander to a loved one’s death.
As Wen Stephenson writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Malms’ new book will no doubt be dismissed by a lot of very serious people, including climate activists and policy advocates, as fringe and even dangerous. That would be a very serious mistake. Nothing could be more dangerous at this moment in human history than a blind faith in politics—or activism—as usual.” Malm’s approach is “erudite and, above all, morally serious.” How to Blow Up a Pipeline should not be dismissed.
Harriet A Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind, 2019
A Terrible Thing to Waste takes an even deeper look into how environmental crises affect mostly poor people of color. “Washington argues that IQ, while a flawed metric, is a useful tool to gauge cognitive damage brought on by environmental hazards” (NPR). Harriet A. Washington is an American writer and medical ethicist who wrote the acclaimed book Medical Apartheid. In A Terrible Thing to Waste, Washington “methodically indicts environmental racism and its catastrophic effects, particularly on the cognitive abilities of America’s children… The news she brings is grim, but she leaves the reader feeling not paralyzed by despair but determined to act” (Randy Cohen, original author of New York Times Magazine’s The Ethicist column).
As the “loss of certain species of small animals seemed less important before the publication of [Silent Spring], a few IQ points might seem insignificant to most Americans now. That shortsightedness will change after they’ve read [A Terrible Thing to Waste].” Harriet Washington has written “a fact-based analysis with conclusions that should absolutely animate us all” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
