To celebrate Read a Book Day, we asked our team for their recommendations of books that have inspired them and this is the list they came up with. With a focus on sustainability and climate change, all these books educate and inform about the world we live in today, but also instill hope and action. We’re sure there’ll be at least a couple that end up on your TBR pile!
The Happy Hero
by Solitaire Townsend
The Happy Hero reveals the secret of enjoying a better life and sets out the principles of how to feel good by doing good. Sounds simple, but where do you start? Everyday we are bombarded with fear and negativity from the media and have been trained out of happiness by these stories. There is a simple solution; stop worrying about the future and start making it better.
Whether it’s donating blood, only eating meat at the weekend, buying vintage/pre-loved clothes or picking up litter in your street. Luckily, many of the changes we need to make to build a better world, we want to do anyway and optimism is the only mindset that can change our world for the better.
New research shows that trying to make a difference, even in the smallest ways, can extend your life, improve your relationships and even help you recover from a cold…because, it turns out, saving the world is good for you. So Superheroes, what are you waiting for… ?
The Lorax
by Dr Seuss
“Mister! He said
with a sawdusty sneeze,
I am the Lorax.
I speak for the trees.”
The Lorax is a timeless classic that has been using humour and rhyme to raise awareness of the destruction of the environment for more than fifty years.
Join the long-suffering crusader and help save the planet with this very special, and still achingly relevant, ode to conservation.
The Sustainable Guide to Green Parenting
by Jen Gale
As a parent, getting out of the house with everyone wearing shoes (on a good day) can feel like you’re winning, so adding ‘being green’ to the never-ending to-do list might feel like the thing to bring all your spinning plates crashing to the ground. If that’s the case, then this is the book for you.
No preaching. No judgement. No guilt.
Instead you’ll find easy, do-able ideas and suggestions for you to pick and choose from, try out and adapt. Plus bucketfuls of encouragement as you explore what works for you and your family.
The Book of Hope
by Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams
The world-renowned naturalist and conservationist Jane Goodall has spent more than a half-century warning of our impact on our planet. From her famous encounters with chimpanzees in the forests of Gombe as a young woman to her tireless campaigning for the environment in her late ’80s, Jane has become the godmother to a new generation of climate activists.
In The Book of Hope, Jane draws on the wisdom of a lifetime dedicated to nature to teach us how to find strength in the face of the climate crisis and explains why she still has hope for the natural world and for humanity. In extraordinary conversations with her co-author Doug Abrams that weave together stories from her travels and activism, she offers a new understanding of the crisis we face and a compelling path forward for us all to create hope in our own lives and in the world.
The world needs a manifesto of hope now more than ever. This profound book from a legendary figure in the fight against climate change shows that even in the face of great adversity, we can find hope in human nature and in nature itself.
Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings – asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass – offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
by Sarah Jaquette Ray
A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The “climate generation”—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet’s environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation.
Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college environmental studies programs, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an “existential tool kit” for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience while advocating for climate justice. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is the essential guidebook for the climate generation—and perhaps the rest of us—as we confront the greatest environmental threat of our time.
Greta Thunberg: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
by Greta Thunberg
The history-making, ground-breaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has become the voice of a generation
‘Everything needs to change. And it has to start today’
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
This book brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across Europe, from the UN to mass street protests, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.
The Climate Book
by Greta Thunberg
We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world’s leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times
by Neil Astley
Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. The Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.
A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem’s importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.
Active Hope
by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, war, political polarization, economic upheaval, and the dying back of nature together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face these crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.
Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.
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Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas
Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is a highly relevant and compelling book which uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years.
In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report projecting average global surface temperatures to rise between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees Celsius (roughly 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Based on this forecast, author Mark Lynas outlines what to expect from a warming world, degree by degree. At 1 degree Celsius, most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. A 3-degree rise would spell the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, disappearance of Greenland’s ice sheet, and the creation of deserts across the Midwestern United States and southern Africa. A 6-degree increase would eliminate most life on Earth, including much of humanity.
Based on authoritative scientific articles, the latest computer models, and information about past warm events in Earth history, Six Degrees promises to be an eye-opening warning that humanity will ignore at its peril.
