A virtual bookshelf co-sponsored by the Council of Student Sustainability Leaders and Countway Library

The Council of Student Sustainability Leaders (CSSL), operating under the Harvard Office for Sustainability (OFS), is a group of Harvard undergraduate and graduate students who lead, organize, and participate in sustainability projects and groups throughout the university. The CSSL Bookshelf at Countway is a collection of thought-provoking sustainability books developed in collaboration with CSSL, Countway Library, and the Harvard Medical School community.

This collection amalgamates diverse perspectives into a curated and organized selection aimed at advancing and transferring knowledge for the betterment of the Harvard community and the planet.

Please suggest a book for the collection. To learn more about CSSL, please visit the CSSL website.

For questions, contact David Havelick, Office for Sustainability Associate Director

 

Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.All We Can Save

Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

Keywords: Environmental Justice; Environmental Policy; Ecofeminism

More Details About All We Can Save | HOLLIS Link

National Bestseller written over a photograph of a decaying building in a field of brown grasses.American War

by Omar El Akkad

Themes/Keywords:

More Details About American War | HOLLIS Link

A gauge showing colors starting at red and ending at dark green with a needle pointing to light green.Better, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness

by Max H. Bazerman

Keywords: Behavior; business; sustainability; philosophy; psychology

More Details About Better, Not Perfect | HOLLIS Link

The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet

by Hal Harvey, Justin Gillis

Keywords: Environmental Policy; Energy Policy; Activism, How-to

More Details About The Big Fix | HOLLIS Link

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

by Kathryn Yusoff

Keywords: Geology; Ethnicity; Climate change; Climate Justice

More Details About A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None | HOLLIS Link

A Children’s Bible

by Lydia Millet

Keywords: Fiction; Environmental Disasters; Family Vacation

More Details About A Children's Bible | HOLLIS Link

The Climate Book

by Greta Thunberg

Keywords: Civil Liberties; Political Activism

More Details About The Climate Book | HOLLIS Link

Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future written by the former President of Ireland and UN Special Envoy on Climate Change. The cover shows people tending to garden beds in the shape of the letters that spell out Climate Justice.Climate Justice

by Mary Robinson

Keywords: Environmental Justice; Environmental Policy; Activism; Social Justice

More Details About Climate Justice | HOLLIS Link

The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. New York Times bestseller.Drawdown, The Book

by Paul Hawken (Editor)

Keywords: Environmental Policy; Sustainable Living; Sustainable Development

More Details About Drawdown, The Book | HOLLIS Link

A report for the Club of Rome. The cover shows Earth segmented into differently colored wedges like a pie chart.Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity

by Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jorgen Randers, Johan Rockström, Per Espen Stoknes

Keywords: Business; Economics; Development; Sustainable Development

More Details About Earth for All | HOLLIS Link

Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis

by David R. Loy

Keywords: Buddhism, Spirituality, Mindfulness

More Details About Ecodharma | HOLLIS Link

Handprint made in multi-colored ink.Educating for the Anthropocene: Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence

by Peter Sutoris

Keywords: Education; Environmental Education; Environmental Activism

More Details About Educating for the Anthropocene | HOLLIS Link

A dead yellow bird lying among fern leaves.The End of Nature

by Bill McKibben

Keywords: Environmental Conservation & Protection; Global Warming

More Details About The End of Nature | HOLLIS Link

A woman in a canoe holding a baby is riding on large waves that are covering the buildings nearby. Ink leaks from this image and puddles on the bottom of the cover.The End We Start From

by Megan Hunter

Keywords: Fiction; Motherhood

More Details About The End We Start From | HOLLIS Link

An iceberg floating with most of its mass hidden underwater obscures the graphic of a tracing showing heart activity as it flatlines.Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health

by Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach

Keywords: Human Health; Medicine; Science

More Details About Enviromedics | HOLLIS Link

Monarch butterflies flutter across the cover of this New York Time bestseller.Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Keywords: Fiction, Thriller

More Details About Flight Behavior | HOLLIS Link

A plant and several animals adorn the cover of this national bestseller.The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

Keywords: Nature; History; Biography (Humboldt); Memoir; Conservation; South America; Europe

More Details About The Invention of Nature | HOLLIS Link

Pollution streams from the smokestack on a large building.Literature for a Changing Planet

by Martin Puchner

Keywords: Humanities; Climate Change Narratives

More Details About Literature for a Changing Planet | HOLLIS Link

Ocean with many small pieces of drift ice floating on it.The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate

by David Archer

Keywords: Paleoclimatology; Geology

More Details About The Long Thaw | HOLLIS Link

An indigenous North American with white face paint down their cheek. The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

Keywords: Fiction; Dystopia, Science Fiction

More Details About The Marrow Thieves | HOLLIS Link

How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. The cover shows gas billowing out of a smokestack.Merchants of Doubt

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Keywords: Role of Science in Society; Politics of Science; History of Science

More Details About Merchants of Doubt | HOLLIS Link

A brain with areas in different colors.Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis

by Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD

Keywords: Neuroscience; Cognitive Science; Climate Change

More Details About Minding the Climate | HOLLIS Link

A person standing at the end of a tunnel looks toward a blue sky featuring clouds, a moon, and a dirigible.The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Keywords: Climate Change

More Details About The Ministry for the Future | HOLLIS Link

How lessons from Earth's past can help us survive the climate crisis. The cover has a color gradient from blue to red with a drawing of Earth in the red zone.Our Fragile Moment

by Michael Mann

Keywords: Historical; Non-fiction

More Details About Our Fragile Moment | HOLLIS Link

A forest shown across three concentric circles with the second circle turned upside, so the sky and ground are reversed. New York Times bestseller.The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Keywords: Nature; Sustainability; Storytelling; Activism; Fiction

More Details About The Overstory | HOLLIS Link

A Black woman stands in front of a large fire with mountains in the background.The Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

Keywords: Novel; Graphic Novel; Dystopian

More Details About The Parable of the Sower | HOLLIS Link

A gauntleted hand reaching out of water holds a sword with a red blade and an image of the Big Ben clock tower on it. The edge of the sword is touching a red crescent moon.Perilous Times

by Thomas D. Lee

Keywords: Fantasy, Fiction

More Details About Perilous Times | HOLLIS Link

Existential risk and the future of humanity. The cover shows earthrise from the surface of the moon, but the bulk of the planet is in shadow.The Precipice

by Toby Ord

Keywords: Philosophy; Sociology

More Details About The Precipice | HOLLIS Link

Plants growing in the shape of buildings.Principles of Sustainable Finance

by Dirk Schoenmaker; Willem Schramade

Keywords: Social Sciences; Economics; Sustainability; Finance

More Details About Principles of Sustainable Finance | HOLLIS Link

Seedlings sprouting from the soil.Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

Keywords: Non-fiction; Agriculture; Science

More Details About Regenesis | HOLLIS Link

Three people travel down a waterway in a canoe.The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community

by Elizabeth Hoover

Keywords: Environmental Policy; Environmental Health; Health and Hygiene; Native American Studies

More Details About The River Is in Us | HOLLIS Link

Empty store shelves.Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis

by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson; Carl Wennerlind

Keywords: Business; Economic History; Capitalism; Politcal Economy; History; Climate Change

More Details About Scarcity | HOLLIS Link

Gas pouring out of smokestacks in an urban area.Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

by Rob Nixon

Keywords: Activism; Nonfiction; Environmental Justice

More Details About Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor | HOLLIS Link

A black swan.The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

Keywords: Fiction; Dystopian; Indigenous Studies

More Details About The Swan Book | HOLLIS Link

A protest with people holding signs that say "Water is a human right. Turn on the water! Tax Wall Street!"Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

by Josiah Rector

Keywords: Environmental Studies; Political History; Public Policy; Social Issues; African American Studies

More Details About Toxic Debt | HOLLIS Link

A dead honey bee.The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Keywords: Science; Domestic Politics

More Details About The Uninhabitable Earth | HOLLIS Link

Different weather patterns shown next to a woman's lips.Weather

by Jenny Offill

Keywords: Fiction; Pyschology

More Details About Weather | HOLLIS Link

A story of crisis, resistance, and hope in an American City.What The Eyes Don't See

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Keywords: Environmental Justice, health Equity, Public Health

More Details About What The Eyes Don't See | HOLLIS Link

Two people on a rooftop look out over a busy city featuring skyscrapers, smokestacks, a wind turbine, and streets full of cars with airplanes flying overhead.World Without End

by Jean-Marc Jancovici, Christophe Blain

Keywords: Graphic Novel

More Details About World Without End | HOLLIS Link TBD

A monk meditating.Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Keywords: Buddhism, Spirituality, Mindfulness

More Detail About Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet | HOLLIS Link

  • All We Can Save

    Book TitleAll We Can Save
    Author(s)Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
    PublisherOne World
    Publication Year2021
    ISBN978-0593237083
    Key WordsEnvironmental Justice; Enviornmental Policy; Ecofeminism
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryAll We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States—scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race—and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society
  • American War

    Book TitleAmerican War
    Author(s)Omar El Akkad
    PublisherMcClelland & Stewart; Alfred A. Knopf
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN978-0451493583
    Key WordsFiction; Dystopia
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryA unique and eerily convincing masterwork, American War takes a scalpel to American politics, precisely dissecting it to see what would happen if their own policies were turned against them. The answer: inevitable, endless bloodshed.
  • Better, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness

    Book TitleBetter, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness
    Author(s)Max H. Bazerman
    PublisherHarper Business
    Publication Year2020
    ISBN########
    Key WordsBehavior; business; sustainability; philosophy; psychology
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryBetter, Not Perfect provides a deeply researched, prescriptive roadmap for how to maximize our pleasure and minimize pain. Bazerman shares a framework to be smarter and more efficient, honest and aware—to attain your “maximum sustainable goodness.”
  • The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet

    Book TitleThe Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet
    Author(s)Hal Harvey, Justin Gillis
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN########
    Key Words Environmental Policy; Energy Policy; Activism, How-to
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn The Big Fix, energy policy advisor Hal Harvey and longtime New York Times reporter Justin Gillis offer a new, hopeful way to engage with one of the greatest problems of our age. Writing in a lively, accessible style, the pair illuminate how the really big decisions that affect our climate get made—whether by the most obscure public utilities commissions or in the lofty halls of state capitols—and reveal how each of us can influence these decisions to deliver change. The pair focus on the seven areas of our political economy where ambitious but practical changes will have the greatest effect: from what kind of power plants to build to how much insulation new houses require to how efficient cars must be before they’re allowed on the road.
  • A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

    Book TitleA Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
    Author(s)Kathryn Yusoff
    PublisherUniversity Of Minnesota Press
    Publication Year2018
    ISBN1-4529-6105-0
    Key WordsGeology; Ethnicity; Climate change; Climate Justice
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryKathryn Yusoff examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. She initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.
  • A Children's Bible

    Book TitleA Children's Bible
    Author(s)Lydia Millet 
    PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
    Publication Year2020
    ISBN978-0393867381
    Key WordsFiction; Environmental Disasters; Family Vacation
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryA Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.
  • The Climate Book

    Book TitleThe Climate Book
    Author(s)Greta Thunberg
    PublisherAllen Lane; Simon & Schuster; Penguin Books
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780241547472; 9780593492307
    Key WordsCivil Liberties; Political Activism
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn 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?
  • Climate Justice

    Book TitleClimate Justice
    Author(s)Mary Robinson
    PublisherBloomsbury
    Publication Year2018
    ISBN978-1408888438
    Key WordsEnvironmental Justice; Environmental Policy; Activism; Social Justice
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryFormer President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change: from a Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to a farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda. In Climate Justice, she shares their stories, and many more. Powerful and deeply humane, this uplifting book is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.
  • Drawdown, The Book

    Book TitleDrawdown, The Book
    Author(s)Paul Hawken (Editor)
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN########
    Key WordsEnvironmental Policy; Sustainable Living; Sustainable Development
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.
  • Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity

    Book TitleEarth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity
    Author(s)Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jorgen Randers, Johan Rockström, Per Espen Stoknes
    PublisherNew Society Publishers
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780865719866.00
    Key WordsBusiness; Economics; Development; Sustainable Development
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryEarth For All is an antidote to despair. Combining the global economy, population, inequality, food, and energy in a state-of-the art computer model, a leading group of scientists and economists present a plan of five system-shifting steps to achieve prosperity for all within planetary limits in a single generation.
  • Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis

    Book TitleEcodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis
    Author(s)David R. Loy
    PublisherWisdom
    Publication Year2019
    ISBN978-1614293828
    Key WordsBuddhism, spirituality, mindfulness
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryThis landmark work is simultaneously a manifesto, a blueprint, a call to action, and a deep comfort for troubling times. David R. Loy masterfully lays out the principles and perspectives of Ecodharma—the Buddhist response to our ecological predicament, a new term for a new development of the Buddhist tradition.
  • Educating for the Anthropocene: Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence

    Book TitleEducating for the Anthropocene: Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence
    Author(s)Peter Sutoris
    PublisherThe MIT Press
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780262370721.00
    Key WordsEducation; Environmental Education; Environmental Activism
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryEducation has never played as critical a role in determining humanity's future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind's unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices. He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis.
  • The End of Nature

    Book TitleThe End of Nature
    Author(s)Bill McKibben
    PublisherRandom House
    Publication Year1989
    ISBN978-0812976083
    Key WordsEnvironmental Conservation & Protection; Global Warming
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryThis impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben’s argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth’s environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement.
  • The End We Start From

    Book TitleThe End We Start From
    Author(s)Megan Hunter
    PublisherGrove
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN978-0802126894
    Key Wordsfiction; motherhood
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryA startlingly beautiful story of a family’s survival, The End We Start From is a searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that’s familiar.

    As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. Their journey traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.

    The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book—a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change.
  • Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health

    Book TitleEnviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health
    Author(s)Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach
    PublisherRowman & Littlefield
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN9781442243187.00
    Key WordsHuman Health; Medicine; Science
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryMany of us have concerns about the effects of climate change on Earth, but we often overlook the essential issue of human health. This book addresses that oversight and enlightens readers about the most important aspect of one of the greatest challenges of our time.

    By weighing in from a physician’s perspective, Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach clarify the science, dispel the myths, and help readers understand the threats of climate change to human health. No better argument exists for persuading people to care about climate change than a close look at its impacts on our physical and emotional well-being.
  • Flight Behavior

    Book TitleFlight Behavior
    Author(s)Barbara Kingsolver
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Publication Year2012
    ISBN978-0062124272
    Key WordsFiction, Thriller
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryFlight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver's riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.
  • The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

    Book TitleThe Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
    Author(s)Andrea Wulf
    PublisherKnopf; Vintage
    Publication Year2015
    ISBN978-0385350662 (HC); 978-0345806291 (PB)
    Key WordsNature; History; Biography (Humboldt); Memoir; Conservation; South America; Europe
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever.
  • Literature for a Changing Planet

    Book TitleLiterature for a Changing Planet
    Author(s)Martin Puchner
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780691213750.00
    Key WordsHumanities; Climate Change Narratives
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn Literature for a Changing Planet, Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it’s too late.
  • The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate

    Book TitleThe Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate
    Author(s)David Archer
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Publication Year2016
    ISBN9780691169064.00
    Key WordsPaleoclimatology; Geology
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryThe human impact on Earth’s climate is often treated as a hundred-year issue lasting as far into the future as 2100, the year in which most climate projections cease. In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world’s leading climatologists, reveals the hard truth that these changes in climate will be “locked in,” essentially forever.
  • The Marrow Thieves

    Book TitleThe Marrow Thieves
    Author(s)Cherie Dimaline
    PublisherCormorant Books Incorporated; DCB
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN978-1770864863
    Key Wordsfiction; dystopia, science fiction
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryHumanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden — but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
  • Merchants of Doubt

    Book TitleMerchants of Doubt
    Author(s)Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
    PublisherBloomsbury
    Publication Year2010
    ISBN9781608193943.00
    Key WordsRole of Science in Society; Politics of Science; history of science
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryMerchants of Doubt tells the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of global warming is “not settled” have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These “experts” supplied it. Merchants of Doubt rolls back the rug on this dark corner of American science. Now with a new Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore, and with a new Postscript by the authors.
  • Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis

    Book TitleMinding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis
    Author(s)Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD
    PublisherHarvard University Press
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780674247727.00
    Key WordsNeuroscience; Cognitive Science; Climate Change
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryA neurosurgeon explores how our tendency to prioritize short-term consumer pleasures spurs climate change, but also how the brain’s amazing capacity for flexibility can—and likely will—enable us to prioritize the long-term survival of humanity.
  • The Ministry for the Future

    Book TitleThe Ministry for the Future
    Author(s)Kim Stanley Robinson
    PublisherOrbit Books
    Publication Year2020
    ISBN978-0-316-30013-1
    Key WordsClimate change
    Recommended byCSSL / LMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryThe Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.
  • Our Fragile Moment

    Book TitleOur Fragile Moment
    Author(s)Michael Mann
    PublisherHachette Book Group; PublicAffairs
    Publication Year2023
    ISBN9781761380563
    Key WordsHistorical; non-fiction
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryIn this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course. In this book, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann will arm readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them—and others–to act before it truly does become too late.
  • The Overstory

    Book TitleThe Overstory
    Author(s)Richard Powers
    PublisherW.W. Norton and Co.
    Publication Year2019
    ISBN9780393356687.00
    Key WordsNature; sustainability; storytelling; activism; fiction
    Recommended byCSSL / LMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryThe Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
  • The Parable of the Sower

    Book TitleThe Parable of the Sower
    Author(s)Octavia E. Butler
    PublisherGrand Central Publishing
    Publication Year1993
    ISBN978-1538732182
    Key Wordsnovel; graphic novel; dystopian
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryWhen global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.
    Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
  • Perilous Times

    Book TitlePerilous Times
    Author(s)Thomas D. Lee
    PublisherRandom House
    Publication Year2023
    ISBN978-0593499016
    Key WordsFantasy, Fiction
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryAn immortal Knight of the Round Table faces his greatest challenge yet—saving the politically polarized, rapidly warming world from itself—in this slyly funny contemporary take on Arthurian legend.
  • The Precipice

    Book TitleThe Precipice
    Author(s)Toby Ord
    PublisherHachette Books
    Publication Year2021
    ISBN9780316484923.00
    Key WordsPhilosophy; Sociology
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryDrawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.
  • Principles of Sustainable Finance

    Book TitlePrinciples of Sustainable Finance
    Author(s)Dirk Schoenmaker; Willem Schramade
    PublisherOxford University Press
    Publication Year2019
    ISBN9780198826606.00
    Key WordsSocial Sciences; Economics; Sustainability; Finance
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryPrinciples of Sustainable Finance explains how the financial sector can be mobilized to counter this. Using finance as a means to achieve social goals, we can divert the planet and its economy from its current path to a world that is sustainable for all.
  • Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

    Book TitleRegenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
    Author(s)George Monbiot 
    PublisherPenguin Random House
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN9780143135968
    Key Wordsnon-fiction; agriculture; science
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryRegenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
  • The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community

    Book TitleThe River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community
    Author(s)Elizabeth Hoover
    PublisherUniversity of Minnesota Press
    Publication Year2017
    ISBN978-1-5179-0303-9
    Key WordsEnvironmental Policy; Environmental Health; Health and hygiene; Native American Studies
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryIn The River Is in Us, author Elizabeth Hoover takes us deep into this remarkable community that has partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and reclaim its health and culture. Through in-depth research into archives, newspapers, and public meetings, as well as numerous interviews with community members and scientists, Hoover shows the exact efforts taken by Akwesasne's massive research project and the grassroots efforts to preserve the Native culture and lands. She also documents how contaminants have altered tribal life, including changes to the Mohawk fishing culture and the rise of diabetes in Akwesasne.
  • Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis

    Book TitleScarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
    Author(s)Fredrik Albritton Jonsson; Carl Wennerlind
    PublisherHarvard University Press
    Publication Year2023
    ISBN9780674987081
    Key WordsBusiness; Economic History; Capitalism; Politcal Economy; History; Climate Change
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryA sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.
  • Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

    Book TitleSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
    Author(s)Richard Nixon
    PublisherHarvard University Press
    Publication Year2013
    ISBN9780674072343.00
    Key Wordsactivism; nonfiction; environmental justice
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryIn a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
  • The Swan Book

    Book TitleThe Swan Book
    Author(s)Alexis Wright
    PublisherAtria Books; Washington Square Press; Giramondo Publishing
    Publication Year2013, 2018, 2023
    ISBN9781472120557
    Key WordsFiction; Dystopian; Indigenous Studies
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryThe Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginal peoples still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city.
  • Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

    Book TitleToxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit
    Author(s)Josiah Rector
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN978-1-4696-6576-4 (PB); 978-1-4696-6575-7 (HC); 978-1-4696-6577-1 (EB)
    Key WordsEnvironmental Studies; Political History; Public Policy; Social Issues; African American Studies
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryToxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

    Book TitleThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
    Author(s)David Wallace-Wells
    PublisherTim Duggan Books; Crown
    Publication Year2019, 2020
    ISBN9780525576716
    Key WordsScience; Domestic Politics
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryThe Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

    The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
  • Weather

    Book TitleWeather
    Author(s)Jenny Offill
    PublisherKnopf; Vintage
    Publication Year2020
    ISBN9780345806901
    Key WordsFiction; Psychology
    Recommended byfaculty / professors
    Recommendation SummaryLizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.
  • What the Eyes Don't See

    Book TitleWhat the Eyes Don't See
    Author(s)Mona Hanna-Attisha
    PublisherOne World
    Publication Year2019
    ISBN9780399590856
    Key WordsEnvironmental justice, health equity, public health
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryWhat the Eyes Don’t See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their—and all of our—children.
  • World Without End

    Book TitleWorld without end
    Author(s)Jancovici - Blain
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Publication Year2021 - Translation 2022
    ISBN9791032813331
    Key Wordsgraphic novel
    Recommended byLMA campus students
    Recommendation SummaryIn this intelligent, eye-opening, and witty international bestseller, an eminent climate expert takes a graphic novelist on a journey to understand the profound changes that our planet is experiencing. The scientist, Jean-Marc Jancovici, explains the workings of superpowers and history; oil and climate; ecology, economics, and energy flows. He describes, in short, the world we live in today--a world whose future is deeply uncertain. The artist, Christophe Blain, intently listens and draws.
  • Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

    Book TitleZen and the Art of Saving the Planet
    Author(s)Thich Nhat Hanh 
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Publication Year2022
    ISBN978-0062954817
    Key WordsBuddhism, spirituality, mindfulness
    Recommended byCSSL
    Recommendation SummaryMindfulness and the radical insights of Zen meditation can give us the strength and clarity we need to help create a regenerative world in which all life is respected. Filled with Thich Nhat Hanh’s inspiring meditations, Zen stories and experiences from his own activism, as well as commentary from Sister True Dedication, one of his students Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet shows us a new way of seeing and living that can bring healing and harmony to ourselves, our relationships, and the Earth.