a few must-read books about global climate change

Es­ti­mated reading time is 3 minutes.

THE CLI­MATE RE­ALITY PROJECT has a list of “Five Must-Read Books About the Cli­mate Crisis” (Oc­tober 29, 2019). Ac­cording to the blurb on their web­site, “It’s the per­fect time of year to curl up with a great new book, so be sure to add these cli­mate must-reads to your list. Ready to put all that extra time spent in­side to good use? Learn more about the ways this crisis is im­pacting the world around us—and what we need to do to fight back—with our list of five cli­mate must-reads below.

Ready to put all that extra time spent in­side to good use? Learn more about the ways this crisis is im­pacting the world around us—and what we need to do to fight back—with our list of five cli­mate must-reads below.

 

DavidWallace Wells UninhabitableEarth 600

The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

This is easily one of the most talked-about books of the year, and its very first line puts the cli­mate crisis into in­cred­ible per­spec­tive: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” The au­thor, a deputy ed­itor and cli­mate colum­nist at New York mag­a­zine, does not mince words on the chal­lenges facing our planet—from the pos­si­bility of food short­ages and refugee emer­gen­cies to climate-driven nation-state destabilization.

 

AlGore AnInconvenientSequel 600

An Inconvenient Sequel – Truth to Power: Your Action Handbook to Learn the Science, Find Your Voice, and Help Solve the Climate Crisis

by Al Gore

A com­panion to Vice Pres­i­dent Gore’s most re­cent doc­u­men­tary, this is a com­pre­hen­sive how-to guide full of con­crete, ac­tion­able ways you can join the move­ment for so­lu­tions and help turn the tide. It’s a pow­erful re­minder of what can happen when people just like you take a stand – when you use your vote, your voice, and your choices to take ac­tion when it mat­ters the most.

 

ElizabethKolbert SixthExtinction 600

The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History

by Eliz­a­beth Kolbert

As this New York Times best­seller and Pulitzer Prize winner de­tails, the Earth has seen five land­mark events in the dis­tant past that wiped out most plant and an­imal life. But today, we’re wit­nessing a new phe­nom­enon known to sci­en­tists as the “sixth ex­tinc­tion.” Un­like the five pre­vious cat­a­clysms, this sixth one is not a nat­ural event. It’s human-made. And it’s hap­pening right now. We know it as the cli­mate crisis.

 

PaulHawken Drawdown 600

Drawdown – The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

by Paul Hawken (ed­itor)

Ed­itor Paul Hawken de­scribed the ro­bust re­view process that went into every so­lu­tion pre­sented in the book: “We have 70 re­search fel­lows from around the world. Each of them took one or, in some cases, two so­lu­tions and wrote ba­si­cally a master’s thesis on them. They did a lit­er­a­ture re­view. There’s about 5,000 ref­er­ences for those 80 so­lu­tions. The method­ology was a three-step re­view process. It’s re­viewed in­ter­nally, it’s re­viewed by the ad­vi­sors, then the model is re­viewed by out­side ex­pert sci­ence reviewers.”

 

Powers Overstory 600

The Overstory

by Richard Powers

A work of in­cred­ible imag­i­na­tion sprawling across cen­turies and con­ti­nents, The Over­story tells the, well, story of nine main char­ac­ters, all ex­isting at dif­ferent pe­riods of time. But the real pro­tag­o­nists of the novel are not men or women at all. They’re trees.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in fic­tion and was short­listed for the Man Booker Prize. The Wash­ington Post, Time, Oprah Mag­a­zine, Newsweek, and Chicago Tri­bune all named it among the best books of 2018.

To read the Cli­mate Re­ality Pro­ject’s ar­ticle in its en­tirety, click HERE.

 

Overstory TreesAreAlive 1500

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page was lifted from a re­view of The Over­story ti­tled “A re­minder that trees are alive” by Sarah Anjum Bari for The Daily Star. Here is Bari’s opening para­graph: “To call it ‘cli­mate fic­tion’ would barely scratch the sur­face of what it re­ally is. Richard Powers’ The Over­story—winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—is an ex­hil­a­rating glimpse into the majesty of plant life, and a hum­bling re­minder of the fact that we hu­mans aren’t the cen­tral char­ac­ters in the story of this planet.”

 

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