Recommended Books

Although it never plumbs the depths of worthy of a full understanding of the climate challenge, this book is well worth reading, and will elevate public awareness as fully as its own position on the Times best-seller list. Hopeful, coolly nerdy, and useful.

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet. In this edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession. 

In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. 

Truly one of my favorite people, Moore gave up an endowed chair in Moral Philosophy to combat climate change for the duration. Here she offers a luscious set of essays poignant and hefty, anguished and icy, passionate and inspiring. Read them and sing.

Here’s the book that “outed” climate change into the public at large. Gore first got religion when he learned of the impact of CO2 on global heating. Scorned by conservatives, he has proven tragically right and remains a key climate pioneer.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. The leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution, which is the Green New Deal. 

Klein really means what her title says. In this searing critique of our current economic arrangement, she connects the dots among capitalism, racial justice, economic inequality, and climate. She also devastates the idea that dimming the sun will somehow save us.

Examining clean energy laws in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio over a thirty-year time frame, Stokes argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why states are not on track to address the climate crisis. This book is recommended by Third Act in their 2023 Public Utilities Commission Teach-In Webinar.

Lists 100 “actions” people can take, under such categories as Energy, Travel and Work, Food and Farming, Shopping and Consumer Choices, Actions around the Home and more.