Recommended Books

Data scientist Hannah Ritchie presents an optimistic perspective on environmental challenges, showing that significant progress is already being made toward sustainability. Ritchie uses data and practical advice to help readers understand what actions truly impact the planet, dispelling myths and misconceptions. This hopeful, research-backed guide empowers readers to see a sustainable future as achievable.

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. This novel will change the way you think about the climate crisis.

(Ages 4-7) A young girl takes action against ocean pollution in a timely story with unique plastic-waste diorama art from award-winning author-illustrator Alma Fullerton. No More Plastic is a moving, eye-catching, and ultimately hopeful reminder that the health of our oceans—and our planet—is in our hands.

(Ages 14-20) Discover the secret life of trees with this nature and science book for kids: Can You Hear the Trees Talking? shares the mysteries and magic of the forest with young readers, revealing what trees feel, how they communicate, and the ways trees take care of their families.

(ages 8-12) Trees can live a very long time, but what happens when they die? This unusual book describes, in lyrical prose accompanied by colorful and graphic illustrations, that trees have a whole long second life, continuing to contribute to their habitat, the environment, and the cycle of life.

(Ages 4-8) Explore the hidden world and many lives of a garden through the course of a year! Up in the garden, the world is full of green—leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt exists a busy world—populated by all the animals that make a garden their home.

A fascinating investigation into how people around the globe are cashing in on a warming world. McKenzie Funk has spent the last six years reporting around the world on how we are preparing for a warmer planet.

An updated edition of a guide to the basic science of climate change, and a call to action. The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—most dramatically since the 1970s.

Inspired by Greta Thunberg and informed by Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire, about the Green New Deal, Fonda has produced a readable, practical book filled with ideas for how each of us can make a difference before it’s too late.

What if Atlantis wasn’t a myth, but an early precursor to a new age of great flooding? Acclaimed journalist Jeff Goodell travels across twelve countries and reports from the front lines to show vivid scenes from what already is becoming a water world.

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.

Having detailed the coming man-made climate disaster in her Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert explores the costs of trying to repair the mess by more manipulation of Mother Nature. “By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic,” says the jacket.