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.

I loved this book for its utterly fresh angle on climate disaster as well as Bengal-born Ghosh’s quiet, erudite reflection on why it is so difficult for Americans even to conceive of the reality of what is facing us. It is devastatingly revelatory.

If you want to know how bad it can get, McPherson’s your man. He has been warning of certain climate doom for decades. This slim volume is only one of many diatribes in which he has predicted climate clamp-down by 2026. Do the arithmetic and weep.

By the founder of 350.org and dean of popular climate writing, this, his most recent book, offers us a perfect storm of the disasters that lie ahead if we don’t pay attention: artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and climate meltdown. Read and tremble.

In this, the first book about climate change, McKibben argues that “Nature,” to which we have always been subordinate, has now become subordinate to us, and that we are not exercising this power wisely. The book paved the way for the term, “Anthropocene”.

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 sub-title has it right. If you want a comprehensive selection of countless ways we can address climate change, this is it; includes food, energy, buildings, land use, transporta­tion, and more. Loaded with concrete ideas. Google it to find an array of supportive links.

If you are looking for ways to convince people that addressing climate change is urgent, or that it’s even real, this book is one of the best. Marshall shows how peer pressure, trusted communicators, social norms, and in-group loyalty can make a real difference.

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.