Hopeful environmental reads for Earth Day. Image: Victoria Ford / Penguin
Grappling with the enormity of the climate crisis takes a mental toll. The vast majority (84%) of young people in particular are worried about climate change, with many reporting feelings of anxiety, guilt, anger, and dissatisfaction with government response, according to a 2021 global study by The Lancet .
There’s no shortage of brilliant books penned by scientists, thought leaders and advocates, who capture searing invectives and sound the alarm bells about the environmental destruction caused by humans and the cost of not taking urgent action. But for those already doing that important work, and feeling buried by a sense of helplessness and anxiety, we’ve picked a selection of fiction, nature writing, non-fiction and manifestos to offer at least slight reprieve, with realism balanced with a pinch of hope.
Greta Thunberg has been a galvanising force for climate activism since she started her weekly School Strikes for Climate in 2018, at just 15 years old. In this collection of rousing speeches, Thunberg pulls no punches about the state of the climate crisis and the dangerous, anger-inducing inaction of those with the power to effect change, but it’s hard not to feel emboldened and heartened by her rallying cries, and the impact she has had as one of many voices in the climate movement. In other words, the kids are alright.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or even nihilistic in the face of the climate crisis, look no further than this book by revered data scientist Hannah Ritchie for the antidote. From air pollution to food, biodiversity to plastic straws, Not the End of the World zooms out on the biggest hot-button environmental issues to offer a clear-eyed, hopeful, and data-backed vision of what exactly we need to do in order to solve the biggest sustainability challenges in front of us.
Spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing has helped bring mindfulness to the masses and taught powerful life lessons about everything from grief to walking. In this particular volume, he addresses the feeling of powerlessness and despair that often overwhelms individuals in the face of the climate crisis, drawing from examples of action he has taken in his own life. Soothing and beautifully written, this book will leave you with a new perspective on how meditation, compassion and personal enlightenment can create the building blocks for collective awakening and action.
In recent years, mass tree-planting has attracted cynicism as an exercise for polluters and corporations to (at least superficially) offset their environmental ills. But in this short story spanning both world wars, the French writer and pacifist Jean Giono ascribes a kind of symbolic hope to the act. In faux-documentary style, the narrator visits and revisits the fictional shepherd Elzéard Bouffier, who dedicates much of his life to restoring arid, desertified land in south-eastern France by planting hundreds of thousands of trees. The result: an almost utopic expanse of natural beauty and improved quality of life for once-downtrodden communities.
Earth’s oceans are a precious carbon sink and home to a wealth of biodiversity, but human-made crises such as overfishing, oil spills, climate change and pollution threaten these crucial and delicate balances. In his follow-up to End of the Line (a searing indictment of the destruction caused by overfishing), environmental journalist and co-founder of the conservation charity Blue Marine Foundation Charles Clover tells the story of how he “journeyed from despair to hope about the state of our common oceans”. Highlighting the work of dedicated individuals driving real change and impact, Rewilding the Sea carries an uplifting message on the power of determination in the face of overwhelming, seemingly insurmountable problems.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Richard Powers created a sweeping epic that spans disparate characters, geographies and generations, but it’s nature – and trees in particular – that anchors this astonishing book as a character in its own right. The fate of the non-tree protagonists in The Overstory is more bleak than upbeat, but its overall message is profound: nature is enduring, often cruel and indifferent, with its own story to tell – and humans had better listen.
Part memoir, part nature writing, Braiding Sweetgrass weaves the findings of modern botany and science with the ancient customs and collective wisdom of indigenous communities in what the author calls a “dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge”. Kimmerer, who is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, challenges (predominantly Western) concepts such as hierarchy, extraction and commodification that have helped cause destruction in nature, in a collection of essays that will have you rethinking our relationship with the natural world.
In this barnstorming debut, climate activist Mikaela Loach challenges the conventional frameworks of oppression and injustice under which the current climate movement has developed in recent years, such as capitalism, whitewashing and, of course, greenwashing. While unsparing in her bid to dismantle the power structures that be, Loach delivers an accessible and hopeful manifesto for mobilising people and shaping the future of environmental advocacy.
As nature increasingly fades from our day-to-day lives, so too does an entire ecosystem of words. With The Lost Words, poet Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris hope to change that by preserving the names of plants and animals for the next generation. This love letter to the natural world is accompanied by equally stunning visuals in a series of poems that will capture readers young and old.
There are vast, interconnected networks in nature that ensure equilibrium. But humans, who only see the tip of the proverbial iceberg, often destroy this delicate balance through clumsy interference. Peter Wohlleben, the bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees
What are the qualities that have made humans uniquely capable of altering the course of nature and the future of the planet? In Transcendence, environmental journalist Gaia Vince explores the genetic, environmental and cultural factors that have determined humans’ evolutionary path, and consequently changed our relationship with the planet. Ultimately, she argues, it is our collective potential and capacity for cooperation that make us such a transcendental force of nature – for better or worse.
The bad news? Climate change is already underway. The good news? The tools and levers for staving off complete climate disaster already exist. When environmentalist Tim Flannery wrote We are the Weather Makers in 2005, climate change was, in his words, “thought of as a hypothetical by most people.” Atmosphere of Hope , which came out a decade later, reflects a world that is already paying the price for doing too little, too late, but also one that is full of promising, innovative solutions for a better future that is still within our grasp.
Masanobu Fukuoka was a pioneer of the natural farming movement, renowned as much for his work as a philosopher as he was for restoring desertified land. In this touching and personal volume of writing, he focuses on spirituality and healing: healing from trauma and ill-health, healing from ecological damage, and healing the fraught relationship between humans and nature. The simplicity of “a single leaf, a single flower,” is enough to inspire Fukuoka and teach him about the wider beauty of the natural world. With a clear mind, the landscape before him is, he concludes, “the only deity I would ever worship.”
