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Uplifting climate books to inspire hope about the planet’s future

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Green Ideas Slipcase

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement - now in one complete set 
 
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each of these short books deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Greta Thunberg (Author) 
 Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 1 million schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies across Europe. In December she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a speech that was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019 she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact. She has won the prestigious Prix Liberté and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg is vegan, and doesn't fly, in order to live a low-carbon life. 
 
Naomi Klein (Author) 
 Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, and No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics. In 2017 she joined The Intercept as Senior Correspondent. Recent articles have also appeared in the Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, the New Yorker and Le Monde. In November 2016 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in Australia. 
 
Timothy Morton (Author) 
 Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future's Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), 11 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton's work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. 
 
George Monbiot (Author) 
 George Monbiot studied zoology at Oxford, and has spent his career as a journalist and environmentalist, working with others to defend the natural world he loves. His celebrated Guardian columns are syndicated all over the world. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State, The Age of Consent, Bring on the Apocalypse and Heat, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. His latest book, Feral, was shortlisted for the Great Outdoors Book of the Year award. Among the many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. 
 
Bill McKibben (Author) 
 Bill McKibben is a writer and environmental activist. His The End of Nature (1989) is considered the first book for a general audience about climate change. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize. He has campaigned on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. In recognition of his activism, a new species of woodland gnat - Megophthalmidia mckibbeni - was in 2014 named in his honour. 
 
Amitav Ghosh (Author) 
 Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning novelist and essayist. His most recent book is The Great Derangement 
 
Tim Flannery (Author) 
 Professor Tim Flannery is a palaeontologist and conservationist who frequently presents programmes on ABC Radio, NPR and the BBC. He is a leading writer on climate change and his previous books include Here on Earth (2010) and The Weather Makers (2005). 
 
Terry Tempest Williams (Author) 
 Terry Tempest Williams (b.1955) is a writer and conservationist. Her creative non-fiction focuses on environmental justice, the protection of wilderness and humanity's relationship with the natural world. 
 
Michael Pollan (Author) 
 Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international bestselling books about the way we live today - including How to Change Your Mind, In Defence of Food and Food Rules ­- combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife. 
 
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Author) 
 Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. 
 
Dai Qing (Author) 
 Dai Qing (b.1941) is an environmentalist and investigative journalist who has been campaigning against the Three Gorges Dam since the 1980s. She is forbidden to publish or speak publicly in China but remains in the country to continue documenting the truth about the regime. 
 
Wangari Maathai (Author) 
 Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was a Nobel Peace Prize winning activist and founder of the Green Belt Movement, which to date has planted 51 million trees in Kenya. 
 
Jared Diamond (Author) 
 Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of Time magazine's best non-fiction books of all time, Collapse, a No. 1 international bestseller, and The World Until Yesterday, among other books. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others. 
 
Wendell Berry (Author) 
 'A farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,' Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Humanities Medal. For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed in his native Henry Country, Kentucky, with his wife, Tanya, and their children and grandchildren. 
 
Edward O. Wilson (Author) 
 Edward O. Wilson is widely recognized as one of the world's pre-eminent biologists and naturalists. The author of more than thirty books, including Consilience, The Diversity of Life, The Social Conquest of Earth, The Meaning of Human Existence and Letters to a Young Scientist, Wilson is a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. 
 
James Lovelock (Author) 
 Elected to the Royal Society in 1974, James Lovelock is the originator of Gaia Theory. His many books include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). In 2003 he was made a Royal Companion of Honour, in 2005 Prospect placed him among the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal. 
 
Masanobu Fukuoka (Author) 
 Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a farmer and philosopher from Japan who inspired sustainable, organic practices with his approach to natural farming and the re-vegetation of desert land. 
 
Arne Næss (Author) 
 Arne Naess was born in Slemdal, Norway, in 1912. After earning his Ph.D. at the age of 27, he became the University of Oslo's youngest professor, and Norway's only Professor of Philosophy. 
 
Naess was a keen mountaineer, environmentalist and social activist. In 1938, he finished building an isolated wooden hut high in the Hallingskarvet mountains, where he would spend a quarter of his life. It was here that he developed his concept of 'deep ecology,' and his lifelong commitment to the environmental movement. His activity within the movement ranged from grassroots protest, to candidacy for political office with the Green Party, to a post as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway in 1988. 
 
His achievements as a philosopher, ecologist and activist were widely recognised during his lifetime. In 2005 he was knighted and made a Commander with Star of the Royal Norwegian order of St. Olav First Class. He died in Oslo in 2009. 
 
Rachel Carson (Author) 
 Rachel Carson (1907-64) wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, appeared in 1941. Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of the misuse of pesticides, was published in 1962. Carson's articles on natural history appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Reader's Digest and Holiday. An ardent ecologist and preservationist, Carson warned against the dumping of atomic waste at sea and predicted global warming. The Edge of the Sea, which completed her biography of the sea, is also published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Rachel Carson died of cancer at the age of 56.

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each of these short books deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

The Democracy of Species

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. 
 
In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, from the wild leeks in the field to the deer in the woods. 
 
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, from the wild leeks in the field to the deer in the woods.

A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Gathering Moss

'Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants' Guardian 
 
'Bewitching ... a masterwork ... a glittering read in its entirety' Maria Popova, Brainpickings 
 
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. 
 
 In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. 
 
 Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Grounding, calming, and quietly revolutionary.

I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual.

Gathering Moss is fantastic and offers an extraordinary point of view on the natural world

Soulful, accessible... informed by both western science and indigenous teachings alike ... Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants

Beneath your feet, barely visible to the eye, is another world: a rainforest in miniature ... Read Kimmerer's book and you're unlikely ever again to waste precious gardening time scraping moss from paving stones.

Beautiful ... Her scientific training and knowledge of plants from her Potawatomi heritage create a unique lens, teaching us how to look and watch... Reading this has made me stop to wondrously admire any patch of moss I come across.

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. 
 
 In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. 
 
 Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Braiding Sweetgrass

'A hymn of love to the world ... A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love 
 
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together. 
 
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Remarkable, wise and potentially paradigm-shifting

Braiding Sweetgrass is the book we all need right now. It is a vision of a new world, of reciprocity, gratitude and seeing the living world for what it is: an abundance of gifts. Kimmerer is uniquely placed to braid indigenous knowledge with scientific learnings and she does it with kindness, ingenuity and a poet's prose. It is truly the text for our times.

An extraordinary book, showing how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most - the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

Reading this book was like looking at the world afresh. Radical, hopeful, honest and wise, Robin Wall Kimmerer has woven us a precious heartsong for difficult times

A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise

Robin Wall Kimmerer opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.

In a world where only six percent of mammalian biomass on the planet now comprises of wild animals, I longed for books that pressed me up against the inhuman, that connected me to an inhuman world. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer moved me to actual tears

With deep compassion and graceful prose, Robin Wall Kimmerer encourages readers to consid­er the ways that our lives and language weave through the natural world. A mesmerizing story­teller, she shares legends from her Potawatomi ancestors to illustrate the culture of gratitude in which we all should live

In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship 'which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land.' . . . It's a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes?that sense of discovery that draws us in.

The gift of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is that she provides readers the ability to see a very common world in uncommon ways, or, rather, in ways that have been commonly held but have recently been largely discarded. She puts forth the notion that we ought to be interacting in such a way that the land should be thankful for the people

Beautifully written . . . Anyone who enjoys reading about natural history, botany, protecting na­ture, or Native American culture will love this book

Professor and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer knows that the answer to all forms of ecological unbalance have long been hidden in plain sight, told in the language of plants and animals, minerals and elements. She draws on her own heritage . . . pairing science with Indigenous principles and storytelling to advocate for a renewed connection between human beings and nature.

Kimmerer eloquently makes the case that by observing and celebrating our reciprocal relationship with the natural world, one can gain greater ecological consciousness.

Braiding Sweetgrass is instructive poetry. Robin Wall Kimmerer has put the spiritual relationship that Chief Seattle called the 'web of life' into writing. Industrial societies lack the understanding of the interrelationships that bind all living things?this book fills that void. I encourage one and all to read these instructions.

Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Onondaga Nation and Indigenous Environmental Leader

Hands down the best book on ecology I've read

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). 
 
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry

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