Now that we have all set our eco-friendly resolutions for the new year, and have set our reading goals it is time to choose what books to read in 2021. Here is a shortlist of books that can further educate you, by providing insight on climate change and environmental awareness.
1. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
By: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson
A mix of essays curated by two climate leaders discussing the climate movement, fusing poetry and art. All we can save discusses the changes that are happening in the movement, how leadership in the climate change discussion is becoming ingrained by collaboration, creativity, and compassion. Furthermore discussing the need for women and girls as agents of change, nonetheless, arguing that to change everything, we need everyone. This book is the epitome of collective action, as it collects and celebrates the path that climate activists are paving towards saving our planet from this crisis.
2. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
By: Jonathan Safran Foer
In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer discusses the dilemma that climate change believers face. He poses the question of whether future generations will be able to differentiate between those who denied climate change and those who accepted it, but failed to change their way of living in the process? He disputes the difficulty and reluctance we have in sacrificing our current comfort in our ways for the sake of the future and discusses the idea that only collective action will save our earth ― “and it all starts with what we eat―and don’t eat―for breakfast”.
3. The Future We Choose: A Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis
By: Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac
In the Future We Choose, the writers offer a refreshing side of the climate crisis; an optimist’s. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac, argue that humanity can survive and that it will. However, it is up to us to choose which side we are on and how we are going to change. Coming from two experts in the climate change crisis, former UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, and Tom Rivett-Carnac, a senior political strategist for the Paris Agreement, this book offers an empowering sense of hope on how we can create a better future for our planet.
4. Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have
By: Tatiana Schlossberg
Inconspicuous Consumption by former New York Times science writer, Tatiana Schlossberg offers advice on making simple but impactful everyday choices in regard to our consumption. With her contagious wit, she argues that we have converted climate change into the central issue of our generation, but instead of making it a distant problem to us, she argues it is everywhere. In a practical manner, she examines the unconscious choices we might be making that are indeed harmful, by looking at four areas; the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel. Schlossberg discusses the importance of citizens as voters and consumers in the fight against climate change.
5. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
By: Paul Hawken & Katharine K. Wilkinson
If you are the practical kind and want to get down to the nitty-gritty solutions to reverse global warming this is your book. Drawdown offers one hundred solutions and methods based on detailed research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world. Nonetheless, the main message is that the solutions exist, they are possible economically, and communities around the world are enabling them. Therefore, if done so collectively, on a global scale, over the next decades, there is an overwhelming probability that they will work.
