Stop feeling hopeless about climate change and start reading.
Here are 6 climate change books I read this year that made me feel like maybe we can do something about this planetary crisis after all. Pick them up for yourself, then pass them around to your friends, family, colleagues, and even elected officials. Or, hold onto them and earmark your favorite pages and passages for those inevitable moments when you’re tempted to throw up your hands and say, “This is so bad, what can I do??”
As you’ll read in these books, the answer is: a lot!
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams. How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? Jane Goodall’s Book of Hope shows us how to do both, offering a “survival guide” for trying times. I’ve been motivated by Jane Goodall since I was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. At the time, her adventures in African rainforests inspired me to take risks and think big. Her new book shows all of us how to keep doing that, even though the climate crisis is reaching epic proportions. “There is hope for our future–for the health of our planet, our societies, and our children,” she says. “But only if we all get together and join forces.”
Read My Full Review Of Jane Goodall’s Book of Hope Here!
Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, by Paul Hawken. This big, beautiful volume brims with easy-to-understand explanations of how oceans, forests, land, food, energy cities, industry, and of course, people, all figure into the climate equation. It lays out a three-step process for stopping climate change that makes complete sense. It includes profiles of activists and entrepreneurs who have come up with ingenious ways to reduce greenhouse gases and waste, while restoring Nature and our relationship to her. “The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies,” writes Hawken. “It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion–for ourselves, for all people, and for all life.” I wholeheartedly agree!
Read My Full Review of Regeneration Here!
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates. News flash: Bill Gates advocates the same consumer strategies we do to help stop climate change! Like us, Gates believes that climate change poses an environmental and human crisis of epic proportions. In his book, he says we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ZERO by 2050, then describes how new non-fossil fuel “breakthrough” ways of generating electricity could eliminate the problem. He dovetails perfectly with the Big Green Purse message when he writes: “If all of us make individual changes in what we buy and use, it can add up to a lot–as long as we focus on changes that are meaningful.” I wholeheartedly agree.
Read My Full Review of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Here!
How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos, by David Pogue. If you’re one of those people who feel better by being prepared, this is the book for you. In chapters ranging from “Where to Live” and “What to Grow” to how to be “Ready for Anything” and even prepare for social breakdown, Pogue lays out blueprints for taking action now so you’ll be prepared if and when the climate crisis gets worse. It’s not grim – just straightforward and matter-of-fact, which is a helpful way to approach the dire straits we face.
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, by Katharine Hayhoe. I loved this book, and loved talking with Katharine Hayhoe about it. She’s a climate scientist and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. But she’s also a mom, professor, and a climate ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. As such, she looks at climate change with many different eyes–but just about all of them are hopeful. One of the most valuable aspects of her book addresses how to talk to people who don’t believe climate change is real (and sometimes, how to skip those conversations and move on). In her chapter on “Finding Hope and Courage,” she reminds us that “it is NOT too late to avoid the most serious and dangerous impacts. Our choices will determine what happensTogether, we can save ourselves.”
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson. If you ever needed–or wanted–a book to fire up your “inner” feminist and turn it into a big bold uncontainable flame, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis is it. The book is the brainchild of a marine biologist and climate activist who wanted to capture the “renaissance blooming in the climate movement.” They’ve collected 60 powerful essays divided into eight categories. From “Root,” which is where many climate conversations begin, to “Advocate,” “Persist,” and “Rise,” the essays remind us, in the words of Sierra Clubber Mary Anne Hitt, that “We can do this, and it’s not too late…Let’s go make it happen.”
Do you have a favorite climate change book (especially one that offers hope?).
Please share the title and why you love it let us know on the Big Green Purse Facebook page.
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