Climate Books

Rebecca Gerny,
Climate Books Coordinator

If one thing separates our species from the more-than-human world, it is storytelling. For millennia, humans have been communicating lessons, histories, and geographies through oral and later written storytelling. Stories carry power—opening windows to new worlds, both real and imagined, remembered and investigated. In this way, books are an incredible tool in climate action, bringing us nuanced stories of crisis, resilience, and imaginative solutions across time and regions.

Whether scientific or poetic, climate books highlight the causes, impacts, and responses to climate crises around the world.

Beyond providing new facts or theories, climate books bring us stories from a wide spectrum of environmental defenders and frontline communities; climate fiction imagines new policies, economics and ecologies; histories teach us lessons from our shared past and how to be good future ancestors; cookbooks allow us to taste dishes from around the world; and permaculture guides help us develop new relationships with the ecosystems in our own communities.

Learning is almost always the first step in climate action and it's as easy as picking up a climate book.