The Pulitzer-prize winning author documents the technology and interventions that have endangered our water, soil, and air and are, in fact, their best hope for salvation.

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This science-fiction novel takes place a world that is almost upon us, and looks at real strategies for behavioral finance and quantitative easing turning the tide of environmental devastation caused by climate change.

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Price: $18.59 / paperback

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Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.

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When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.

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An indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything traces the way in which economic value has been accounted and reveals how economic theory has failed to clearly delineate the difference between value creation and value extraction. The increasingly blurry distinction between the two categories has allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they are just moving around existing value or, even worse, destroying it.

The book uses case studies, ranging from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma, to show how the foggy notions of value engender confusion between rents and profits, reward extractors and creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality rises.

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The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

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Why can’t wrap our minds around climate change? Amitav Ghosh looks at the tangled global stories of the carbon economy and prompts us to imagine other forms of existence.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

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Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

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As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future

Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.

Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.

Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.

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Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

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Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world.

Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything.

Paul Hawken and the nonprofit Regeneration Organization are launching a series of initiatives to accompany the book, including a streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software. Regeneration is the inspiring and necessary guide to inform the rapidly spreading climate movement.

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A chef is hired for a private utopia, serving up exotic meats and rare vegetables that have been genetically engineered to grow in the Land of Milk and Honey, on a mountaintop in Italy. Below them, people must survive on soy-based protein and flour that can be produced in smog and drought. How can two extremes coexist?

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An urgent plea for an alternative vision of the good life seeks to decouple the idea of prosperity from consumption.

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A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

The Seed Keeper tells the story of Rosalie Iron Wing, who has survived the foster care system to marry a farmer and now sees the impact of fertilizers and proprietary seeds on the farm and rivers. The chapters shift among four Dakhóta women who reveal how seeds share a memory that is a vast ribbon of time.

Rathi tells stories of people, policy, and technology coming together to generate solutions to climate warming. He is award-winning senior reporter for Bloomberg News and host of the podcast Zero for Bloomberg Green.

A restless wife, Dellarobia Turnbow discovers butterflies to the pine grove above her family's farm in rural Tennesee and uses biblical metaphor and science to explain why they have migrated off course. Kingsolver shows the territorial divide between local people and outsiders, churchgoers, scientists, local television and climate activists.

The book is structured around ten parables to frame the promise digital innovation holds to protect forests, endangered species, the ocean, and the earth, while also detailing the perils of digital surveillance, increased resource extraction and more. AI will intensify already high energy use by the digital ecosystem. The goal of the book is to explore a new set of narratives for humankind's relationship with the non-human.

The protagonist of The Life of the Mind is in a state of precarity. This is much more than eco anxiety. As an adjunct professor of English who teaches "Writing Apocalypse,” Dorothy is directly affected by the starving of humanities departments; she is also keenly aware of the less material (for her, for now) but even larger threat of climate change. The novel follows her thinking about the “present, ongoing, mobile disaster” [that] means that “one should aspire to survive, hide and migrate.” She second- and third-guesses herself at every turn. The environmental crisis might be worldwide, but Dorothy, like all of us, is endlessly, claustrophobically trapped inside herself. A must read!

British economist and activist Raworth outlines 7 ways to think like a 21st-century economist. She offers the doughnut as a way to conceptualize how economic practice must ensure human well-being and the limits of resources.

The novel Clade tells the story of Adam and all his descendants. The stories of people in his descent line are brief, set amidst multi-system collapse described in lyrical language. For more, and to support your local bookstore, see bookshop.org

Through critical histories of the terms used in climate debate—alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China”, innovation, and reslience—the author explains why words matter in climate politics. Climate deniers and those advancing climate solutions use the same terms and maintain status quo.

This slender novel snapshots one day in the lives of six men and women who travel on the International Space Station. They orbit the earth sixteen times, witness sunrises and sunsets, and gaze back at Earth, thinking of home and the future of humanity. See https://bookshop.org/p/books/orbital/19729720?ean=9780802163622&next=t

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes on plants, the gifts they offer, and the importance of gratitude, as she explores our reciprocal relationship with all living beings. Her writing illuminates an alternative path to being “consumed by consumption.” The way she was framing this to herself is that “When someone closes that book, the rights of nature make perfect sense.”

Centuries in the future, after the fall of factory age, robots chose to walk away from cities and settlements into the wild. A robot comes to visit a tea monk, in order to ask “What do humans need?” fulfilling a promise. This slim philosophical novel is the first of a Monk and Robot duology.

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As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she unravels the place of this fruit in Indigenous foodways. She outlines the ethic of reciprocity at the heart of the gift economy and finds the root of these practices in language, in things, and in their interconnectedness. The author proposes this model of mutual flourishing as an alternative to an economics of scarcity.

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This guide for grassroots activism is meant to mirror the journey of an changemaker, from identifying goals, shaping a vision, building community, to fundraising, and sharing sucess stories. Patagonia supported ongoing conferences to train changemakers, and shares its corporate model. Well worth reading

A forced summer vacation at a villa near the ocean is disrupted by a massive storm. The story is told from the point of view of the children, who find a way to survive the flood, a plague, and chaos in the storm’s aftermath. The youngest child makes sense of the chaotic world by reading A Child’s Bible. One of The New York Times best books of 2020.

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A hapless young man named Bob Dollar surveys the Texas panhandle, local life, and people while he scouts potential sites for hog farms.

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Authors and journalists Klein and Thompson call for a paradigm shift to renew a politics of plenty and face up to the failures of liberal governance. They offer a template to build, grow, innovate, and deploy policy to better the lives of working people.

IIan McEwan’s latest novel is set in a future England and offers the perspective of those who will live a century from now. A scholar pieces together a picture of our times, as he searches for a long-lost love poem from 2014. This literary quest amid the ruins of civilization reveals the limits of knowledge, and compels us to think about the limits of liberalism and complicity in the planet’s devastation (populist leaders, A.I. run amok, climate collapse, resource wars, rogue nukes, tsunamis & mega death).

A clear-eyed and readable analysis of the costs of lithium mining. Riofrancos takes us from the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert, to Nevada’s Silver Peak Range, to Thacker Pass as she tracks the geopolitics of green technology supply chains. A call to balance climate goals with ecological flourishing and social justice.

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The novel is a prescient vision of the cry of the earth against extraction and the violence of commodity capitalism, first printed in 1949. Interlocking stories of local community, neocolonial violence, and Mayan mythology swirl around each other and repeal, in surreal fashion. Footnotes are required reading!

In this book, Edward Wilson issued a chilling warning: “We’re extinguishing Earth’s biodiversity as though the species of the natural world are no better than weeds and kitchen vermin.” His audacious idea is that we must increase the land we have set aside for reserves for protecting wild plants and animals until this terrain covers half the globe. What can we create to realize the vision of one of the world’s greatest naturalists?

Biologist Inti Flynn is able to mirror others’ feelings—making for a great opening line to the novel. She leads a team to reintroduce wolves and repair the landscape, she senses. The author asks whether predators and people can ever share the same land.

A “thoroughly enjoyable exercise in world-building.” After sea levels have risen fifty feet, and lower Manhattan has become an inter-tidal zone, the rich keep getting richer. Robinson follows the residents of one co-op to ask how “the city that never sleeps” adapts to life after climate catastrophe.

A manifesto that turns the greatest threat we face into the greatest opportunity. The authors argue that getting people to make the leap to accelerate decarbonization requires extreme positives incentives for change (EPICS) as well as policy.

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