As we celebrate the New Year, I’m struggling to find what to read next.

At the end of every year, there is no shortage of great climate books to choose from, with tons of best-of-year lists (and even lists of books coming out soon). But those kinds of lists overwhelm me: I’m lucky to read one climate book published in the last year, let alone a dozen of them.

So now that we’re a quarter into the century, it seems like a good time to reflect and share my favorite climate books published this century — often so good that they hang around my head long after I’ve put them down.

A note on this list: I’ve tried to balance widely lauded books with some personal favorites, while also diversifying topics (otherwise, it would be a bunch of books about walkability and the Midwest).

At the same time, I am an American, so naturally many books skew toward American audiences and geographies. And I only picked books read by me, a mere mortal with implicit bias, limited reading time, and plenty of interests outside of climate change.

So please don’t drag me in the comments — but do let me know your favorites!

Leave a comment

1. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, by David Owen (2009)

Can a book turn you into an urbanist? This book follows a simple premise: “New Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than do the average residents of the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms.” That’s because sprawling spaces, which are so prevalent around the country, encourage driving — one of our most climate-destructive habits. Reversing this trend takes not only ambitious policies but complete mindset shifts, replacing white picket fences with the cleaner, healthier, and, let’s be honest, much more fun spaces of cities.

Liked it? Try: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, by Jeff Speck; Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek.

2. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer (2019)

If Green Metropolis can make you an urbanist, this book can make you vegan. Part essay–part memoir, this book isn’t simply a step-by-step guide on how to go vegan the first two meals of the day — it’s a wrestling match with individual decisions in a world where we know too much (in this case, the profound environmental impacts of our food choices). As Foer writes, “Knowing is the difference between a grave error and an unforgivable crime.”

Liked it? Try: Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

3. A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet (2020)

A Children’s Bible is a 240-page novel that follows a group of children stuck at a vacation house with their parents — largely incompetent and representative of the growing indifference and denial of an older generation — when a hurricane strikes. This isn’t just a disaster story, though; it’s a coming-of-age story amid a climate-changed future: “I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway.”

Liked it? Try: The Overstory, by Richard Powers; The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh.

4. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Katharine K. Wilkinson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (2020)

We need a dose of optimism here, right? This collection of essays by climate leaders and feminists is a rewarding “mosaic of voices — the full spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can turn things around.” The book — divided into sections of strategy, language, problem-solving, activism, compassion, transformation, and more — is both a gateway into finding one’s role within the climate crisis and a guidebook to understanding the issues at hand.

Liked it? Try: The Best American Science and Nature Writing (series); The Fragile Earth: Writings from The New Yorker on Climate Change, edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global War, edited by Paul Hawken.

5. Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall (2014)

Once upon a time, I was absolutely floored that climate change was a partisan issue. I just didn’t see what was so political about having cleaner air and more efficient energy. Then I read Don’t Even Think About It. The book explains psychological roots of climate denial, the misinformation tactics that exploit this, and importantly, the steps we can take to do something about it.

Liked it? Try: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway; Losing Earth: A Recent History, by Nathaniel Rich.

6. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

As a full-time climate communicator, I also really connect with this one. The Great Derangement explores the lack of climate change in art and literature and the imperial and colonial roots of this absence. To tackle climate change, we must transform our thinking in politics, history, art, and literature, and incorporate a clear discussion and acknowledgement of climate change into these mediums.

Liked it? Try: The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, by Amitav Ghosh; Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, by Katharine Hayhoe.

7.The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

No list like this can exclude The Sixth Extinction, which is probably THE 21st century book on climate. Written by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, the book shows what could happen if we don’t get our shit together. With each chapter focused on a different extinct species, Kolbert explores the relative ease, speed, and permanence in which we’ve driven extinctions: “We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolution pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed.”

Liked it? Try: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells; The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen; Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas.

8. How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates (2021)

Bill Gates is a hell of a communicator. And I truly believe in the premise of his book, which argues that innovation and technology are keys to tackling climate change. It’s not just investing in existing clean tech and driving breakthroughs, though — we also need government policies and incentives to scale these technologies, generate demand, and bring them to market.

Liked it? Try: Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis, by John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram; Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, by Tom Steyer.

9. After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, by Eric Dean Wilson (2021)

Climate change is about impacts far and wide, from droughts to hurricanes to wildfires. But it’s also about living in a much hotter world, and the contradictions that emerge from that. Enter air conditioning. As the world becomes hotter, we need more A/C, but A/C is also a great contributor to climate change — and inequity. As Wilson writes, “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the comfort line: Who gets to be comfortable and at what cost to others?”

Liked it? Try: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell; The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (if only for the unforgettable opening).

10. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan (2017)

This is totally Midwestern bias, but I couldn’t help myself. Growing up just south of Lake Erie, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to over 40 million people. But after decades of pollution, invasive species, and climate change, they are under threat. What’s at stake is the largest body of freshwater in the world, a precious environmental resource that’s home to countless species and relied on by millions.

Liked it? Try: The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers, by Martin Doyle; Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush; Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., by Cynthia Barnett.