We’re celebrating, and advocating for, our earth this week. In the lead-up to Earth Day on Monday, EarthDay.org organizers promoted the theme “Planet vs. Plastics,” calling for a massive reduction in plastic production. There is always so much to learn about protecting this beautiful world. Here are recent and acclaimed books to help us appreciate its biodiversity and motivate us to improve our planet’s health:
The world faces an uncertain future with the rise of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, overfishing, and other threats. Understanding Imperiled Earth meets this uncertainty head-on, presenting archaeology and history as critical guides to addressing the modern environmental crisis. Anthropologist Todd J. Braje draws connections between deep history and today’s hot-button environmental news stories to reveal how the study of the ancient past can help build a more sustainable future.
In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a Shell, Thom van Dooren offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai‘i—once home to more than 750 species of land snails, almost two-thirds of which are now gone. Following snail trails through forests, laboratories, museums, and even a military training facility, and meeting with scientists and Native Hawaiians, van Dooren explores ongoing processes of ecological and cultural loss as they are woven through with possibilities for hope, care, mourning, and resilience.
In An Immense World Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong takes us on a “thrilling tour of nonhuman perception” (The New York Times)
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension—the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
For more than two decades, award-winning science and nature writer David Quammen has traveled to Earth’s most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending back field notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. This illuminating book features 20 of those assignments: elegantly written narratives, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today, telling colorful and impassioned stories from some of the planet’s wildest locales.
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
Nineteen leading literary writers from around the globe offer timely, haunting first-person reflections on how climate change has altered their lives—including essays by Lydia Millet, Alexandra Kleeman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Omar El Akkad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, and more. As the stories unfold—from Antarctica to Australia, New Hampshire to New York—an intimate portrait of a climate-changed world emerges, captured by writers whose lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places that have been transformed in startling ways.
This collection represents part of the enduring legacy of Barry Lopez, hailed as “a national treasure” (Outside) and “one of our finest writers” (Los Angeles Times Book Review) when he died in December 2020. An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture in all its forms, Lopez lost much of the Oregon property where he had lived for over fifty years when it was consumed by wildfire, likely caused by climate change. Fortunately, some of his papers survived, including five never-before published pieces that are gathered here, along with essays written in the final years of his life; these essays appear now for the first time in book form.
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Learn how and why a useful, 5000-year-old invention has become a threat to our planet–and what you can do about it–in this history of the simple straw.
On land and in the seas, green plants make the oxygen and food that many living things—including us—need to survive. Covering the evolution of the first plants billions of years ago, the secret, microscopic workings of trees and leaves today, and the role of plants in both creating fossil fuels and combating climate change, this book is a lush and fascinating introduction to the science of plants that goes well beyond photosynthesis.
An inspiring and accessible picture book biography of the beloved naturalist, broadcaster, and documentarian David Attenborough—stunningly illustrated by a Caldecott Honoree.This is the story of David Attenborough. It’s also the story of our planet, which has changed rapidly over the course of one person’s lifetime, and a clarion call for us to do our part to bring back the wild places and protect the creatures who call Earth home.
Once upon a time, somewhere not far away, was the Wild. The Wild was huge and giving, and everything from insects to birds to humans made their home in it. At first, people lived lightly and took only what they needed, but when they started to take more, the Wild suffered. But one day, a young child is brave enough to raise their voice . . .In this environmental story told as a fairy tale, author-illustrator Yuval Zommer shares a hopeful and powerful message of healing, well-being, and humanity’s precious and precarious relationship with nature.
Award-winning science poetry master Leslie Bulion presents a lyrical salute to Africa’s Serengeti Plain, one of the most spectacular and productive ecosystems on Earth.
For more on these and related titles visit the collection, Earth Week, 2024
