Recommended Reading
Below, you'll find a selection of non-fiction, novels, and memoir touching on climate change and sustainability of all kinds.

Books about Climate Challenge and Hope
 
Hope Matters (Erin Kelsey)
Fears about climate change are fueling global despair: adults worry about their children's future or question whether they should have kids, and many young people honestly believe they have no future. Author Elin Kelsey argues that our hopelessness is hampering our ability to address the very real problems we face and shares real-life examples of positive climate news that reveal the power of our mindsets to shape reality.
(Recommended by Clea)

How Big Things Get Done (Bent Flyvbjerg)
This book offers encouraging news about wind and solar projects but also discusses how hard projects will be in a chaotic climate.
(Recommended by Mike)

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (Katherine Hayhoe)
A scientist and gifted speaker makes a convincing case for calm, informed discussions in the race to avert catastrophe. This book reminds us we need to start from a place of open-mindedness and respect.
(Recommended by Mike)
 
Still Hopeful (Maude Barlow)
In this timely book, Barlow counters the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism that surrounds us and offers lessons of hope that she has learned from a lifetime of activism in three areas: second-wave feminism, the battle against free trade and globalization, and the global fight for water justice. From each of these she draws her lessons of hope, emphasizing that effective activism is not really about the goal, rather it is about building a movement and finding like-minded people to carry the load with you.
 
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (Jane Goodall and Douglas Carlton Abrams with Gail Hudson)
In a world that seems so troubled, how do we hold on to hope?  Looking at the headlines--a global pandemic, the worsening climate crisis, political upheaval--it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.
(Recommended by Eva)

What We Can Do

All We Can Save (Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson)
The contributors are all women from various walks of life, all talking about tools and strategies for fighting the climate crisis. It’s sad but it’s also optimistic and determined, and showcases so many different avenues to address the crisis. It’s heartening to see people working  on changing agricultural practices and litigating against climate change, but also at the community-level on environmental justice and community-first solutions to hurricanes and rising water levels.

Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World (Diane MacEachern)
Protecting our environment is one of the biggest issues facing our planet today. But how do we solve a problem that can seem overwhelming-even hopeless? The best way to fight the industries that pollute the planet, thereby changing the marketplace forever, is to mobilize the most powerful consumer force in the world: Women.
(Recommended by Marianne)

Drawdown (Paul Hawken)
Its the go-to book on what we have to do to stop the climate crisis.
(Recommended by Mike F)

How to Be A Climate Optimist (Chris Turner)
This is a book that moves past the despair and futile anger over ecological collapse and harnesses that passion toward the project of building a twenty-first century quality of life that surpasses the twentieth-century version in every way. How to Be a Climate Optimist overflows with possibility in a moment of great panic, upheaval and uncertainty over a world on fire.

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (Naomi Klein)
An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success (Mark Jaccard)
Mark is English Canada's leading academic/author on climate. This is on my cottage reading list.
(Recommended by Mike F)

The Climate Book (Greta Thunberg)
Alongside over 100 climate experts, Greta Thunberg shares her own stories of learning, demonstrating, and uncovering green-washing, revealing the extent to which we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest problems, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, we will be able to act. What could we do collectively if we tried? 
(Recommended by Mike F)

The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada  (Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman and Bronwen Tucker)
A joint vision from six climate thinkers and organizers to lay out a pathway for what a just transition off oil and gas looks like and how we build a caring economy that provides social support for all, redistributes wealth, and ensures stolen land is rightfully reclaimed under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.

The Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (Seth Klein)
During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians. Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future.

The New Climate War (Michael E Mann)
It’s a good read to explain the politics of what's going on. By reading this, people will get an appreciation of when they are getting played by the fossil fuel industry and it’s not a heavy read.
(Recommended by Mike F)

Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson
Zero Waste Home shares the writer’s story of reducing waste at home and simplifying her family’s lifestyle in the process.  She shares tips, tricks, and tools for you to do the same to save money, time and improve your health in the meantime.  Zero Waste Home offers room by room instruction on how to eliminate waste and change wasteful habits.  The author delivers her insights with humility and humour and emphasizes that making changes slowly is more sustainable and therefore impactful than a drastic overhaul.

Other Reading

Blowout (Rachel Maddow)
“I read it in 2019 when it was published, but the subject matter feels more relevant than ever: Russian and American politics entangled with the fossil fuel industry’s booms and busts, the ‘resource curse’, and fracked gas. It’s a dense, revealing read.”

Paved Paradise (Henry Grabar)
The title says it all. The climate implications of horrendously bad urban planning are a thread all the way through.
​(Recommended by Mike) 

Pleasure Activism (Adrienne Maree Brown)
Because we can never stop learning how to be good activists.
(Recommended by Mike F)

The Golden Spruce (John Valliant)
On a winter night in 1997, in a bizarre environmental protest, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin attacked a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree – fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles – with a chainsaw.  The golden spruce was a scientific marvel and a tourist attraction. It was also sacred to the Haida people and beloved by local loggers. Shortly after confessing to the crime, Hadwin disappeared under suspicious circumstances and is missing to this day. John Vaillant braids together the strands of this mystery while bringing to life the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, the historical collision of Europeans and the Haida, and the harrowing world of logging.

"Plan to Survive" (CACOR)
The Canadian Association for the Club of Rome presents "Plan to Survive: A Canadian Guidebook for dealing with Climate Change". Download the PDF here.

Books about Our Interconnected World

Animism: Respecting the Living World (Graham Harvey)
An approachable academic text exploring a “new” definition of Animism and how those who practice it demonstrate ways in which we can live as humans, and as people in a world populated by non-human people too.

Becoming Animal (David Abrams)
A poetic exploration of humanity's collective (and individual) need to reconnect with our animal nature and to rebuild our understanding of being "one species among many": a necessary step in Just Recovery if "for all" isn't only going to mean "for humans".

Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
"Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. [...] Only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return."
~ Milkweed Editions

Eager (Ben Goldfarb)
This book introduces us to the amazing world of nature's premier construction engineer, showing us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology & even our economy. A funny and fact-filled page-turner about our favourite semi-aquatic rodent.
Reommended by Sherri

EarthPath (Starhawk)
An older but still excellent, explicitly religious (Reclaiming Tradition of religious witchcraft), look at how humanity is part of every ecosystem in-which we live. Includes activities and exercises to get to know your own micro-bioregion, cultivate ecstatic connection, and turn ideals into action.

Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard)
Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she  illuminates the fascinating and vital truths – that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Healing Grounds (Liz Carlisle)
In this powerful yet approachable book about climate change, racial justice, and the deep roots of regenerative farming, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors' methods of growing food. In doing so, she reveals that it will ultimately require dismantling long-seated racial power structures in order heal our planet, our communities and ourselves.

Rooted (Lyanda Lynn Haupt)
A gorgeous and deeply spiritual book -despite the author's claims to it being "not a book about religion" - the delves into the interconnectedness of all life and phenomena and the need to reenchant our experiencing of the wide, wild world of which we are a part. A beautiful meeting of science and spirit.

The World We Have (Thich Nhat Hanh)
In this provocative book, noted Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh offers a dramatic vision of the future of a planet overheated by rapidly disappearing fossil fuels, degraded by massive overconsumption, and besieged by unsupportable population growth. Mixing inspiring insights with practical strategies, and citing projects his own monastic community has undertaken that can serve as models for any community, ​Hanh offers answers that help us use our collective wisdom and technology to restore the Earth's balance.

To Speak for the Trees (Diana Beresford-Kroeger)
It is half the story of her unusual childhood in Ireland where she spent the summers in the countryside and was tutored in the old Celtic lore about plants, and half a description of trees following the ancient Ogham alphabet of the Celts. It includes how she came to work at the Experimental Farm briefly and then established the tree and seed sanctuary in Merrickville.
Recommended by Clea D

Underland (Robert MacFarlane)
An exploration of humanity's relationship to places underground - from bronze age burial mounds and remote neolithic cave art, to contemporary salt mines and research into the wood wide web, to planned offshore oil drilling (and activist efforts to stop it) and the deep-time storage of nuclear waste in the high north, all framed by the question of how to be Good Ancestors.

Novels

Blackfish City (Sam J Miller)
Set after the Climate Wars, on a floating city near the Arctic Circle, this is an urgent — and ultimately very hopeful — cyberpunk novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, and the unifying power of human connection.

Burning Souls (David Chernushenko)
A hard-to-put-down novel of the gripping journey of four friends, written against a background of environmental and social justice themes. A good UU book.
(Recommended by Ed W)

Flight Behaviour (Barbara Kingsolver)
Barbara Kingsolver takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy, the author dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.  Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)
Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, the novel Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, follow Lauren Oya Olamina and, eventually, other members of her family, through a too-familiar societal collapse wherein people survive by relying on each other and through the understanding that “God is change”.

Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver)
Prodigal Summer is a fictional story that weaves together three stories along with the tapestry of lives inhabiting the forest, including a wildlife biologist, a young hunter, local farmers, and a den of coyotes.  This is a great summer book because it is set during a humid summer in the Appalachian mountains and the narrative pays close attention to the local ecology and nature It is also a beautifully woven story about the lives of unique characters.

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
The Ministry for the Future is a novel set in the near future which describes the disastrous consequences of a warming planet and the steps humanity takes to mitigate them. It is ultimately an optimistic story about technological and political innovation. It is a novel with a distinct point of view about the economic system which has brought our natural environment to its current tipping point, and about how we can get ourselves out of it.  (Recommended by Bethany)

The Overstory (Richard Powers)
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, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables. 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.

For Our Kids

How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals (Sy Montgomery and Rebecca Green)
This restorative memoir for very young readers reflects on the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals—Sy’s friends—and the truths revealed by their grace.

The Big Book of Nature Activities: A Year-Round Guide to Outdoor Learning (Drew Monkman and Jacob Rodenburg)
The Big Book of Nature Activities, by Kawartha naturalist Drew Monkman  and Jacob Rodenburg is a read for the whole family to enjoy. It is packed full of ideas and activities to get your family outdoors and connecting with nature. The fun continues all year long, as the authors take you on a journey through all of the seasons in the Kawarthas.

The Lorax (Dr Seuss)
Over fifty years old, and just as relevant today, it chronicles the danger of greed causing human destruction of the natural environment.

We Are Water Protectors (Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade)
​Inspired by the many Indigenous-led movements across North America, We Are Water Protectors issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption.