6 Best Books About Climate Change And The Environment
In a year of such incredible transformation, thought leaders and innovators continue to come up with solutions and new ways of thinking that make us reflect and hope.
Books RM Of BTS Has Read Or Recommended You Should Read
From an ongoing global health crisis to stalling economies and dysfunctional international supply chains, 2021 has taken us to extremes few potential, and climate is no exception.
Devastating floods in China and Europe, record-breaking heat waves and wildfires across the planet, and even tornadoes made it truly incontrovertible that the atmosphere is everything, and the changes within it will impact every person, every sector, and every country.
The Best Novel Book Recommendation You'll Never Forget-Lets Read!With every passing day, we are inching closer to seeing the irreversible effects of climate change. The Earth’s average temperature has increased by more than 1C in a little less than 100 years. This points to the fact that the last 30 years have been the warmest in the planet’s history (or at least the past 800 years).
6 Best Books About Climate Change And The Environment
1. The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet
One of The Observer’s ‘Thirty books to help us understand the world’ Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we’ve been told we can save the planet.
But are individuals really to blame for the climate crisis? Seventy-one per cent of global emissions come from the same hundred companies, but fossil-fuel companies have taken no responsibility themselves. Instead, they have waged a thirty-year campaign to blame individuals for climate change. The result has been disastrous for our planet. In The New Climate War, renowned scientist Michael E.
Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters ― fossil-fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petro-states ― and outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change.
2. The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking
The most important question we must ask ourselves is, &;Are we being good ancestors?&; So said Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine in 1953 but refused to patent it&;forgoing profit so that more lives could be saved.
Salk&;s radical generosity to future generations should inspire us. But when leading philosopher Roman Krznaric examines society today, he sees just the opposite: Our short term, exploitative mindsets have &;colonized the future.&; Businesses eschew civic responsibility for immediate gains, politicians throw their support behind whatever will win the next election, and we all struggle to focus our attention beyond the next alert from our phones.
The result? An inexcusable chasm between the haves and have-nots&;and mounting existential threats&;have brought our species to the precipice of disaster.
Yet Krznaric sees reason to hope. Yes, the urgent struggle for intergenerational justice calls for hugely ambitious solutions, from rewiring our growth-at-all-costs economy to giving voters of future generations a voice in our democracies.
But at the heart of all these changes is one we can enact within ourselves: We must trade shortsightedness for long-term thinking. In The Good Ancestor, Krznaric reveals six practical ways we can retrain our brains to think of the long view, including Deep-Time Humility (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and Cathedral Thinking (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to inspire more &;time rebels&; like Greta Thunberg&;to shift our allegiance from this generation to all humanity&;in short, to save our planet and our future.
3. On Time and Water
Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water is a lyrical and emotionally moving experience of a book. At its core, this book is a poetic exploration of what processes like climate change, environmental loss and ecological shocks really mean.
The book makes the example of ocean acidification, a combination of words that could realistically glean half-interested stares and vacant expressions from most people, and yet inspire visceral fear and dread in the hearts of marine and climate scientists. The same applies to atmospheric carbon buildup. Sure, we know it’s bad, but why?
On Time and Water is a pensive and beautifully written meditation on how to connect our past, present and future, offering a hopeful vision of a world where we feel closer to each other, to our families and to the natural world that surrounds us. It gives us the tools we need to think closely about this future, the language we can use to describe it and the anchors we can turn towards to connect ourselves with it.
4. The Nature Fix – Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
"Highly informative and remarkably entertaining." —Elle From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain.
Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
5. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America
Thomas L. Friedman's phenomenal number-one bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world in a new way. In his brilliant, essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. In this groundbreaking account of where we stand now, he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked--how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.
Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things--unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.
This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that America cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.
In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. But the payoff for America will be more than just cleaner air. It will inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, boldness, and concern for the common good that are our nation's greatest natural resources.
6. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change
'The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn’t happen.
Read it.' John SimpsonBy 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change – what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it.
Obviously, we failed.Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking account of that failure – and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism – is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker.
A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did – and didn’t – happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.
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