Climate Books

The climate crisis and its causes are multidisciplinary, cutting across almost every subject. From hydrology to history, economics to ecology, physics to philosophy—climate books can be found on almost every shelf in a bookstore or library, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Simply, climate books specifically highlight the causes, impacts, and responses to climate crises around the world.

Traditionally, climate books have focused on the science of environmental change and how to engineer large scale solutions to energy, weather and related crises. Oft-read texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring emphasize scientific causes of climate crises. These analyses are necessary, but climate change is not only a scientific problem, it is also deeply rooted in our economic, social, and political systems. Now more than ever, authors are exploring these connections and expanding the breath of climate non-fiction.

While every book on an environmental shelf is a climate book, other genres are more difficult to differentiate. Some subjects, like police reform for example, may seem independent from the climate. Many climate activists emphasize the importance of intersectionality and inclusivity, both in the fight for climate solutions, and our understanding of the climate crisis more broadly. Scholars argue that rather than an anthropocene, we live in the capitalocene, an era where capitalism, imperialism, and various oppressive systems have caused the climate crisis. It follows then that their alternatives (anticapitalism, decolonization, and abolition) are climate solutions, and common themes of climate books.

Historically, publishing and academia have traditionally published climate knowledge and stories from white authors in the Global North while those most impacted by environmental changes are marginalized BIPOC and Global South communities who have contributed least to the climate crisis. Books like We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth place Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. An inclusive definition of climate books emphasizes the necessity for a diversity of climate narrative and the value of first-person frontline accounts of climate change, especially from under-represented authors.

There is also growing consensus that the climate crisis is an imagination crisis. This is the role of climate fiction—to create new worlds, belief systems, economies, and societies that radically reimagine humans' relationship with our planet and each other. While some fictions are overt in this world building, others may only be climate-adjacent yet still fall into this category. Climate fiction can also look backwards, exploring the relationships and responsibilities we have to our past and present ancestors. Indigenous authors are especially talented in climate imaginations, drawing from oral histories repeated through generations, which often share critical lessons about the more-than-human world.

Whether new to the climate movement or not, climate books are an accessible first step in climate action. By learning about the climate crisis from experts and frontline authors or imagining new solutions from scientists and indigenous world views, anyone can enter the climate movement and embrace and communicate lessons of climate books beyond the page, strengthening community knowledge and building collective action in the urgent fight for just climate solutions.