2021 Reading List
It’s here—the full Book Club for the Planet 2021 reading list!
Hi friends! I’m Jess and this is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis in community.
It’s here—the full Book Club for the Planet 2021 reading list!
Pulling together a reading list for a whole year was hard, precisely because there are so many books written or being written and published, at a clip now, about the climate crisis and what it touches (i.e., everything). Which means that every book that made the cut for 2021 is there for a big reason, and I think is an essential building block to the foundation of climate knowledge we’re collectively building. As a reminder, I haven’t read any of our book picks, which makes selecting and reading books just as exciting for me as I hope it is for you!
So, what made the cut and why? Here were a few guiding principles I considered when selecting our books:
1) Prioritize voices of BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ writers. Like the rest of the world of publishing and especially science writing, books on climate are overwhelmingly written by white people and white men, and they don’t need my help in getting their books seen and read. Also, in my experience, the perspectives shared by many of the white climate writers I’ve read tend to be rooted in themes of tragedy, grief, and fatalism. While I believe these are all valid observations and responses to the climate crisis, I am more interested in elevating the perspectives of Indigenous, African-American, Asian-American, and non-American leaders—many of whom have survived apocalypse caused by white supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism—to learn more about reimagining systems, resilience, and healing from those who have been doing the work for years.
2) No best sellers. A build on my previous point. I’ll do a round-up at a later date with a list of titles that were foundational to my understanding of the climate crisis and what’s actually happening.
3) Selections should “talk” to each other. As we build our collective climate foundation together, I chose books that felt connected to each other and built on common themes, especially those you were most interested in learning about from our initial survey—themes of antiracism, the Green New Deal and policy, and activism and organizing. There are plenty of additional themes I’m personally eager to dig in on, like sustainable design, plant intelligence, eco-Marxism, the history of fossil fuels, geoengineering, and much, much more, but hope this list is a solid jumping-off point for your further study and discovery.
For the books that didn’t make the cut, some may appear in a 2022 reading list (if we’re still going by then), and some I may include in lists of suggested continued reading.
And with that, let’s get into it!
January - February
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney
Now that we’ve read The Fate of Food and All We Can Save—both solid overviews of the key, recurrent themes of the climate crisis—we’re starting off the year digging into themes of race and representation in green spaces and the climate movement.
There is a lot of work being done right now to speak to systemic, racialized environmental violence against BIPOC communities, as well as African Americans’ relationship to land, outdoor recreation, and “the environment.” Black Faces, White Spaces, written by Carolyn Finney, assistant professor of environmental science, policy, and management at UC Berkeley, is a cornerstone piece in exploring why African Americans have been underrepresented in environmentalism for so long. This selection also overlaps with Black History Month, so I hope it intersects with other related work being published and elevated at this time.
For continued reading, please check out A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T Dungy.
March - April
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
There are a good number of books being published about the Green New Deal right now, but I chose this one by Naomi Klein, the renowned climate journalist, writer, professor, and activist. She’s best known for her books, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate, both polemic tomes of research and theory. So, I chose her (hopefully) more accessible book, On Fire, which I hope addresses the need for brave climate policy like The Green New Deal, as well as an overview of what it outlines and why. We’ll also read the actual Green New Deal and the Blue New Deal! Time to read up and hold the Biden administration accountable to their promises.
For continued reading, please check out Leah Stokes’ new book on climate policy, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States and the excellent primers on the Green New Deal from Verso Books (which has a 40% off sale until the end of the year!).
May - June
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson OR Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
We’ll be taking a break from non-fiction with a novel—reader’s choice! I was so excited by both of these novels that I couldn’t pick just one, so decided I didn’t have to… you’re welcome to read both or just the one that’s speaking more to you. I’m also breaking all of my rules for one of these picks.
Gun Island is written by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively about climate. I’ve wanted to check out his 2016 non-fiction book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, for a while now, but excited to dig into his latest and renowned cli-fi (climate fiction) novel, a continent-hopping journey that addresses themes of displacement, migration, and loss of place.
The Ministry for the Future was just published this year, written by the renowned sci-fi writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, most well known for his Mars trilogy. For as much as I read sci-fi and seek out books on climate, this book surprisingly wasn’t even on my radar until I heard an author interview with Ezra Klein on Ezra’s podcast. This selection was a late-add exception to all my book pick rules, but its setting (just a few years into the future, rather than the distant future), plot (how and when will we actually start responding, through policy and action, to the climate crisis), and the questions it seeks to address (Does policy even work, or is it as corrupt as the system it’s operating in? What’s the difference between “slow violence” and “hot violence”?) all made me feel like this was an urgent, necessary read. Don’t let me down, Kim Stanley Robinson!
For continued reading, please check out three of my favorite novels of all time, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
July - August
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
More than any other book, The Mushroom at the End of the World was repeatedly shared in our kick-off survey and in my DMs as an important and necessary read for this group. Written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, the book explores trading for the matsutake, one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world, and intersects with themes of capitalism, fungal ecologies, and collaborative survival in multispecies landscapes. I hope this will be an exciting and nourishing read for anyone who has voraciously read about the “Wood Wide Web” and wants to learn more.
For recent and continued reading, be sure to check out “The Social Life of Forests” by Ferris Jabr, published in The New York Times Magazine earlier this month. It profiles biologist Suzanne Simard (the real-life inspiration for Patricia Westerford in Richard Powers’ book, The Overstory), whose memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering How the Forest Is Wired for Intelligence and Healing, is being published in May 2021. I told you it was hard to pick only six books for next year!
September - October
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
There is so much that climate justice groups can learn from the successes and struggles of Indigenous environmental justice movements, and I’m so excited to dig into this book by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes), a lecturer of American Indian studies at California State University San Marcos. As Long as Grass Grows will give us a grounding in the history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands, treaty violations, and protection of sacred sites, as well as a decolonization framework beyond Western conceptions of environmental justice.
For continued reading, please check out Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson, and When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology edited by Joy Harjo, 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States.
November - December
Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by Emma Marris (publishing July 2021)
Emma Marris, a science writer based in Oregon, previously wrote about how conservation is changing in the Anthropocene in her book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, and she’s back in 2021 with a new vision for our relationships with—and responsibilities toward—the planet's wild animals. Building on the themes raised in The Mushroom at the End of the World, I’m hopeful that Emma Marris’ new book, Wild Souls, will be an accessible, uplifting read at the end of the year.
For continued reading, please check out the admittedly more academic book on similar themes, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by renowned and visionary multispecies feminist Donna J. Haraway.
Want to see all of these books in one place? Check out my shop link at Bookshop.org.