Book #26: Undrowned
Starting the year with lessons from the sea.
We’re Book Club for the Planet, a book club dedicated to reading about the climate crisis in community. Want to see all of the 2025 book picks and recommendations in one place? Here you go. Need a refresher for how book club works? Right this way.
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Friends, 2025 has only just begun and it’s already laden with so much meaning, resilience, and dread. My birthday falls on inauguration weekend and I can recall a similar birthday inauguration weekend, eight years ago, watching the inevitable take place from a restaurant television in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The fact that this presidential inauguration takes place on Martin Luther King Jr. Day feels like an added insult, a perversion of MLK’s legacy and memory. Ugh!
I will not look away from the horrors soon to unfold, from the horrors already taking place. But I am also creating containers of peace and purpose for myself, for the year ahead, and these moments in time that will be especially painful. I am planning a weekend filled with friendship, good food, art museums, long forest walks, a massage, and rootedness in place and time. I welcome you to do the same, if it feels right. And I will also be saving Alexis Pauline Gumb’s sweet, slim book, Undrowned, for just that moment.
Her book is a new classic from the Emergent Strategy series, a series of meditations on how marine mammals model lessons that we can learn on land about organizing, protecting, surviving. From the book description, that says it perfectly: “A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do—or might—adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances.”
I added this book to our list after the election. It feels like a necessary place to start, a table setting. We will read the words of the wise Black feminist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and intuit from embodied, interspecies wisdom of our whale and dolphin cousins on how we can move forward next year and in the years to come.
Looking for other climate-related books that are ocean-inspired? Check out Playground by Richard Powers, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery, The Sea Trilogy by Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, or my own personal favorite book of 2024, In Ascension by Martin MacInnes.
Book club dates: Sunday, January 26 (virtual); Monday, January 27 (in-person)
Don’t live in Baltimore? Join us virtually via Google Meets!
If you live in or near Baltimore, join us at Greedy Reads' Remington location for an in-person meet-up!
Happy reading! ✨ xo - Jess