List of Books on Nature and Climate not Written by White Guys
In an effort to address the common complaint that white men dominate the climate conversation by sharing solutions:
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. If there was only one book I could recommend it would be this one. The chapter titled Risk is itself one of the best pieces of climate writing.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A book of essays on the places where Western botany and indigenous plant knowledge meet. This book is a treasure. I wish I had read it a slower so I could spend more time in each essay.
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. A book about the social and psychological forces that prevent of us from truly understanding climate change. This is also the first book I’d read to dive deep on what climate change will do to India.
Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. This is the true crime story of the people who lied to us and stole our future.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Ostensibly a book about the botany and economics of the matsutake mushroom that grows only in disturbed environments.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. This book is a bummer.
Trace: Memory, History, Race and American Land by Lauret Savoy. This is the kind of nature writing I love best, showing how geology, and the natural and human world intersect.
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica White. This is a little, somewhat obscure book I picked up mostly because it is about Detroit but that I can’t stop recommending. This is a wonderful corrective to histories that have downplayed Black farmer activists and contemporary narratives that imply only white people want to be small farmers. If nothing else it’s a wonderful, thorough look at Fannie Lou Hager’s work.
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan. A beautiful, frightening exploration of agricultural diversity and the forces arrayed against it.
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Batsheba Demuth. All our ideologies encounter the people and animals of the Bering Straits, always for the worst.
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