Four books to understand the climate crisis

Skip the headlines, you've read them already, hottest year on record again, somehow. Here are four that go deeper than the news cycle ever does.

'Silent Spring' by Rachel Carson

This is the oldest book on the list, over sixty years now, and somehow nothing since has quite matched it. Carson wrote about pesticides, a subject with no obvious drama in it, and made it feel less like a science report and more like something closing in on you, eggshells gone paper-thin, birdsong disappearing from spring mornings one species at a time. The writing is beautiful and extraordinarily literary. It's admirable how she has handle such a subject with so much poetry. It was controversial enough that chemical companies and even the US military pushed back publicly, which tells you she was naming something real rather than being merely alarmist.

“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?”

'The Great Derangement' by Amitav Ghosh

A short book, essay-length chapters rather than a sustained narrative, and one I find myself bringing up in conversations that have nothing to do with books. Ghosh's central claim is that the nations most responsible for warming the planet are also the worst equipped, narratively, to grasp it as real, while places like his own Kolkata are left absorbing centuries of extraction they never had a hand in causing. He calls this a derangement, and he means it fairly literally, a kind of collective failure of imagination rather than a simple metaphor.

More from Lifestyle

“To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself.”

div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8">

_*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown">

'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Young Kimmerer tells her college admissions interviewer the actual reason she wants to study botany, not soil chemistry or crop yields, but why asters and goldenrod look so striking growing side by side. He looks at her like she's said something faintly embarrassing and informs her that isn't botany, that's not science.

Some Indigenous languages don't carve the world up that way — a tree or a river gets grammar that marks it as alive, not property. Once you notice it you can't really unnotice it. And then the black ash trees, used for traditional basket weaving, dying off not because people used them too much but because people stopped, the harvesting was apparently what kept them healthy.

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”

‘Fire Weather’ by John Vaillant

Vaillant's account of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history, reads with the pace of a thriller, but the most unsettling parts are the ones that need no embellishment. Entire houses burned so completely in under six minutes that nothing remained except the cast-iron bathtubs, left standing alone on otherwise empty lots. The town had been built to extract oil sands, and officials delayed evacuating residents because the early forecasts seemed too extreme to credit.

Vaillant captures, is that the failure of imagination, the inability to believe a disaster could be as bad as the data suggested until it was already underway.

“But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world.”