Great climate non-fiction books are popping up faster than solar panels

“A good book is like a hydra.” wrote one reader, Kirk, this week. “Causing several more entries of must-read books to my ever growing list.  The list is growing about 10 times faster than I can read them.”

It’s been strangely uplifting to read through all your recommendations for nonfiction books. There was a time, not so very long ago, when it felt important to read all the big new climate books and stay abreast of all the climate news. For a while that project was almost manageable. Then, it began to require serious triage. Today, it’s hopeless. Pick any subcategory and you’re immediately swamped, lost in squadrons of reproachful browser tabs, disappointed bookmarks, and fanciful to-read lists. 

As with the shelves of cli-fi, the reams of nonfiction are proliferating exponentially, popping up like solar panels in China. One of your fellow newsletter readers sent in over 40 titles “and those are just the ones ranked nine or higher” on his wish list.

The wide range of options resulted in a broad suite of recommendations for nonfiction. But there was one blazing point of agreement.

Top voted cli-non-fi

“The best one is John Vaillant’s Fire Weather,” says Garry from Victoria, B.C. And many of you concurred. “Fire Weather (obviously),” says Emiko. “Rocked my world, “ writes Jeanie from Toronto.

Even if you haven’t read it yet, you might know that Fire Weather is the story of “The Beast,” the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray. But also the grand sweep of fire more broadly. Fire is the true protagonist, a character of mythological proportions in the physical world as well as the human mind and projects. “The oil industry is a fire industry,” Vaillant often says. “The petroleum industry is a wholly-owned subsidiary of fire,” and we live now in the Pyrocene, yes, but also its accelerant, “The Petrocene.”

Fire Weather is "meticulously researched, thrillingly told," said the judges who awarded Vailliant the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. In one scene, we follow a woman from Fort Mac driving past flames to drop off her dry cleaning. The shop owner confirms the date for pickup even while calling his wife urging her to ignore the police chief’s latest update and evacuate immediately. “Get out, get out, get out!... Tuesday good?” The juxtapositions nest among awe-inspiring science and stories that will stick with you.

I wouldn’t have thought Vaillant could outperform 2005’s The Golden Spruce. Fire Weather took him seven years but the Vancouver-based author keeps pulling it off.

Readers’ runners-up

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth.

Raworth’s “playfully serious” reworking of traditional economics was the second-most recommended nonfiction read. The Financial Times named it its best economics book of the year. 

“Humanity’s 21st-century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet,” writes Raworth. “In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to health care and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend.”

If you need the Coles Notes, Raworth has packed it all into an infographic:

Tellingly, most of the other runners-up also clustered in the general category of “What should we do?” Narrative nonfiction, policy, technology and nature writing got their nods but, based on our highly scientific poll, you seem a very practical lot.

All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katherine Wilkinson

A collection of essays and poetry from women at the forefront of the climate movement, “It’s a book that lives up to its subtitle, Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis,” says Eve from Montreal. A couple of snippets:

“Cultivate grounded hope…This is an act of rebellion against the extinction of soul,” writes Susanne Moser. 

And Naomi Klein’s essay includes this encapsulation: “The capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be easily distracted...might explain the way serious people can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as unserious and unrealistic.” 

What If We Get It Right? edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Another collection edited by Johnson, a U.S. marine biologist with contagious enthusiasm for the natural world. This anthology asks us to imagine Visions of Climate Futures, and decidedly non-dystopian ones. 

“Listen to the audiobook,” says one reader. And Katherine Hayhoe endorses the sentiment: “It feels like we’re eavesdropping on intimate conversations with the world’s most brilliant change-makers,” says Katharine Hayhoe.

The Good War, by Seth Klein

Klein says he never meant to write a book about the Second World War (the columnist for Canada’s National Observer and head of the Climate Emergency Unit is a long-time peace activist, after all). But the more he researched the question of how to tackle climate change, the more compelling the analog became.

“Insightful; cogent; straight forward; hopeful; easily understandable,” says Ian, “with concrete examples of ‘how to’ and ‘we have done this before; we can do this again!’”

I want a better catastrophe by Andrew Boyd 

The funniest and most irreverent of your nonfiction picks, even if it’s a dark, gallows humour (“Why the fuck am I recycling?”)

Boyd carries us through our own climate dread as he faces his own. It’s a book that “Acknowledges the brutal truth about our future under continued climate change while interviewing some truly remarkable activists and philosophers who are dedicated to building a more resilient future in spite of that,” says Andrew.

Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon

“It pulls no punches, is short and to the point and emboldens us to stand up and be more courageous than we ever thought possible,” says Erin from Ontario. “We have only been arrested twice for civil disobedience re climate issues; Klein Salamon inspires us to get out there and do much more!”

Last year, Salamon updated Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth and released a second edition with a foreword by Adam McKay, the writer and movie producer of Don’t Look Up. Salamon is a clinical psychologist turned climate activist, and she’s now running the Climate Emergency Fund, wrangling support for climate protests that unabashedly “Disrupt Normalcy.”

Salamon embraces the self-help moniker, but it’s tough love. “Its goal is not to make you feel less pain,” Salamon writes. “Its purpose is to make you feel your pain more directly and constructively, to turn it into action that protects humanity and all life.”

Climate Action for Busy People by Cate Mingoya-LaFortune

Published this past summer, Rita emailed to say that Mingoya-LaFortune’s book is “of the moment.” 

As you might hope from a climate adaptation specialist with a Master of City Planning from MIT, Mingoya-LaFortune has produced “a practical guide, providing an understanding of how the inequities that exist in our communities have come about... She provides excellent guidance for how to build resilience in your own community, how to advocate for a climate safe community. And how to take care of yourself as you do this work.”

Honourable mentions, nonfiction

There’s no sense giving you all the recommendations (that one reader’s list of 40 would overwhelm your holiday gifting all on its own). But these books got multiple recommendations. With roughly the same number of backers, there’s no particular order to the list, other than to note that J.B. McKinnon wouldn’t want you to stop shopping for books.

• The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. McKinnon
• The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page Aldern
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And also her brand new book:
• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua
• The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh
• Le Monde Sans Fin by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici (A French graphic novel now translated into english as World Without End)
• The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It by Genevieve Guenther.
• The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Also her newer books Under a White Sky and H is for Hope
• We Will Be Jaguars By Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson
• The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell
• Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith
• Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action by Dana R Fisher
• We're All Climate Hypocrites Now: How Embracing Our Limitations Can Unlock the Power of a Movement by Sami Grover

Gratitude and best wishes.

I probably won’t get a newsletter out next week so, before we get into the news roundup, I want to send you my very best wishes for the holiday season and the year to come. Thank you for all your book recommendations these past couple of weeks and for reading Zero Carbon these past few years. Most of all, heartfelt thanks for all you’re doing to protect life on this precious little rock of ours as we careen through the vastness of space and the limitations of our mammal brains.

I hope you’ll consider a donation to our winter fundraising campaign. You know the challenges ahead better than most. Please join the mighty group of readers that boost climate reporting to the broader public.