As the holiday travel season approaches, a good book is a must-have for airport delays or the perfect gift.
Bloomberg Green journalists selected seven books about climate and the environment that they liked, despite their weighty content. Some of them were positively encouraging. Here are our recommendations.
Fiction
“What Can We Know” by Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, decades after the Craze (cascading climate catastrophes), the Flood (a global tsunami caused by a Russian nuclear bomb), and AI-fueled wars cut the world's population in half. The US is no more and Britain is an impoverished archipelago of tiny islands where scholar Tom Metcalfe embarks on an obsessive search for the only copy of a famous 21st-century poem that has never been published.
The celebrated author of the ode to the now-vanished English landscape once read it at a dinner party in 2014 as a gift for his wife, but its words remained lost to time. Metcalfe believes that access to previously hidden digital data about the life of the poet and his circle will lead him to the manuscript. He knows where to start looking: Thanks to Nigeria, a 22nd century superpower, the historical Internet has been transcribed and archived, including all personal emails, text messages, photos and videos.
However, the truth is different. It's a richly told story about our abnormal present—and where it can lead if we don't correct course. — Todd Woody
“Greenwood” by Michael Christie
This equally dystopian novel begins in 2038 with Jacinda Greenwood, an dendrologist turned tour guide for the super-rich, working in one of the world's last remaining forests. But the novel zigzags back to 1934, to the beginning of the timber empire that has divided her family for generations.
For more than a century, the lives and destinies of the Greenwoods were tied to the trees they fought to exploit or protect. The novel explores themes of ancient sin and redemption against the backdrop of forests that stand as silent witnesses to human crimes committed on a global scale. — Daniel Bochove
Barkskin by Annie Proulx
Another multi-generational saga spanning over three centuries and 700 pages. This 2016 novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chronicles deforestation in the New World over 300 years, beginning in the 17th century.
Following the descendants of two immigrants to what would become modern-day Quebec, the story takes the reader on a global journey, crossing North America, visiting the Amsterdam coffee houses that served as centers of the Dutch trading empire, and following new trade routes from China to New Zealand. Along the way, it explores the exploitation of forests, the impact on indigenous peoples, and the lasting legacy of colonialism.
The sheer number of characters makes the novel unwieldy at times. But the stunning descriptions of the forests of the Old World and the incredible human effort required to destroy them linger long after the saga's conclusion. —Daniel Bohove
Fiction
“The Joyful Environmentalist: How to Practice Without Preaching” by Isabel Losada
It's hard for a committed environmentalist to feel cheerful these days. But Isabel Lozada's book challenges readers to take on a seemingly impossible mission: to find joy in coping with the absurd situations that committed environmentalists inevitably face, rather than giving in to frustration.
These pleasures can be as simple as searching Instagram for organic homemade shampoo recipes or crushing a bucket of berries to collect seeds that will help regenerate native plants.
The book itself is a pleasure to read. With vivid detail and a dash of British humor, Losada recounts his failed attempt to dine at Whole Foods without using disposable plastic cutlery. (Solution? Bring your own metal fork.) Of course, some of the tips in her book won't work for everyone. But there are plenty of practical tips, such as deleting old and unnecessary emails, that can help reduce the energy consumption of the data centers where they are stored. This book is an important reminder that you can be a joyful advocate for the environment.
— Coco Liu
“Puzzle: China's Quest to Create the Future” by Deng Wang
Chinese President Xi Jinping is a trained engineer, as are many members of the country's top leadership. Dan Wang writes about how this learning manifests itself in the country's relentless drive to build and build and build. This includes the cleantech industry, which leads the world in almost every category imaginable, although Wang is exploring other areas as well.
Wang was born in China, raised in Canada and studied in the United States before returning to live in his home country from 2017 to 2023. This experience helps his analysis become more serious in 2025, when the US and China fight in the battle for fossil fuels vs clean technologies— Akshat Rati
Entangled Life: How Fungi Shape Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
The JP Morgan banker might seem like an unlikely character in a book about mushrooms. But R. Gordon Wasson, who popularized the main compound found in magic mushrooms in a 1957 Life magazine article, is just one of the delightful surprises in Merlin Sheldrake's extraordinary book. The author's quest to tell the story of mushrooms involves literally getting his hands dirty, unearthing complex underground fungal networks, and engaging in self-experimentation while participating in scientific research into the effects of LSD on the brain. The result is a book that reveals the complexity and interdependence of life on Earth and the role we play in it.
“We humans became as intelligent as we are, it is argued, because we were caught up in a demanding stream of interactions,” Sheldrake writes. Fungi, a form of life that depends on its interconnection with everything else, may have more in common with us than we think. — Olivia Rudgard
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Feigin
When chemical manufacturer Ciba arrived in Toms River, New Jersey, in 1952, the company's new plant seemed like the economic engine the sleepy coastal community, dependent on fishing and tourism, had always needed. But the plant soon began quietly dumping millions of gallons of chemical waste into the city's namesake river and surrounding forests. It began a legacy of toxic pollution that left families wondering if the waste was causing the area's unusually high childhood cancer rates.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of environmental journalism reads like a thriller, albeit one with devastating real-life consequences. It also shows how companies can reinvent themselves: I was amazed to learn that Ciba, later known as Ciba-Geigy, merged with another company in 1996 to become the pharmaceutical company Novartis. At a time when efforts are underway to shift manufacturing from overseas back to the United States, this is a worthwhile exploration of the hidden costs that can accompany industrial growth. — Emma Court
Bokhove, Woody, Liu, Court, Rudgard and Rathi write for Bloomberg.
