Sustainability Summer Book Recommendations

Interested in some summer, reading? Well here are some books that I hope will inspire critical thinking about environmental justice, and fuel conversations about sustainability.

Whether you’re ready for a memoir of science in action, a guide to managing eco-anxiety, an ode to coral reefs and efforts to save them, or a first-hand account of how scientists came to understand the fundamental processes behind global warming, there’s a title for you.

1. How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going By Vaclav Smil (2022) 
2. A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman: A Memoir By Lindy Elkins-Tanton (2022)
3. Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs By Juli Berwald (2022)
4. Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy By Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022)
5. How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything By Mike Berners-Lee (2010, new edition 2020)
6. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest By Suzanne Simard (2021)
7. Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis NowBy John Doerr (2021)
8. Beyond Global Warming: How Numerical Models Revealed the Secrets of Climate Change By Syukuro Manabe and Anthony J. Broccoli (2020)
9. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis By Britt Wray (2022)
10. Leading Matters: Lessons From My Journey By John L. Hennessy (2018)
11. Hidden Wonders: The Subtle Dialogue Between Physics and Elegance By Etienne Guyon, José Bico, Étienne Reyssat, and Benoît Roman (2021)
12. The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles Across the Sierra Nevada By Richard J. Nevle and Steven Nightingale (2022)
13. The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir By Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson (2019)
14. Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry Collected and with an introduction by Joy Harjo (2021)
15. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World By David Epstein (2019)
16. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA By Brenda Maddox (2003)
17. Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in a Non-Human World By Emma Marris (2021)
18. Under the Great Ice: Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland By Mark Nuttall (2017)
19. Termination Shock: A Novel By Neal Stephenson (2021)
20. How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind By Charles H. Langmuir and Wallace Broecker (1984, revised and expanded 2012)
21. Kaiālu: Gathering Tides By Mehana Blaich Vaughan (2018)
22. Apeirogon: A Novel By Colum McCann (2020)
23. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity By David Graever and David Wengrow (2021)
24. Humankind: A Hopeful History By Rutger Bregman (2020)
25. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat By Bee Wilson (2013)