SUGGESTED BOOKLIST OLLI CLIMATE CHANGE SERIES

The Climate Change Committee has assembled this extensive list of books on the environment and climate change. The publications are organized into six categories that include: Classics, Science, Economics and Sustainability, Non-Fiction, Climate Novels, and Children’s. The titles have appeared on a number of “Best Books on Climate Change” from reliable sources. We hope you find a book or two for further exploration.

CLASSICS

The Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III (1974) The 1972 study summarized in this book, examines the implications of population

increase, agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial out-put, and pollution generation. The message is urgent and sobering: The earth's in-terlocking resources probably cannot support present rates of economic and popu-lation growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technol-ogy. The book contains a message of hope, as well: Man can create a society in which he can live indefinitely on earth if he imposes limits on himself and his pro-ductions of material goods.

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Den-nis Meadows (2004)

In 1972, three scientists from MIT created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.

2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years by Jorgen Randers (2012) So, where are we now? And what does our future look like? In the book 2052, Jor-gen Randers, one of the co-authors of Limits to Growth, issues a progress report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he asked dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our economies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, militaries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in the coming decades. He synthesizes those scenarios into a global forecast of life as we will most likely know it in the years ahead.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (2006)

What should we have for dinner? The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even mortal implications for all of us. This is a book as much about visionary solu-tions as it is about problems.

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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (2019, 1962) Using scientific research and persuasive logic Rachel Carson raised awareness in 1962 about the environmental and human risks of using pesticides, such as DDT. The book was one of the contributing factors that spurred the modern environmental movement.

Earth in the Balance by Al Gore (2006) Earth in the Balance focuses on the threats that everyday choices pose to our cli-mate, water, soil, and diversity of plant and animal life. Gore’s information and predic-tions are accurate almost three decades later.

SCIENCE, ECONOMICS AND SUSTAINABILITY

Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze (2018) In the 1990s, researchers in the Arctic noticed that floating summer sea ice had be-gun receding. This was accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation and unexpected changes in weather patterns throughout the world. The Arctic's perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, was warming, and treeless tundra was being overtak-en by shrubs. What was going on?

Can We Price Carbon? by Barry G. Rabe (2018) Climate change, economists generally agree, is best addressed by putting a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels--by taxing carbon, by cap-and-trade systems, or other methods. But what about the politics of carbon pricing? Do political realities render carbon pricing impracticable? In this book, Barry Rabe offers the first major political science analysis of the feasibility and sustainability of carbon pricing, draw-ing upon a series of real-world attempts to price carbon over the last two decades in North America, Europe, and Asia - - Available for sale following the lecture

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate by Andrew J. Hoffman (2015)* Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, de-bates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest; one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart this split no longer concerns carbon diox-ide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched world views. This book examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change - - Available for sale following

the lecture

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate by Naomi Klein (2014) This Changes Everything encourages readers to take a big step back and analyze the current economic models and society’s mounting consumerism. Klein proposes that our addiction to profit has to drastically change before we can talk about the number of floods, storms, droughts, and fires happening every year.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Global Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019)

David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an im-passioned call to action.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann (2018)

Charles Mann compares and contrasts two main schools of thought within the envi-ronmental movement. This book begins with short biographies of two extremely influ-ential scientists, Norman Borlaug, “the Wizard”, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, for being the father of the “Green Revolution” that led to increased crop yields in South Asia and other parts of the developing world, and ornithologist, William Vogt “the Prophet”, who wrote and published the hugely influential book, Road to Survival

in 1948, where he concluded that human population growth would exhaust all natural resources. As the human population rapidly approaches 10 billion, Prophets say we must reduce consump-tion, Wizards say we must find more efficient means of production.

NON-FICTION

The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail (2019) In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers.The End of Ice of-fers a firsthand chronicle - including photographs throughout - of Jamail on his jour-ney across the world.

The Hidden Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2016) Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amaz-ing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland. He presents the science behind the secret, and previously unknown, life of trees and their communication abilities.

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The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams (2016) America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing and is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. The Hour of Land is a literary celebration of our national parks and an explo-ration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv (2006)

Child advocacy expert, Richard Louv, directly links “nature deficit” in the lives of to-day's wired generation to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as ris-es in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and depression. Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood physical, emotional, and spiritu-al development.

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (2018) With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant; rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015 Pulitzer Prize Win-ner)

Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the di-versity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastat-ing extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive

account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Bailey (2010) While an illness keeps her bedridden, Elisabeth Tova Bailey watches a Neohelix albo-labris - a common woodland snail - that has taken up residence on her nightstand. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world can illuminate our own human exis-tence, while providing an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.

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CLIMATE NOVELS

American War by Omar El Akkad (2015) A second Civil War has erupted in the United States, a product of toxic political divi-sions, battles over fossil fuel, and a desperate immigrant crisis. El Akkad’s debut novel mixes elements of reportage and fabulism to create a gripping and incisive vision of what could happen if we don’t start being nicer to one another and to the land we in-habit.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (2017)

Rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amor-phous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012)

Kingsolver’s background in biology and undeniable narrative talent make this novel about monarch butterflies and “global weirding” a lucid beauty — both as a page-turning story and as a compelling argument to care about the fragile world around us. Dune by Frank Herbert (2019, 1965 Nebula and Hugo Award winner)

Dune is famous for being the “first planetary ecology novel on a grand scale.” Herbert’s complex depiction of the planet (albeit a sand planet) reminds us of the importance of all its impressive interlocking parts. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, envi-ronmentalism and politics.

The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence (2009) South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was a 'rogue' elephant herd’s last chance of survival on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand. As Anthony risked his life to create a bond with the troubled elephants and persuade them to stay on his re-serve, he came to realize what a special family they were.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (2017) Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event. In a world in which seasons have all but disappeared and natural evolution has begun to run in reverse, the young woman finds uncertain sanctuary on the reservation where her birth family lives.

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Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015)

Watkins’ mesmerizing vision of a West without water takes dystopian near-future fic-tion one step further into evolutionary science, with an embedded field guide to the fauna and flora that have adapted to survive in an imaginative world where massive sand dunes have swallowed the Rocky Mountains. The heart of the story is a woman’s search for family and safe haven, and the near impossibility of both in this radically changed climate.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) The waters rose, submerging New York City - every street became a canal; every sky-scraper an island. But the residents adapted and it remained the bustling, vibrant me-tropolis it had always been - though changed forever.

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner) The Overstory is told through several narrators whose lives are progressively shown to be interconnected through their reverent relationship with trees. One life touches another and then another, as would occur in an ecosystem. Lives are bound together in ways that at first seem unapparent but are vital for mutual hope of survival.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner) A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the rav-aged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011) The author received the National Book Award for this heartbreaking and often terrify-ing novel that takes place in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina (“the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered”). In it, the family of 15-year-old Esch, who’s ex-pecting a baby, tries—with little in the way of shelter or resources—to cope. After the storm, Esch reflects: “I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.”

The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr (2003) Doerr takes readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. He ex-plores the human condition in all its varieties—metamorphosis, grief, fractured rela-tionships, and slowly mending hearts—conjuring nature in both its beautiful abun-dance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.

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When the Killing’s Done by T.C. Boyle (2012) Principally set on the wild Channel Islands off the coast of California, T.C. Boyle's novel is a gripping adventure with a timely theme. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist spearheading the efforts to save the islands' native creatures from invasive species. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a local businessman who is fiercely opposed to the killing of any animals whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert her plans.When the Killing's Done relates a richly humane tale about the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world.

CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULT

Blue by Laura Vacaro Seeger (2018) - Ages 2+

There’s the soft blue of a baby’s cherished blanket, the ocean blue of a romp in the waves, the chilly blue of a cold winter’s walk in the snow, and the true blue of the bond that exists between children and animals.

The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest by Lynne Cherry (2000) - Ages 4+ One day, a man exhausts himself trying to chop down a giant kapok tree. While he sleeps, the forest’s residents, including a child from the Yanomamo tribe, whisper in his ear about the importance of trees and how "all living things depend on one anoth-er" . . . and it works!

The Lorax by Doctor Seuss (1971) - Ages 4+ Dr. Seuss’s beloved story teaches kids to speak up and stand up for those who can’t. With a recycling-friendly “Go Green” message, The Lorax allows young readers to ex-perience the beauty of the Truffula Trees and the danger of taking our earth for grant-ed, all in a story that is timely, playful, and hopeful. The book’s final pages teach us that just one small seed, or one small child, can make a difference.

Up and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner (2017) - Ages 4+ Kate Messner's Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt is a wildly enthusiastic, gor-geously illustrated book about gardening, seasonal changes, and gardening wisdom, with a strong nod to intergenerational mentoring. Perfect for preschoolers and kinder-gartners beginning to grasp a world of facts, figures, and wonderment.

Judy Moody Saves the World by Megan MacDonald (2018) - Ages 6+ Inspired by her third-grade teacher, Judy Moody is going to save the world. She en-ters a design-your-own band-aid contest, tries to relieve her family of anything that might be related to the rainforest, releases her brother's pet toad into the wild, and hides all of her classmates' pencils. She even tries to live in a tree. But, with her teacher's help, Judy finally comes up with an idea to collect enough recyclables to raise money to plant 100 trees in the rainforest.

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The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate - Winner of the Newbery Medal and hailed as a a best book of the year by Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Amazon (2015) - Ages 8+

Inspired by the true story of a captive gorilla known as Ivan, this novel is told from his point of view. Behind the glass walls of his enclosure in a shopping mall, Ivan occupies himself with television, his friends, Stella and Bob, and painting until he meets Ruby, a baby elephant, taken from the wild. He is forced to see their home, and his art, through new eyes. The One and Only Ivan celebrates the transformative power of unexpected friend-ships.

The Elephant Whisperer Young Readers Adaptation): My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence (2017) - Ages 10+

South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was a 'rogue' elephant herd’s last chance of survival on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand. As Anthony risked his life to create a bond with the troubled elephants and persuade them to stay on his reserve, he came to realize what a special family they were.

Anthill by E.O. Wilson (2010) - Young Adult (Ages 12+) Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a mod-ern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marsh-lands around which he lives, the book’s hero decides to take decisive action. Ac-claimed biologist, Edward O. Wilson elegantly balances glimpses of science with the gripping fictional saga of a boy determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself.

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