Climate Politics

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present - perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush - that’s unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profound.

Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting the economic interest of the American people first.

As global warming accelerates, droughts last longer, floods rise higher, and super-storms become more frequent. With increasing numbers of people on the move as a result, the business of containing them - border fortification - is booming. In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for environmental justice and sustainability.

Our take-make-waste economy has cost consumers and taxpayers billions while cheating us out of a habitable planet. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Waste-Free World makes a persuasive, forward-looking case for a circular economic model, a “closed-loop” system that wastes no natural resources. Entrepreneur, CEO, and sustainability expert Ron Gonen argues that circularity is not only crucial for the planet but holds immense business opportunity.

Oil and Honey is McKibben's account of two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight - from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

Weaving together findings from a wide range of disciplines, Power traces how four key elements developed to give humans extraordinary power: Tool making ability, language, social complexity, and the ability to harness energy sources - most significantly, fossil fuels. It asks whether we have, at this point, overpowered natural and social systems, and if we have, what we can do about it. Has Homo sapiens - one species among millions - become powerful enough to threaten a mass extinction and disrupt the Earth's climate?

This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on.

In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the "Hockey Stick", a chart showing global temperature data over the past 1,000 years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present.

It is not your imagination: water crises are more frequent. Our twentieth-century systems for providing the water that grows food, sustains cities, and supports healthy ecosystems are failing to meet the demands of growing population and the challenges brought on by climate change. But the grim news reports—of empty reservoirs, withering crops, failing ecosystems—need not be cause for despair, argues award-winning author David Sedlak.

We have reached the point of no return. The existential threat of climate change is now a reality. The world has never been more vulnerable. Yet corporations are already planning a life beyond this point. The business models of fossil fuel giants factor in continued profitability in a scenario of a five-degree increase in global temperature. An increase that will kill millions, if not billions. This is the shocking reality laid bare in a hard-hitting new book by David Whyte.

Professor of environmental engineering Daniel Cohan argues that escaping the gravest perils of climate change will first require American diplomacy, technological innovation, and policy to catalyze decarbonization globally. Combining his own expertise along with insights from more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, scholars, and clean-technology pioneers, Cohan identifies flaws in previous efforts to combat climate change.

As a chef in high-end restaurants, and later, in the home of then Senator Barack and Michelle Obama, Sam Kass read a lot about how eating organic and buying local was the key to remaking a food system otherwise built on climate-change-causing petroleum. But when he followed the Obamas into the White House, he realized something: While it’s easy to identify the problems in our spoiled food system, fixing it is not as simple as getting your eggs from the farmers’ market. Now investing in startups trying to solve the environmental and human challenges of climate change in food and agriculture.

We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity's clumsy signature. The old distinctions - between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact - have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation.

Unless we start addressing the causes of climate change and stop simply navigating its effects, we will be facing a series of unstoppable catastrophes by the time our preschoolers graduate from college. Our world is in trouble - right now. This Is the Way the World Ends tells the real stories of the substantial impacts to Earth’s systems unfolding across each continent.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In this book, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

We owe it to our fellow humans - and other species - to save them from the catastrophic harm caused by climate change. Philosopher Elizabeth Cripps approaches climate justice not just as an abstract idea but as something that should motivate us all. Using clear reasoning and poignant examples, starting from irrefutable science and uncontroversial moral rules, she explores our obligations to each other and to the non-human world, unravels the legacy of colonialism and entrenched racism, and makes the case for immediate action.

Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southward toward the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart", the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region.