Let’s Celebrate Earth Day Together
Celebrating Earth Day with books is a wonderful way to deepen our appreciation for the planet we call home. Whether you're looking for practical tips or simply want to marvel at the beauty of nature, there is a book out there for everyone. By reading books that promote green living and environmental awareness, we can learn how to make positive changes in our daily lives. So, this Earth Day, accept the gift of education and knowledge for this wonder and majesty incredible planet.
Books To Celebrate Earth Day:
More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources--And What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Throughout history, the only way for humanity to grow was by degrading the Earth: chopping down forests, fouling the air and water, and endlessly digging out resources. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the reigning argument has been that taking better care of the planet means radically changing course: reducing our consumption, tightening our belts, learning to share and reuse, restraining growth. Is that argument correct?
Absolutely not. In More from Less, McAfee argues that to solve our ecological problems we don't need to make radical changes. Instead, we need to do more of what we're already doing: growing technologically sophisticated market-based economies around the world.
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees
by Jared Farmer
Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.
Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world's oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature
by Steven Rinella
In the era of screens and devices, the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Not only does this phenomenon have consequences for kids' physical and mental health, it jeopardizes their ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment.
Thankfully, with the right mind-set, families can find beauty, meaning, and connection in a life lived outdoors. Here, outdoors expert Steven Rinella shares the parenting wisdom he has garnered as a father whose family has lived amid the biggest cities and wildest corners of America. Throughout, he offers practical advice for getting kids radically engaged with nature in a muddy, thrilling, hands-on way, with the ultimate goal of helping them see their own place within the natural ecosystem. No matter their location--rural, suburban, or urban--caregivers and kids will bond over activities such as:
- Camping to conquer fears, build tolerance for dirt and discomfort, and savor the timeless pleasure of swapping stories around a campfire.
- Growing a vegetable garden to develop a capacity to nurture and an appreciation for hard work.
- Fishing local lakes and rivers to learn the value of patience while grappling with the possibility of failure.
- Hunting for sustainably managed wild game to face the realities of life, death, and what it really takes to obtain our food.
How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other
by Naomi Klein - Rebecca Stefoff
Warmer temperatures. Fires in the Amazon. Superstorms. These are just some of the effects of climate change that we are already experiencing.
The good news is that we can all do something about it. A movement is already underway to combat not only the environmental effects of climate change but also to fight for climate justice and make a fair and livable future possible for everyone. And young people are not just part of that movement, they are leading the way. They are showing us that this moment of danger is also a moment of great opportunity--an opportunity to change everything.
Full of empowering stories of young leaders all over the world, this information-packed book from award-winning journalist and one of the foremost voices for climate justice, Naomi Klein, offers young readers a comprehensive look at the state of the climate today and how we got here, while also providing the tools they need to join this fight to protect and reshape the planet they will inherit.
Around the World in 80 Trees: (The Perfect Gift for Tree Lovers)
by Jonathan Drori - Lucille Clerc
In Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori uses plant science to illuminate how trees play a role in every part of human life, from the romantic to the regrettable. From the trees of Britain, to India's sacred banyan tree, they offer us sanctuary and inspiration - not to mention the raw materials for everything from aspirin to maple syrup.
Stops on the trip include the lime trees of Berlin's Unter den Linden boulevard, which intoxicate amorous Germans and hungry bees alike, the swankiest streets in nineteenth-century London, which were paved with Australian eucalyptus wood, and the redwood forests of California, where the secret to the trees' soaring heights can be found in the properties of the tiniest drops of water.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries from a Secret World
by Peter Wohlleben - Tim Flannery - Jane Billinghurst - Suzanne Simard
Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration that he has observed in his woodland.
The Day the River Caught Fire: How the Cuyahoga River Exploded and Ignited the Earth Day Movement
by Barry Wittenstein - Jessie Hartland
After the Industrial Revolution in the 1880s, the Cayuhoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire almost twenty times, earning Cleveland the nickname "The Mistake on the Lake." Waste dumping had made fires so routine that local politicians and media didn't pay them any mind, and other Cleveland residents laughed off their combustible river and even wrote songs about it.
But when the river ignited again in June 1969, the national media picked up on the story and added fuel to the fire of the recent environmental movement. A year later, in 1970, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency--leading to the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts--and the first Earth Day was celebrated. It was a celebration, it was a protest, and it was the beginning of a movement to save our planet.
The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth
by Ben Rawlence
For the last fifty years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. Ben Rawlence's The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, Canada to Sweden to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes. Only the hardest species survive at these latitudes including the ice-loving Dahurian larch of Siberia, the antiseptic Spruce that purifies our atmosphere, the Downy birch conquering Scandinavia, the healing Balsam poplar that Native Americans use as a cure-all and the noble Scots Pine that lives longer when surrounded by its family.
It is a journey of wonder and awe at the incredible creativity and resilience of these species and the mysterious workings of the forest upon which we rely for the air we breathe. Blending reportage with the latest science, The Treeline is a story of what might soon be the last forest left and what that means for the future of all life on earth.
Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet
by John W Reid - Thomas E Lovejoy
Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska's Bering seacoast to Canada's Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost the entirety of South America's bulge; the Congo, occupying parts of six nations in Africa's wet equatorial middle; and the island forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California.
These megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever Green. Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere--the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years' worth of global emissions at 2019 levels--and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet's most formidable ongoing crisis.
Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperiled, beloved earth?
Award-winning writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt's highly personal new book is a brilliant invitation to live with the earth in both simple and profound ways--from walking barefoot in the woods and reimagining our relationship with animals and trees, to examining the very language we use to describe and think about nature. She invokes rootedness as a way of being in concert with the wilderness--and wildness--that sustains humans and all of life.
Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
by Jessica J Lee
A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?
In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being 'out of place'--weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.