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The Future of The Past: when cultural heritage meets climate change | Thijs Weststeijn

 

As the wooden piles under Amsterdam begin to rot, water levels rise in Venice. The 4,500-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro flood in Pakistan. Compaction of peat soil in northern England is causing Hadrian’s Wall to collapse. The bricks of excavated Babylon are exploding as a result of increasing salt levels. Melting permafrost in Siberia is endangering the ancient burial mounds of the Scythian civilization. In the US, hurricanes have partially destroyed the heritage of New Orleans and Puerto Rico, while the 2019 wildfires forced the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to close.

The climate crisis is threatening historical heritage all over the world, with higher temperatures, more storms and fires and, of course, rising sea levels. Monuments, buildings, inner cities and cultural landscapes are at risk, and museums such as the Louvre have already started relocating parts of their collections to climate-proof storage facilities. The Future of the Past addresses this urgent issue and asks us to include the fate of beauty in our conversations on climate change.

 

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Yellow Pine | Claire Vaye Watkins

 

As Watkins’ celebrated Gold, Fame, Citrus showed, she has never been interested in comfortable fiction. Her latest novel, set in the Mohave desert, digs deeper into the discomfort through its protagonist Rose, an on-and-off Twelve-Stepper circling an old flame and craving another baby. The Yellow Pine of the title –a real solar farm in Nevada – embodies the central tension of the book: the collision between “green” energy and the wild land it demolishes. The result is a story that mourns the land as Rose knew it while insisting, stubbornly, on love, joy, humour, and the hope of future life amid the ruins: a novel that understands grief and vitality are not opposites, but conjoined twins.

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The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet | Leah Thomas

 

The Intersectional Environmentalist bridges the gap between environmentalism and social justice and outlines how climate activism cannot succeed without addressing systemic oppression, racism and inequality. From Indigenous peoples to low-income neighbourhoods, Thomas demonstrates how environmental issues disproportionately affect marginalised communities and challenges readers to adopt an inclusive approach to sustainability.

Thomas blends activism, science, and storytelling to highlight the interconnectedness of environmental and social struggles. The book is both a manifesto and a practical guide, offering actionable steps for individuals and organisations to centre equity in their environmental efforts. Whether you’re new to intersectional environmentalism or already engaged in climate justice work, this book offers an indispensable primer for anyone wanting to make a difference, featuring empowering insight from activists around the globe.

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Feminism for a World on Fire | Natasha Walter

 

Clear-eyed, eloquent and cogent, Natasha Walters’s argument that the eco-crisis is a feminist crisis could not come at a better moment. Wildfires, floods, heat domes, pollution and rising seas are not the only dangers facing women: authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown are endangering their wellbeing, lives and safety too. Yet Western feminism, Walter  suggests, has become side-tracked into consumer-driven self-empowerment in a way that serves neither women nor the planet. The response, she argues, is a rooted feminism that connects to other movements for equality and environmental protection to build the caring, flourishing world that is still within our grasp.

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The Response | David Shukman

“This fascinating and gripping book has the power to open our eyes and shift our thinking in ways that few others can. Read on and get ready.” -Kate Raworth

In this timely account of Britain’s response to wildfires, heatwaves and flooding, David Shukman, the BBC’s former science and environment correspondent, doesn’t pull his punches. Why, he asks, is Britain, one of the richest nations in the world, so ill-prepared for such disasters, and why is its track record in dealing with them so terrible? Shukman’s investigation provides a gripping account of the new extremes that our bodies, buildings and landscapes face in Britain and around the world – and what we can do about them.

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Dream State | Eric Puchner

 

Puchner’s engrossing multi-generational portrait of a groups of family and friends in Montana is a thoughtful examination of love, loss, and the enduring effects of past choices. But it is in its depiction of the desecration of wildlife and the creeping effects of climate breakdown that it excels. The story starts by an idyllic Montana lake in the present era, with the quickly-doomed wedding of Ceci and Charlie. But as the decades go by, we see how the lives of the bride, the groom, his best man and their families are shaped by good or bad luck, critical decisions, betrayals – and the creeping effects of wildlife habitat loss and climate breakdown. Like the best novels that deal with environmental issues, it’s in specifics – like the sinking water level in the once-pristine lake, or the disappearance of the native wolverine – that the present and the near-future are brought to poignantly exquisite life.

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The New Global Possible | Ani Dasgupta

 

Global environmental leader Ani Dasgupta takes an honest look at lagging climate action and maps out what can be done to rebuild hope for the future.

In 2015, world leaders came together in Paris and signed an agreement to save the planet. Ten years later, we have made little progress on the ground, and the climate crisis is worse than ever. We’ve mostly figured out what we need to do, but not how to get it done—and time is running out.

In this groundbreaking new book, World Resources Institute President and CEO Ani Dasgupta explores how to orchestrate change at speed and scale. How do we get countries to keep working together on climate action when multilateralism is declining? How do we harness technological innovation to protect nature, rather than destroy it? How do we dismantle entrenched power structures and rapidly transition to a clean, resilient economy?

Based on conversations with more than one hundred leaders around the world, The New Global Possible weaves together stories of unusual partnerships, collaborative leadership, and lessons learned from failure. Mining the rich history of the climate movement, Dasgupta defines the narrow path to a hopeful future—one requiring all of our collective focus and determination—and offers a radical new practice for orchestrating change for good.

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Wild Dark Shore | Charlotte McConaghy

 

Gripping, moving, and beautifully-wrought, McConagh’s tale of a woman stranded on a remote Antarctic island is a literary eco-thriller like no other. The island is many things: the locus of a threatened seed-vault, a nature sanctuary, a kind of prison – and the home of a grieving family whose members are not what they seem. Throw in a heart-breaking love story, a ruthless antagonist and vivid depictions of endangered wildlife, and the stage is set for a story that builds to fever pitch.

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The Shetland Way: Community and climate crisis on my father’s islands | Marianne Brown

 

How do we balance our needs with the needs of the natural world around us? How can we have nuanced conversations and debate in a time of extreme activism or extreme denial? How can we begin to understand the complexities of a subject as enormous as climate change? And how can we change the way we live to save our lives?

This is one woman’s story of how her quest to make peace with her father’s death brought her straight to the heart of a challenging debate about how we save the planet.

Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population.

As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself on a transformative journey into the heart of a debate that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet.

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Helm | Sarah Hall

 

 

Non-human protagonists are having quite a moment in fiction: Laline’s Paull’s The Bees and Pod, and Polly Clark’s Tiger are just two recent examples of narratives in which animals take centre-stage. But in Helm, Sarah Hall goes a step further in articulating the more-than-human world by giving voice and agency to Britain’s only named wind, the Helm of the title – to dazzling effect. Spanning the Neolithic to the Anthropocene, the wind blows through the landscapes of a panoply of human lives to evoke the tragic trajectory of humankind’s decreasing bond with the natural world. Yet despite the urgency of her subject-matter, Hall remains a deft and often humorous storyteller, and the novel is as much a love-letter to the natural world as an obituary of it.