Tag Archive for: activism

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BIRD GIRL | MAYA-ROSE CRAIG

 

“In deciding to write a personal memoir at the age of 20, the ornithologist and activist Mya-Rose Craig has shown considerable courage. Not only has she travelled the length and breadth of Britain, she has visited every continent on Earth, rising at dawn, sleeping on ice, walking up mountains and baking in deserts in order to view over 5,000 different birds. Throughout the book, her passion for these animals takes centre stage, and leads her to an environmental activism that feels both necessary and urgent.” – Natasha Walter

It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action To Transform Our World | Mikaela Loach

The environmental crisis is deeply entangled with colonialism and a capitalist system that places profit over people. Tackling the climate crisis cannot be achieved without an unfiltered examination of exploitation, inequality, poverty and racism.

Named as one of the most influencial women in the UK climate movement, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh perspective on the crisis through the lens of climate justice which creates the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues. ‘False hope won’t save us,’ Loach tells us. ‘But active hope can.’ This book is a must read for every climate activist.

Spinning Out | Charlie Herzog Young

This debut from a young researcher, writer and award-winning activist begins with a harrowing account of the suicide attempt which left him a double amputee, and morphs into an uplifting road-map to a positive, liveable future. The climate and ecological despair that led Herzog to the brink of death is becoming endemic in his generation, yet remains relatively unexamined. Which makes his meticulously researched, deeply moving and sublimely-written account essential reading for anyone struggling with climate grief or working with those who do. This empowering and uplifting book may start by making you cry, but it will end by making you think. And it may even change you. – Liz Jensen.

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power | Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit - Hope int he Dark
At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq.

Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the 21st century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century’s thinkers – including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel – Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.

The Climate Book | Greta Thunberg

In this collection of essays, interspersed with Greta Thunberg’s own speeches, writings and commentaries, the legendary Swedish environmentalist showcases some of the leading voices in climate and ecological science and activism.

Thunberg and her collaborators do more than simply bear witness to the planet’s profound ecological challenges: they outline some of the solutions that are available to forge a more just, healthy and liveable global society that respects its limitations and thrives within them.

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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The Nerves and Their Endings | Jessica Gaitán Johannesson

The body as a measuring tool for planetary harm. A nervous system under increasing stress.

In this collection that moves from the personal to the political and back again, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitán Johannesson explores how we respond to crises. She draws parallels between an eating disorder and environmental neurosis, examines the perils of an activist movement built on non-parenthood, dissects the privilege of how we talk about hope, and more. The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies.

 

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson discussed her book The Nerves and Their Endings with Writers Rebel’s Toby Litt back in November 2022. Read their conversation and learn more about the book here.

The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday | Emma Must

In 1992, a group of young people began to protest against the extension of the M3 motorway through Twyford Down outside Winchester – a new road that would, by the hands of the Conservative government, cut seven minutes off the journey time between London and Southampton, whilst carving through the chalk hill in one of England’s ‘protected’ Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The Dongas Tribe, as they would later be known, named after the Matabele word for ‘gully’, radically altered the UK environmental movement, lauded by the Guardian as having ‘kickstarted a major shift in green attitudes in both government and the public.’

Twyford Down became a symbol for a further 1,000 protected heritage sites across the UK which were planned to undergo the same process, removing idiosyncrasy from the landscape and presenting an ideal for a country based on mobility and so-called ‘progress’.

Emma Must’s searing collection, published 30 years after the Twyford protests, considers the role that language plays as witness to our impact on the Earth. These powerful, moving and honest depictions of the campaign explore the ways in which language reaches us, saves us, or fails to convince us. Here, the land reveals its histories to the reader, whilst protest actions are juxtaposed with judicial statements, teetering between the active and passive voice, the human and non-human.

 

Purchase The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday at Hive online bookshop