With the holiday travel season in full swing, a good book is a must-have in case of airport delays or to give as the perfect gift.
Bloomberg Green journalists picked seven climate and environment books they loved despite their important content. Some were positively uplifting. Here are our recommendations.
Fiction
“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, decades after the Upheaval (cascading climate catastrophes), the Flood (a global tsunami caused by a Russian nuclear bomb), and wars launched by artificial intelligence have halved the world's population. The United States no longer exists and the United Kingdom is an impoverished archipelago of small islands where academic Tom Metcalfe embarks on an obsessive quest to find the only copy of a famous 21st century poem that was never published.
The famous author of the ode to lost English landscapes once recited it at a dinner in 2014 as a gift for his wife, but his words remain lost to time. Metcalfe believes that access to the previously hidden digital lives of the poet and his circle will lead him to the manuscript. You know where to start your search: thanks to Nigeria, the superpower of the 22nd century, the historic Internet has been decrypted and archived, including all personal emails, texts, photographs and videos.
The truth, however, lies elsewhere. It is a richly told story about our disrupted present and where it can lead us without course correction. —Todd Woody
“Greenwood” by Michael Christie
This equally dystopian novel begins in 2038 with Jacinda Greenwood, a dendrologist turned tour guide for the ultra-rich, working in one of the last remaining forests in the world. But the novel zigzags to 1934 and the beginnings of a logging empire that divided his family for generations.
For more than a century, the lives and fates of the Greenwoods were intertwined with the trees they fought to exploit or protect. The novel explores themes of ancestral sin and atonement against the backdrop of forests, which are silent witnesses to human crimes perpetrated on a global scale. —Danielle Bochove
“Bark Skins” by Annie Proulx
Another multigenerational saga, spanning more than three centuries and 700 pages, this 2016 novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author traces the deforestation of the New World over 300 years, beginning in the 17th century.
Following the descendants of two immigrants in what will become modern-day Quebec, the story takes the reader on a global journey, traversing North America, visiting the coffee houses of Amsterdam that served as centers for the Dutch merchant empire, and following new trade routes from China to New Zealand. Along the way, it chronicles the exploitation of forests, the impact on indigenous communities, and the lasting legacy of colonialism.
With a large cast of characters, the novel is sometimes difficult to handle. But the astonishing descriptions of Old World forests and the incredible human effort required to destroy them persist long after the saga concludes. —Danielle Bochove
Non-fiction
“The cheerful environmentalist: how to practice without preaching” by Isabel Losada
It's hard for a committed environmentalist to feel cheerful these days. But Isabel Losada's book encourages readers to undertake a seemingly impossible mission: to delight in navigating the absurd situations that committed environmentalists inevitably face, rather than succumbing to frustration.
Those delights can be as simple as searching for eco-friendly homemade shampoo formulas on Instagram or crushing a bucket of berries to collect seeds and help restore native plants.
The book itself is an enjoyable read. With vivid detail and a dose of British humor, Losada recounts her failed attempt to eat lunch at a Whole Foods store without using their disposable plastic cutlery. (The solution? Bring your own metal fork.) Certainly, some of the advice in his book is not realistic for everyone. But there are plenty of practical tips, such as deleting old and unwanted emails, to help reduce the energy use of the data centers that store them. This book is an important reminder that you can joyfully protect the environment.
-Coco Liu
“Dizzying: China's Quest to Design the Future” by Dan Wang
China's President Xi Jinping is a trained engineer, as are many members of the country's top leaders. Dan Wang writes about how that training is reflected in the country's relentless effort to build, build, build. That includes a cleantech industry that leads the world in almost every category imaginable, although Wang is also exploring other domains.
Born in China, Wang grew up in Canada and studied in the United States before returning to live in his native country between 2017 and 2023. That background helps his analysis land more gravely in 2025, when the United States and China face off in a battle between fossil fuels versus clean technologies. —Akshat Rathi
“Tangled Life: How Fungi Create Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future” by Merlin Sheldrake
A JP Morgan banker might seem like an unlikely character in a book about mushrooms. But R. Gordon Wasson, who popularized the main compound found in “magic mushrooms” with a 1957 article in Life magazine, is just one of the delightful surprises in Merlin Sheldrake's unconventional book. The author's dedication to telling the mushroom story includes literally getting his hands dirty, unearthing complex underground mushroom networks, and engaging in self-experimentation by participating in a scientific study on the effects of LSD on the brain. The result is a book that reveals the complexity and interdependence of life on Earth and the role we play in it.
“Humans became as intelligent as we are, the argument goes, because we were entangled in a demanding flurry of interaction,” Sheldrake writes. Fungi, a form of life that depends on its interrelationship with everything else, could have more in common with us than we think. -Olivia Rudgard
“Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” by Dan Fagin
When chemical manufacturer Ciba arrived in Toms River, New Jersey, in 1952, the company's new plant looked like the economic engine the sleepy coastal community dependent on fishing and tourism had always needed. But the plant soon began quietly dumping millions of gallons of chemical waste into the city's namesake river and surrounding forests. That started a legacy of toxic pollution that left families wondering if the waste was the cause of unusually high rates of childhood cancer in the area.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of environmental journalism reads like a thriller, albeit with devastating real-world consequences. It also shows how companies can reinvent themselves: I was surprised to learn that Ciba, later known as Ciba-Geigy, merged with another company in 1996 to become the pharmaceutical company Novartis. At a time when there has been pressure to relocate manufacturing from abroad to the United States, this is a worthy examination of the hidden costs that can accompany industrial growth. – Emma Corte
Bochove, Woody, Liu, Court, Rudgard and Rathi write for Bloomberg.
