Here are our top recommendations for zero waste, sustainability and climate change reads.
Economics and Capitalism vs. The Climate
This changes everything, Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything addresses one of the most pressing issues today: climate change. The book outlines exactly how we’re harming the planet and why we’ve thus far failed to stem our destructive behavior. Author and activist Naomi Klein also points out how some early movements are meaningfully fighting climate change and what more needs to be done to prevent global disaster.
“Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life"
Zero Waste Tips and Sustainable Living
Live Green: 52 steps for a more sustainable life by Jen Chillingsworth
Many of us are already doing what we can to adopt a greener lifestyle. We recycle, try to reduce our waste and plastics, choose organic food when shopping, eat less meat, and opt for environmentally friendly cleaning products. Yet we often wish we were doing more and it can be overwhelming to know where to start. Live Green is a practical guide of 52 tips and changes you can make to your home and lifestyle over the course of a year. Tackling all areas of your life from home and garden, your cleaning routine, food, fashion, natural beauty, and Christmas, this book has all the ingredients to help you achieve a more sustainable existence. Learn how to modify your daily habits to rid yourself of environmental guilt and rediscover the pleasures of living a slower and simpler life. From creating your own eco-friendly cleaning products and improving your natural beauty regime to creating a capsule wardrobe and composting – discover how to get the most out of life by living more intentionally. Live simply. Live Green.
‘The Sustainable(ish) Living Guide’ by Jen Gale
If you want to save the planet, but your to-do list is already pretty long and remembering your re-usable coffee cup feels like a Herculean task, then this is the book for you. Covering every aspect of our lives from the stuff we buy and the food we eat, to how we travel, work, and celebrate. This book provides stacks of practical, down to earth ideas to slot into your daily life, alongside a gentle kick up the butt to put your newfound knowledge into action.
Find out how to fit sustainable living into your life, in a way that works for you. Change your impact without radically changing your life and figure out the small steps you can make that will add up to make a big difference (halo not included).
For Kids
Greta and the Giants: inspired by Greta Thunberg's stand to save the world by Zoë Tucker and Zoe Persico
This picture book tells the story of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg—the Swedish teenager who has led a global movement to raise awareness about the world’s climate crisis—using allegory to make this important topic accessible to young children.
Greta is a little girl who lives in a beautiful forest threatened by Giants. When the Giants first came to the forest, they chopped down trees to make houses. Then they chopped down more trees and made even bigger homes. The houses grew into towns and the towns grew into cities, until now there is hardly any forest left. Greta knows she has to help the animals who live in the forest, but how?
Carbon Footprint Calculation
‘How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything’ by Mike Berners-Lee
From a text message to a war, from a Valentine's rose to a flight or even having a child, How Bad are Bananas? gives us the carbon answers we need and provides plenty of revelations. By talking through a hundred or so items, Mike Berners-Lee sets out to give us a carbon instinct for the footprint of literally anything we do, buy and think about. He helps us pick our battles by laying out the orders of magnitude. The book ranges from the everyday (foods, books, plastic bags, bikes, flights, baths...) and the global (deforestation, data centres, rice production, the World Cup, volcanoes, ...) Be warned, some of the things you thought you knew about green living may be about to be turned on their head. Never preachy but packed full of information and always entertaining.
"The message here is that it is OK to eat apples, oranges, bananas, or whatever you like from anywhere in the world, as long as it has not been on a plane or thousands of miles by road."
Rewilding and Conservation
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot
This book explodes with wonder and delight. Making use of remarkable scientific discoveries that transform our understanding of how natural systems work, George Monbiot explores a new, positive environmentalism that shows how damaged ecosystems on land and at sea can be restored, and how this restoration can revitalize and enrich our lives. Challenging what he calls his “ecological boredom,” Monbiot weaves together a beautiful and riveting tale of wild places, wildlife, and wild people. Roaming the hills of Britain and the forests of Europe, kayaking off the coast of Wales with dolphins and seabirds, he seeks out the places that still possess something of the untamed spirit he would like to resurrect.
He meets people trying to restore lost forests and bring back missing species—such as wolves, lynx, wolverines, wild boar, and gray whales—and explores astonishing evidence that certain species, not just humans, have the power to shape the physical landscape. This process of rewilding, Monbiot argues, offers an alternative to a silent spring: the chance of a raucous summer in which ecological processes resume and humans draw closer to the natural world.
Feminist
Why Women Will Save the Planet by Friends Of The Earth
Women's empowerment is critical to environmental sustainability, isn't it? When Friends of the Earth asked this question on Facebook half of respondents said yes and half said no, with women as likely to say no as men. This collection of articles and interviews, from some of the leading lights of the environmental and feminist movements, demonstrates that achieving gender equality is vital if we are to protect the environment upon which we all depend. It is a rallying call to environmental campaigning groups and other environmentalists who have, on the whole, neglected women's empowerment in their work.
We hope that the book will encourage the environmental movement and women's movement to join in fighting the twin evils of women's oppression and environmental degradation, because social justice and environmental sustainability are two sides of the same coin.
Fiction
News From Gardenia by Robert Llewellyn
OK, this one isn't the best of fiction writing, but there are some really interesting ideas around technology and future dystopian scenarios following the disaster that is the climate crisis.
When Gavin Meckler's light aircraft encounters a mysterious cloud and crashes to earth, he discovers that the eerily quiet landscape in which he has landed is 200 years older than the one from which he took off. In this gentle, peaceful, sustainable new world, it is possible to travel from one side of the globe to the other in a matter of minutes without burning fuel, and everyone is a gardener because that's how they can be sure to eat.
Inspired by William Morris's utopian novel News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn shows us a future where we don't burn anything to make anything else and which isn't hovering on the brink of disaster; where aliens haven't invaded, meteors haven’t hit and zombies haven’t taken over. In short, a world where humanity eventually gets it right.
All the technology described in the novel has seen the light of day in reality. Llewellyn's future isn't perfect and may not be very likely, but it is entirely possible.