Recommendations from Our Members – Worth a Read
Looking for a good book to read this summer? Check out these recommendations related to the environment.

 

From Tenaya Taylor

Book title: Bite by Bite

Author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Publication year: 2024

 

What is this book about? 

I am using it as a teaching tool to center environmental justice, health, and storytelling.

 

Why did you like it? Why should someone else read it?

It's so descriptive and reminds me of my own life growing up and how I relate food to joy and my relationships, and my own experiences.

 

 

From Andy Danzig

Here’s a great book that I can heartily recommend.

Book title: Ministry for the Future

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Publication year: 2022

 

What is this book about? 

The novel describes how the drastic effects of a warming planet will cause drastic changes in behavior to deal with it.

 

Why did you like it? Why should someone else read it?  

With many of the heat events predicted to be decades away happening now, fiction in the book has become non-fiction. E.g. “The Coming Collapse” in Scientific American, Nov. 2022 by Douglas Fox supports the section in the book about the Thwaites Glacier.

 

I actually have 2 books that I can heartily recommend.

Book title: $20 a Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

Author: Christopher Steiner

Publication year: 2010

 

What is this book about? 

This book explores how our society and culture are going to change for the betterment of the environment, as the price of gasoline, heating oil, and all other everyday consumer products that are derived from oil continue to escalate. 

 

Why did you like it? Why should someone else read it?  

With so much attention in the news and social media on the price of gasoline and diesel, this book is worth revisiting. The benefits of shutting down shipment of 20% of the world’s oil consumption and of the processing of oil into plastics from the closure of the Straits of Hormuz have been largely overlooked. Yet people are now beginning to reevaluate their behavior. The book explains why we have a long way to go.

 

Looking for some more great ideas for your summer reading?

 

From Lynn Stoddard

Regarding your email about great environmental books, I was in the Joshua Trust (JT) book club for quite a few years. Lots of excellent books.  I'm passing along the list below if this is helpful. 

Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben is, of course, excellent and strongly recommended.

 

Joshua’s Trust Nature/ Science Book Club List 2023-2026

JT Book List 2025-2026

Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane 

Pastoral Song by James Rebanks 

Wilding by Isabella Tree 

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell

Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens and Other Marvels of the Dark by Leigh Ann Henion 

The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West by Amy Gamerman 

Mighty Storms of New England by Eric Fisher

Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben 

A Year with the Seals by Alex Morris

 

JT Book List 2024-2025

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World  Out of Balance by Dan Egan

18 Miles: The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather by Christopher Dewdney

Brave the Wild River by Melissa L Sevigny

The Rights of Nature by David R Boyd

A Thousand Trails Home by Seth Kantner

Eight Bears by Gloria Dickie

The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle

 

JT Book List 2023-2024

Fire Weather  by John Vaillant 

Wild Souls by Emma Marris

Journey Into Summer  by Edwin Way Teale

Why Fish Don’t Exists by Lulu Miller

Wild New World by Dan Flores 

The Fate of Food by Amanda Little 

The Underworld by Susan Casey 

The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker