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With the holiday
travel season ramping up, a good book is a
must-have for airport delays or to give as
the perfect gift.
The Bloomberg
Green team has done its fair share of
reading this year, and our journalists picked
eight climate and environmental books they loved
despite their weighty content. A few were
positively uplifting. Here are our
recommendations.
Photographer:
Thomas Barwick/Getty Images
Fiction
What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
It’s 2119, decades
after the Derangement (cascading climate
catastrophes), the Inundation (a global tsunami
triggered by a Russian nuclear bomb) and
artificial intelligence-launched wars have
halved the world’s population. The US is no more
and the UK is an impoverished archipelago of
tiny islands where scholar Tom Metcalfe embarks
on an obsessive quest to find the only copy of a
renowned 21st-century poem that was never
published.
It’s a richly told
tale of our deranged present — and where it may
lead without course correction. —Todd Woody
Greenwood by
Michael Christie
This likewise
dystopian novel begins in 2038 with Jacinda
Greenwood, a dendrologist turned tour guide for
the ultra-wealthy, working in one of the world's
last remaining forests. But the novel
zig-zags back to 1934 and the beginnings of a
timber empire that divided her family for
generations.
For more than a
century, the Greenwoods’ lives and fates were
entwined with the trees they fought to exploit
or protect. The novel explores themes of
ancestral sin and atonement against the backdrop
of the forests, which stand as silent witnesses
to human crimes enacted on a global scale. —Danielle
Bochove
Barkskins by
Annie Proulx
Another
multi-generational saga, spanning more than
three centuries and 700 pages, this 2016 novel
by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author tracks the
deforestation of the New World over 300 years,
beginning in the 17th century.
The story takes the
reader on a global voyage from North America to
the Amsterdam coffee houses and new trade routes
from China to New Zealand. Along the way, it
chronicles the exploitation of the forests, the
impact on Indigenous communities and the lasting
legacy of colonialism. —Danielle Bochove
Nonfiction
The Joyful
Environmentalist: How to Practise Without
Preaching by Isabel Losada
It is hard for a
committed environmentalist to feel cheerful
these days. But Isabel Losada’s book encourages
readers to undertake a seemingly impossible
mission: finding delight in navigating the
absurd situations that committed
environmentalists inevitably face, rather than
succumbing to frustration.
Those delights can
be as simple as looking up eco-friendly homemade
shampoo formulas on Instagram or crushing a
bucket of berries for seed collection to help
restore native plants.
There are also
plenty of practical tips for those looking to
lighten their footprint. This book is an
important reminder that you can protect the
environment joyfully.
—Coco Liu
Breakneck:
China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by
Dan Wang
China’s President
Xi Jinping is a trained engineer, and so are
many members of the country’s top leadership.
Dan Wang writes about how that training shows up
in the country's relentless push to build, build
and build. That includes a clean tech industry
that leads the world in almost every conceivable
category, though Wang explores other domains as
well.
Born in China, Wang
grew up in Canada and studied in the US before
going back to live in his native country from
2017 to 2023. That background helps his analysis
land with more gravity in 2025, as the US and
China face off in a battle of fossil
fuels versus clean tech. —Akshat
Rathi
Entangled Life:
How Fungi Make Our Worlds Change Our Minds
and Shape Our Futures by Merlin
Sheldrake
A JP Morgan banker
might seem an unlikely character in a book about
fungi. But R. Gordon Wasson, who popularized the
main compound found in “magic mushrooms” with a
1957 article in Life magazine, is only
one of the delightful surprises in Merlin
Sheldrake’s offbeat book.
The
author’s dedication to telling the tale of
fungi includes literally getting his hands
dirty, unearthing complex underground fungal
networks, and engaging in self-experimentation
by participating in a scientific study of the
effects of LSD on the brain. The result is a
book that reveals the complexity and
interdependency of life on Earth, and the role
we play in it. —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 seemed
like the economic engine the sleepy coastal
community needed. But the plant soon began
quietly dumping millions of gallons of
chemical-laced waste into the town’s eponymous
river and surrounding
woods. That left families asking whether 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 fallout. It also shows
how companies can reinvent themselves: I was
startled 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’s been a push to relocate
manufacturing from abroad back to the US, this
is a worthy examination of the hidden costs that
can accompany industrial growth. —Emma
Court
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