The Issues 2024: The Fight for Climate Justice
For the past few weeks, Literary Hub has been going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls next week, on November 5th. We’ve featured reading lists, essays, and interviews on important topics like income inequality, health care, gun culture, and more. For a better handle on the issues affecting you and your loved ones—regardless of who ends up president on November 6th (or 7th, or 8th, or whenever)—we have you covered. You can catch up on past features here: Income Inequality, The Importance of Labor, The High Costs of a For-Profit Healthcare System, the National Epidemic of Gun Violence, and the Urgent Importance of Reproductive Rights.
Today we’ve gathered the best stories published at Lit Hub about a very important issue that affects the entire world: The urgent fight for climate justice.
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The 10 Best Books on Climate Justice
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned that the birds were dying from DDT, so many canaries in America’s figurative coalmines. Since then, more portentous, unacknowledged canaries have died. Climate change, the biggest existential threat to our collective humanity, has already, and will continue to, disproportionately affect the poor, the marginalized and oppressed. But every year, emissions increase. Free market capitalism enables carbon output. Indigenous people are stripped of their land stewardship. There are toxins in environments that people cannot leave, that have devastating effects on their lives. Changing weather displaces them.
As our policymakers fail to combat it, where else can we look? The following books take disparate, but deeply researched and thoughtful, angles on climate justice, through indigenous wisdom, scientific innovation, grassroots activism, anthropology, and botany. Perhaps, most unlikely, a rare mushroom might reveal a way forward. Stronger than independence is interdependence.
Freedom and Responsibility: Why Earth’s Survival Depends on All of Us
Once upon a time all history was environmental history. Life was governed by the seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed. Human societies used their ingenuity to wield fire, dam rivers, cut down forests: all to mitigate the risks of living. They harnessed the power of the animals they shared shelter with. Every culture had its gods of beneficence; every culture had dreams of plenty. A thousand years ago, those dreams grew more insistent. The scale of human impact on Earth expanded with the growth in human numbers. The range of possible futures inched wider. But the twinned foes of famine and epidemic never receded for long.
And then things changed. The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won. They believed that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power. They believed that instant access to the prehistoric solar energy embedded in fossil fuels made them invulnerable. Their steam engines and lethal weapons conquered the world. In pursuit of freedom, they poisoned rivers, razed hills, made forests disappear, terrorized surviving animals and drove them to the brink of extinction.
Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
Someone at the dinner table wanted to know what everyone’s turning point on climate was, which is to say she wanted us to tell a story with a pivotal moment. She wanted sudden; all I had was slow, the story of a journey with many steps, gradual shifts, accumulating knowledge, concern, and commitment. A lot had happened but it had happened in many increments over a few decades, not via one transformative anything.
People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash. Movies love them as love at first sight, dramatic speeches that change everything, trouble that can be terminated by shooting one bad guy, and other easy fixes and definitive victories. Old-school radicals love them as the kind of revolution that they imagine will change everything suddenly, even though a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness.
Maybe religion loves them too, as conversion, revelation, and sudden awakening.
Olivia Laing on the Care and Keeping of Gardens In an Era of Climate Emergency
East Anglia is the driest region of the country. It gets around half the annual rainfall and has been categorized by the Environment Agency for over a decade as “seriously water stressed.” By mid-May I was regularly logging yellow leaves and flopping plants. June was alarming, and my diary for July 20 was apocalyptic. There had been two days of record temperatures. It reached 40.3 in Lincolnshire, while in Suffolk the high was 36. Airports had closed because the runways were buckling, and a school went up in flames after the sun was concentrated through a chandelier. There were more fire callouts, I read, than at any time since the Blitz.
That afternoon I walked around the garden, making an unhappy audit. Tree peony flagging, hydrangea leaves scorched, the lawn toast, not that I cared about that. The heat hit me in the face as I opened the door. I’d never experienced anything like it in England. I left out saucers of water for the wasps and mice. Mulberries were ripening by the hour, though the tree looked stunned and sick, its tips dying back, its leaves limp. A scattering of hot rain at nine. There were froglets in the little meadow under the plum, and a grasshopper jumped into my hand, the kick of its legs instantly familiar from childhood, though I hadn’t seen one in years.
How the Myth of Human Exceptionalism Cut Us Off From Nature
For much of human’s time on the planet, before the great delusion, we lived in cultures that understood us not as “masters of the universe” but as what my Haudenosaunee neighbors call “the younger brothers of creation.”
Long before Aristotle placed our species atop the anthropocentric Scale of Nature, long before Western religions declared that only humans were made in the image of God, the peoples of Turtle Island were guided by the kincentric worldview of “all my relations.” It is a philosophy and set of practices based on knowing that the same life force animates us all and binds us as relatives—tree people, bird people, and human people. This kincentric way of being grew from the understanding that we are linked in webs of reciprocity, where the survival of one depends upon the survival of the other. Simultaneously scientific and spiritual, this way of thinking has evolutionary adaptive value in guiding ecological relationships toward mutual flourishing.
Dangerous Solastalgia: On Writing in the Midst of Climate Grief
Grief has no language. It is built from the debris of the shattered connection that created it, and it is powered by our understanding of finality. Because its component parts are assembled from that connection, grief is always personal to the sufferer and idiosyncratic in nature. And yet although it is a reaction to separation, and itself separates the mourner from the world for a period of time, grief is one of the only true things, along with love, that binds us all.
Then why doesn’t it have a language? Why is it literally unspeakable? Before going a funeral, we turn to Google for phrases to memorize. We try to erase its existence by reassuring the bereaved, and ourselves, that the loss is part of a system. Even as we speak, though, we are aware of how little utility our words have in these moments, and because of this, we avoid those to whom we cannot speak and they are left alone to figure out how to live on the margins of the void.
The Sickness of Life: On the Problems with Anti-Natalism
In Margaret Atwood’s 1981 novel Bodily Harm, the protagonist, Rennie, recalls a piece of graffiti she had once seen written on a toilet wall: “Life is just another sexually transmitted social disease.” This sentiment perfectly encapsulates the worldview of the philosopher-detective Rust (“Rust”) Cohle, whose character appears in season one of the HBO drama True Detective (2014).
In episode one, Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and his partner Martin (“Marty”) Hart (Woody Harrelson) are driving through a desolate Louisiana landscape, trying to solve a horrific murder case, when Cohle is asked by Hart to explain his philosophical beliefs. Cohle’s response, almost comic in its tragic seriousness, evokes the ghosts of Schopenhauer and Emil Cioran:
I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self-aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law . . . I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters, opting out of a raw deal.
Cohle is here absolutely anti-natal: humanity should cease procreating and bring about its own extinction. But it is not only that human beings should “opt out” of the raw deal—we might say, the ordeal—that is life, but rather that it would be better for them not to have come into existence in the first place. The world, as Cohle says, is just “a giant gutter in outer space . . . Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat, to force a life into this thresher.” If one does have the misfortune of being born, then the best that can happen is a swift and early death: “the trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up. The damage is done. It’s too late.”
Snapshots of the End of Travel: On Trying to Enter a Personal No-Fly Zone
My father traveled. Still in his teens, he traveled from Michigan to Alaska with a tent when the Alaska highway was still pitted dirt and gravel. He went moose hunting in Northern Ontario. He tried to travel to Korea in the 1950s, but a hernia barred him from enlisting. He met my mother in the early 60s, and despite being Depression babies from hardscrabble backgrounds, far from the avant garde, they were early adopters of Travel as a leisure pursuit.
They flew to Northern Europe where they rented cheap rooms across Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. To afford this, they lived in a tiny, unfinished attic room in his parent’s house for the first eight years of their marriage. When my mother was five months pregnant with me, ticket prices fell to a pittance, and they took off for two weeks so he could see the running of the bulls in Madrid. We joked later that she should have made a tiny window for me to see out.
The Birds of Northern Manhattan: On Vanishing Human and Non-Human Habitats
If I can be called a bird-watcher, my spark was a pair of burrowing owls, painted on the narrow storefront gate of a shuttered real estate business on 145th Street, in Harlem, that brokers single-room-occupancy housing for two hundred dollars a week. I spotted them after ice-skating with one of my kids, at the rink in the shadow of towering smokestacks at Riverbank State Park, a concession to our community for the massive wastewater treatment plant hidden beneath it. It was midway through the Trump years: January, but not cold like Januaries when I was little, not cold enough to see your breath. It wasn’t snowing, and it wasn’t going to snow. The owls watched me quizzically, with their heads cocked, their long, skinny legs perched on the colored bands of a psychedelic rainbow that seemed to lead off that gray street into another, more magical realm.
Among people who watch birds, it’s often the case that a first bird love, the so-called “spark bird,” draws them forever down the bright and rambling path of birding. For Aimee, it was the peacocks in her grandmother’s backyard in southern India. For Kerri, it was a whooper swan above Inch Island, in County Donegal, the year the peace process began. For Windhorse, it was the Baltimore orioles flitting about in the high branches of poplars at his grandfather’s house up north, on the lake. For Meera, it was the red-winged blackbird, there at the feeder, when she was small. Her mom told her the name, and it all clicked into place—black bird, red wings—as she learned the game of language and how we match it to the world around us.
Taking the Long View: Why There Might Still Be Hope For the Earth’s Oceans
First, they were bright white dots moving in the distance between sea and sky. Then, as I reached the end of the land at the cliff’s edge, the gannets were everywhere. From eyeline to the waterline six hundred feet below, huge birds filled all the available space. They followed invisible contours through the air in every direction and on every horizontal plane. Somehow, silently, they knew to steer to avoid each other, their black-tipped wings never touching. Those not in flight were sitting on every piece of cliff with room to land. They were lined up on ledges, one bird deep, and the flatter patches of scree were studded in nests, always spaced a sharp beak’s biting distance apart.
If someone told me this was all the gannets there are, every last one of them, coming to nest on these very cliffs, I might easily have believed it. But other colonies exist on both sides of the Atlantic, some even bigger than this one, and all of them in places where the surrounding ocean contains enough prolific life and food to sustain so many parents and hungry chicks. Gannets dive from great heights to hunt beneath the surface, folding their wings back and piercing the water with their arrowlike heads. Air sacs under their skin, like a subdermal cloak of bubble wrap, protect their bodies from the impact of hundred-foot dives. The ammoniacal tang of guano that wafted from the colony told me about the ocean’s immense productivity and all the fish they’ve been catching.
Atomic Fallacy: Why Nuclear Power Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis
I am scared about how fast climate change is disrupting our world. At a theoretical level, I have known for decades about growing carbon dioxide emissions and resultant changes to global and local temperatures, sea-level rise, severe storms, wildfires, and so on. But it was not till 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit the northeast of the United States, that I was directly impacted. The power of that storm was immense, but I knew—theoretically, of course—that people elsewhere had experienced far worse storms.
More recently—in August 2023, as I was finishing this book—it was the turn of wildfires. As the McDougall Creek wildfire came closer to the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Kelowna, students and staff were asked to evacuate. My daughter Shruti is a student there. Because it was summer, she was at home in the Vancouver campus of UBC, where I teach. Had the fires occurred just two weeks later, I would have definitely been panicking.
What Greenland’s Melting Ice Tells Us About the History and Future of Global Warming
April 4, 2019, in Copenhagen was almost a T-shirt day. Such warmth in early spring is unusual for Denmark. But this is a country where climate change has driven up average temperatures nearly 3°F since 1875. I, though, am decidedly not warm. Standing inside a walk-in freezer bigger than many people’s homes, my teeth are chattering loudly enough that I am sure the dozen or so scientists near me can hear them. It’s well below zero as the fog from my breath slowly covers my beard in frost. Here, the temperature is always the same.
This glistening, windowless freezer was purpose built to store ice. Not the ice you use to cool drinks, although you could—and some have done exactly that—but long cores of ice extracted from the world’s great ice sheets and glaciers. Over more than six decades, teams of drillers and scientists living and working in some of the most challenging conditions on Earth—places where bare skin freezes solid in minutes, where the sun never sets at the height of summer and doesn’t rise in the dead of winter—collected the ice stored here.
