Some Book Recommendations!
Over on Instagram, we sometimes offer recommendations of things to read, watch, or listen to. In particular, we’ve made a handful of book recommendations. Here they are, grouped together for your convenience!
Of these four, three are nonfiction and one is a novel. Three have an environmental focus, and one is more of a human-life-and-satisfaction focus. They’ve been best-sellers. They’ve been reviewed by and featured in prestigious papers. They’ve won awards—including a Pulitzer Prize. They’ve been described as everything from “wonderfully honest” to “provocative and joyous” to “science in action,” and lots more.
Without further ado, here they are.
Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard)
Finding the Mother Tree is a fascinating book about forests and the complex webs of connections within them.
The book details how forests form complicated networks among members, sharing resources and passing information from tree to tree in a structure sometimes called the Wood Wide Web.
Simard comes from a logging family and has experience working with loggers and trying to reform logging practices to be more sustainable, often facing fierce opposition from within the industry. This is a great example of someone doing their best to leave a clean wake under very challenging circumstances!
Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
We all have a limited amount of time on this earth: about four thousand weeks. That’s just part of being human. But what do you do with your four thousand weeks to make the most of them?
From the book’s blurb: “Rejecting the futile modern obsession with ‘getting everything done,’ Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude.”
Try as you might, you can’t do everything, and trying is likely to bring more stress than satisfaction as the pressure to do more, faster, better never abates.
Burkeman offers an alternative to the culturally-dominant (at least in many places in the US) ways of thinking about time and time management. It’s a refreshing departure from the deluge of advice on how to constantly increase your productivity, giving you permission to rethink how you approach time management to do so with greater intention and clarity.
The Overstory (Richard Powers)
This phenomenal novel follows nine Americans across multiple generations, all of whose lives are profoundly touched by trees, and whose narratives intertwine to address environmental activism and the ongoing destruction of forests.
Along the way, characters must deal with fierce opposition from loggers, policy-makers, scientists, and more. Like our previous forest-book recommendation, Finding the Mother Tree, this novel is a brilliant example of people doing their best to leave a clean wake under incredibly difficult circumstances.
Now more than ever, protecting our forests is crucial. Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, provide habitat for wildlife, and are beautiful areas for human recreation. We strongly encourage you to contact your government representatives and urge them to take a stand to preserve forests!
And as for The Overstory, we cannot recommend this book highly enough.
What if We Get it Right? (Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson structures this excellent book around a series of fascinating and wide-ranging interviews with scientists, activists, and climate pioneers in a variety of fields. The common thread is the book’s titular question: What if we get this whole “dealing with climate change” thing right? (Or at least, as right as we can at this point, considering all the damage that’s already been done.)
It’s painfully easy (especially for those already somewhat prone to cynicism) to fall into the doom-and-gloom trap when it comes to the climate conversation. Dr. Johnson’s book is an important and timely reminder that all is not lost—there are always things we can do to try to preserve what’s left of our planet and our future, and there are always people fighting to do the right thing.
If you read any of these books, we’d love to know what you think of them! Bonus points if you get them from your local library or purchase from an independent bookstore rather than supporting (shudder) Amazon. And if you have book recommendations of your own, we’re all ears.