A team of climate-focused journalists has released a seven-book reading list spanning fiction and nonfiction, highlighting works that probe ecological collapse, industrial ambition, forest histories, pollution and the hidden worlds of fungi. The selections range from contemporary novels set in near- and far‑future crises to award‑winning investigations and science writing.
The choices matter beyond the page: they mirror policy debates now playing out under the United Nations climate and biodiversity processes, as countries balance industrial strategies, forest protection, chemical controls and public health. From negotiations under the Paris Agreement to national climate‑risk assessments, these books trace how states, markets and communities wrestle with ecological limits-terrain that global institutions and national courts routinely navigate.
Climate fiction that interrogates statehood, memory and extraction
“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan imagines the year 2119 after cascading climate disasters, a nuclear-triggered global tsunami and AI‑driven wars halve humanity. The United States has vanished; the United Kingdom survives as scattered islands. A scholar’s hunt for a single lost poem becomes a meditation on cultural memory in a broken world and on which nations, and narratives, endure. In this speculative future, Nigeria emerges as a 22nd‑century superpower that decrypts and archives the “historical internet,” raising questions about privacy, power and who writes the record-questions that echo today’s fights over digital governance and access to climate data.
“Greenwood” by Michael Christie opens in 2038 with a dendrologist guiding elites through one of the planet’s last great forests, then leaps back to 1934 to trace a timber dynasty’s rifts. The through line is extraction-how fortunes built on trees bind families and landscapes across generations, and how shifting public sentiments and regulation challenge models that treat forests as inexhaustible stock.
Annie Proulx’s “Barkskins” (2016) spans three centuries from the 1600s, following descendants of two immigrants to what becomes modern‑day Quebec, across North America and along trade routes from China to New Zealand. The novel’s sheer scope-Amsterdam coffee houses, merchant empires, Indigenous communities-tracks the global machinery that accelerated deforestation and its social costs, showing how colonial legal systems and commercial charters normalized the conversion of forest into profit.
Nonfiction that maps policy, industry and ecosystems
“The Joyful Environmentalist: How to Practise Without Preaching” by Isabel Losada argues for delight and persistence amid daily eco‑frustrations, from cutlery at grocery food courts to small digital habits that can trim data‑center loads. The tone is pragmatic, not doctrinaire, reflecting a civic ethos that often complements formal regulation and offering readers entry points that sit alongside, rather than substitute for, structural change.
“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang situates statecraft in engineering culture. It describes how leaders trained as engineers shape an economy that “builds and builds,” including a clean‑tech sector that leads “in almost every conceivable category,” while surveying other domains of industrial policy. Born in China and educated in North America before living in China from 2017 to 2023, Wang writes for readers tracking the current contest between fossil‑fuel incumbency and clean‑tech deployment-and how decisions on grids, standards and manufacturing capacity ripple through global climate negotiations and trade disputes.
Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures” explores underground networks and human encounters with them, from a J.P. Morgan banker who popularized psilocybin in 1957 to the author’s own participation in an LSD brain‑study. The book suggests intelligence is relational, extending beyond individual organisms to the webs that connect them:
“We humans became as clever as we are, so the argument goes, because we were entangled within a demanding flurry of interaction,” Sheldrake writes.
By reframing intelligence and agency as distributed, the book offers a quiet challenge to policy frameworks that still treat species and habitats as discrete units rather than interdependent systems.
Dan Fagin’s “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” reconstructs how a chemical plant that arrived in 1952 became synonymous with toxic discharges and a community’s fear of childhood cancers. The narrative follows local organizing, epidemiological sleuthing and regulatory scrutiny, illustrating how scientific evidence eventually forces changes in permitting, enforcement and corporate behavior. The book also points to corporate transformation, noting that Ciba later became Ciba‑Geigy and, after a 1996 merger, Novartis-reminding readers that corporate identities can evolve faster than long‑lived contaminants.
How the selections intersect with global governance and law
These titles collectively traverse the institutions, norms and tradeoffs that define international environmental action and national rulemaking:
- Forests and land use: The novels about timber and dwindling woodlands speak to mechanisms countries use to value and conserve forests, including results‑based finance approaches and safeguards recognized under the UN climate regime for reducing deforestation and forest degradation. They resonate with current assessments that highlight accelerating forest loss and climate impacts on the African continent and beyond, as documented in the World Meteorological Organization’s latest “State of the Climate in Africa 2024” report, which links extreme events to food insecurity and displacement.[1]
- Industry and technology: The portrait of state‑led engineering ambition aligns with debates over clean‑energy supply chains, standards and market access that are typically addressed through multilateral forums and national industrial policies. It also parallels wider findings that 2024 ranked among the warmest years on record globally, underscoring why industrial policy is now a frontline climate tool.[2]
- Chemicals and pollution: The Toms River account echoes why hazardous‑waste and persistent‑pollutant controls are embedded in international conventions and in domestic permitting and enforcement systems. It underscores how community‑level cases can inform stricter standards and remediation obligations decades after industrial facilities break ground.
- Biodiversity and science: Sheldrake’s fungi narrative underscores how ecosystem interdependence features in national biodiversity strategies and in research that informs conservation targets. Its focus on networks, rather than isolated species, mirrors the shift in many national plans toward protecting ecological connectivity and nature‑based solutions.
- Civic behavior: Losada’s focus on everyday choices complements, but does not replace, statutory and regulatory action-illustrating the interplay between personal conduct and formal rulemaking. For policymakers, it offers a reminder that public buy‑in and cultural narratives shape the pace and durability of climate and environmental reforms.
At a glance: the seven books
- “What We Can Know” – Ian McEwan: a 2119 quest for a lost poem in a world remade by climate catastrophe and war, with Nigeria portrayed as a superpower that has decrypted the historical internet and assumed custodianship over fragmented human memory.
- “Greenwood” – Michael Christie: a 2038 forest guide’s story that reaches back to 1934 to map a family’s entanglement with logging and conservation, mirroring shifts from frontier extraction to contested stewardship.
- “Barkskins” – Annie Proulx (2016): three centuries of deforestation and commerce from Quebec across global trade routes, and their effects on Indigenous communities, colonial law and emerging environmental awareness.
- “The Joyful Environmentalist: How to Practise Without Preaching” – Isabel Losada: practical, upbeat approaches to everyday environmental action that sit alongside, and sometimes anticipate, formal policy measures.
- “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” – Dan Wang: engineering culture as statecraft and a clean‑tech push positioned against fossil‑fuel incumbency, with implications for trade, supply chains and climate diplomacy.
- “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures” – Merlin Sheldrake: the social life of fungi and human minds, from mycelial networks to lab studies, inviting readers to rethink where agency and resilience reside in living systems.
- “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” – Dan Fagin: a community’s confrontation with industrial waste and a corporate lineage that culminates in Novartis after a 1996 merger, illustrating how local cases can reshape national standards for environmental health.
Under the United Nations climate process, the UNFCCC registry for Nationally Determined Contributions remains open for Parties to file and update pledges, turning many of the tensions explored in these books-over land, industry, pollution, biodiversity and civic engagement-into binding or politically salient commitments that governments must periodically review and strengthen.
