With climate change dominating our daily lives, it's no surprise that writers are tackling one of the most pressing and world-changing issues of our time. However, these authors are not all doom and gloom—themes of resilience and renewal shine in both fiction and nonfiction abound. Ranging in tone from irreverent to meditative, the following four books will challenge you to see our natural world and climate change from a global perspective and imagine a future beyond our current crisis.
In an attempt to overcoming what is being termed "climate anxiety," Andrew Boyd gets personal in I Want a Better Catastrophe, sharing his struggles with mental health and anxiety in the face of climate crisis with relatable, offbeat humor and searing insight gained from decades of experience as an activist for peace and environmental justice. In a series of essays, he turns to experts like a psychologist who studies disasters and an Indigenous botanist and asks them, "What comes next…and how do we get there?"
Award-winning cartoonist and investigative journalist Joe Sacco travels to the northern Canada to learn from the Dene First Nation, whose traditional lands include the Deh-Cho (so-called the Makenzie River Valley). Paying the Land explores a concept that has informed Dene culture for centuries: that the land owns them and therefore they owe the land care and respect. Sacco's crisp black and white illustrations center Indigenous voices, sharing stories of a community in crisis. He uncovers the tension between present day fracking industry in the sub-Arctic and the injustice of land theft by European settlers and later the Canadian government's horrific residential school programs, and how the Dene continue the generational project of recovering.
Novelist Suyi Davies Okungbowa's novella Lost Ark Dreaming was inspired by his life in Lagos, Nigeria, watching the flooding and erosion of the coastline and the unsafe working conditions during the development of a human-made luxury island just beyond, as well as the violent displacement of unhoused communities from the waterfront. In his imagined future not too removed from our own, sea levels rise, drowning those who cannot make it to the safety of kilometers-tall luxury buildings. In the aftermath, a new and equally fracture society of elites and workers form, but divisions create danger as the water itself begins to seek retribution. Despite the danger, hope and committed action to justice and a better future for all shine through this short but imaginative and powerfully moving story.
The Old Woman and the River is set the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s. Iraq is desolate: its climate ravaged and its people impoverished, imprisoned, or killed. Yet in the southeast, a mysterious stretch of river teams with improbable life, tended to by an old woman who lives in solitude. This gentle and compassionate literary novel in translation by beloved Kuwaiti novelist Ismāʿīl Fahd Ismāʿīl (1940-2018) acknowledges the ecological cost of war and honors the role elders play in preserving cultural memory and rebuilding community after a crisis.
Looking for more? Check out the rest of the Book Bingo NW 2024: Environmental list.
For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk BookBingoNW2024 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2024 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures.
~ posted by Billie B.
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