Earth Week Reading List: Additional Reading

In celebration of Earth Week, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores are pleased to present a series of reading lists addressing environmental issues and the challenges of sustainability. These lists are organized as part of UChicago ECo, a platform aimed at fostering connection among and support for the University of Chicago’s Environmental Community. You can find the full schedule of Earth Week events organized by UChicago ECo here, and learn how our shared community is thinking rigorously about environmental impact and ways to leverage data, practices, policies and creativity to help combat climate change. 

Following our "Introductory Course" and "Seasoned Scholar" bibliographies, we've compiled the following list of "Additional Reading." Think of it as the supplementary section of a syllabus that my well spark new interests, essay topics, or career paths. As contemporary environmental crises reveal the deeply interconnected nature of such phenomena as cultural practices, economic systems, biodiversity, and climate change, so environmental studies have demanded a radically interdisciplinary approach. Our list reflects this interdisciplinarity, drawing from such fields as environmental science, political economy, history, poetry, and literary criticism. These books will provide a representative sampling of recent artistic and academic work, and inspire you to chart new courses of study for yourself. 

The Moth Snowstorm, by Michael McCarthy - The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author's first love: nature. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature's abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world.Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love. An award-winning environmental journalist, McCarthy presents a clear, well-documented picture of what he calls "the great thinning" around the world, while interweaving the story of his own early discovery of the wilderness and a childhood saved by nature. Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author's long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.

Landmarks, by Robert MacFarlane - For years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles. In this, his fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and literary terrain of the British archipelago, from the Shetlands to Cornwall and from Cumbria to Suffolk, offering themed glossaries of hundreds of these rare, deeply local, poetical terms, organized by such geographical terrains as flatlands, uplands, waterlands, coastlands, woodlands, and underlands. Interspersed with this archive of place words are biographical essays in which Macfarlane writes of his favorite authors who have paid close attention to the natural world and who embody in their own work the huge richness of place language--from Barry Lopez and John Muir to Nan Shepard, J. A. Baker, and Roger Deakin. Landmarks is a book about the power of language and how it can become a way to know and love landscape, from a writer acclaimed for his own precision of utterance and distinctive, lyrical voice.

A Shakespearean Botanical, by Margaret Willes - A Shakespearean Botanical follows in the tradition of the medieval and Renaissance herbal, touring the Bard's remarkable knowledge of the fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers of Tudor and Jacobean England through fifty quotations from his plays and verse poems. Each of the entries is beautifully illustrated with hand-colored renderings from the work of Shakespeare's contemporary, herbalist John Gerard, making an appropriate pairing with his writing, along with a brief text setting the quotation within the context of the medicine, cooking, and gardening of the time. The book's many beautifully reproduced images are a pleasure to look at, and Margaret Willes's well-chosen quotations and expert knowledge of Shakespeare's England provide readers with a fascinating insight into daily life. The book will make an inspiring addition to the Shakespeare lover's bookshelf, as well as capitvate anyone with a passion for plants or botanical art.

Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, by Rob Dunn - However domesticated our houses appear, they are wild beyond imagination. Look down in the basement, up in the attic, under the floorboards, and even in the showerhead, and you'll find life everywhere. Biologist Rob Dunn and his team have done it in homes worldwide, and they found nearly 200,000 species!In Never Home Alone, Dunn introduces us to these tiny tenants and shows us how -- in almost every case -- they make our lives better, and explains why trying to eradicate the bad ones just makes our lives worse. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory, and just plain fun book will look at their home, or the life in it, in the same way again.

This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein - In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It's an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not--and cannot--fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift--a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. 

End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, by Dahr Jamail - After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis--from Alaska to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest--in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet's wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.

What Are People For?, by Wendell Berry - Ranging from America's insatiable consumerism and household economies to literary subjects and America's attitude toward waste, here Berry gracefully navigates from one topic to the next. He speaks candidly about the ills plaguing America and the growing gap between people and the land. Despite the somber nature of these essays, Berry's voice and prose provide an underlying sense of faith and hope. He frames his reflections with poetic responsibility, standing up as a firm believer in the power of the human race not only to fix its past mistakes but to build a future that will provide a better life for all.

Petals of Blood, by Ngugi Wa Thiongo - The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time. First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.

New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson - As the sea levels rose, every street In New York became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. The residents adapted and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides. And how we too will change.

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward - A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.