Yale Climate Connections’ bookshelf for February begins with a title that beautifully captures the mission of climate activism during Black History Month.
“People the Planet Needs Now” tells the stories of 25 scientists and activists working to protect and support their Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in a changing climate.
The shoulders on which these younger folk stand are partially revealed by the next two environmental justice-related titles: the new memoir by Catherine Coleman Flowers and the recently released classic by Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright.
The Bullard and Wright book provides a bridge of sorts to the more academic titles that follow, works that shift the focus from “environmental justice” to “climate justice.”
Among this second set of three titles, the new book by prolific legal scholar Cass Sunstein is likely to garner the most attention. Readers can get a preview of his take on climate justice from his interview with The New York Times’ climate columnist, David Wallace-Wells. “Not Just White, Not Just Green” and “Climate Justice and the University” complement Sunstein’s philosophical overview with deeper dives into environmental history and higher education.
Critical social histories make up the third rank, with new titles on “land power,” the Caribbean, and an activist, anti-consumerist “church” in the Alphabet City neighborhood of New York City.
This month’s selections end with three recently published volumes of climate fiction: Library of America’s new collection of Afrofuturist stories and new novels from East Africa and Indigenous Australia. The two novels, it should be noted, made the long list for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize. The short list for the prize will be announced next month; the winning title will be named in May.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.
Editor’s note: In just the last seven monthly bookshelves, Yale Climate Connections has included six titles from Island Press: “Multisolving” by Elizabeth Sawin, “Atlas of a Threatened Planet” by Esther Gonstalla, “The Heat and the Fury” by Peter Schwartzstein, “Threat Multiplier” by Sherri Goodwin, “Inclusive Transportation” by Veronica Davis, and “Smaller Cities Within a Shrinking World” by Alan Mallach. From Feb. 24 through March 2, the e-book versions of these titles – and almost all other Island Press titles – can be purchased for $4.99 each at their website. (The discounted price shows up in the cart.)
People the Planet Needs Now: Voices for Justice, Science and a Future of Promise by Dudley Edmundson (Adventure Books 2025, 264 pages, $30.00)
Heroes among us are fighting for a better world – and many of them are Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color (BIPOC). Acclaimed author and photographer Dudley Edmondson has interviewed 25 Black and Brown scientists, environmental justice activists, and social justice activists to inspire change on a global scale. Along with the full-color photographs, his book offers a rare opportunity to see and hear from BIPOC scientists and activists about problems with “traditional” science and the current methods of addressing everything from climate change to city design. Black and Brown people around the globe have an interdependent relationship with nature, and their perspectives can help us push for positive change. People the Planet Needs Now strives to inspire difference-makers to create a better world together.
Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers (Spiegel & Grau 2025, 240 pages, $28.00)
Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for vulnerable communities deprived of the right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. From climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. Flowers’s faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home. Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action – for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.
See also Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy (Simon & Schuster 2023/2024, 364 pages, $19.99 paperback)
The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities by Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright (New York University Press 2012/2023, 313 pages, $19.99 paperback)
When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly Black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. In The Wrong Complexion for Protection, Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright place the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. They assess how the government responded to different emergencies and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. Uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response, they argue, can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.
Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, edited by Mary E. Mendoza and Tracy Brynne Voyles (University of Nebraska Press 2025, 536 pages, $35.00 paperback)
Environmental history has been defined as the study of the changing relationships between humans and the environment – or nature. Not Just Green, Not Just White aims to redefine the field, arguing that neither humans nor the environment are monolithic actors. Both are diverse, and often the environment causes conflict between and among peoples, leaving unequal access and power in its wake. Just as important, these histories often reveal how, despite unequal power, those who carry less privilege still persist. Together these essays in this volume reveal how, when practitioners in the field move away from “green” and “white” topics, they will be able to explain much more about our collective past than anyone ever imagined.
Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World by Cass Sunstein (The MIT Press 2025, 216 pages, $29.95)
If you’re injuring someone, you should stop – and pay for the damage you’ve caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking, renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what’s at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when or where they live – which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor, particularly vulnerable, nations.
Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future for All by Jennie C. Stephens
Higher education can play a powerful role in addressing the intersecting crises of climate change and inequality. Institutions of higher education hold untapped potential to advance social justice and reduce climate injustices. However, universities are not yet structured to accelerate social change for the public good. In Climate Justice and the University, Jennie Stephens reimagines the potential of higher education to advance human well-being and promote ecological health. Drawing on over thirty years of experience working on the climate crisis within higher education, invites readers to collectively reimagine different priorities and structures within higher education, and suggests ways to shape a more equitable future for all.
See also Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education by Tom Roderick (Harvard Education Press 2023, 296 pages, $39.00 paperback)
Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How that Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus (Basic Books 336 pages, $30.00)
Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, in the forms of Soviet and Maoist collectivization. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis – and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe (Doubleday, 384 pages, $35.00)
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But the Caribbean people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe charts the forces that shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of enslaved people who mined the islands’ bounty – all for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Through the lens of the Caribbean, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. But his book is also a declaration of hope and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.
The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance by George Gonzalez (NYU Press 2024, 352 pages, $35.00 paperback)
Since the dawn of the new millennium, the grassroots performance activist group the Stop Shopping Church has advanced a sophisticated anticapitalist critique in what they call “Earth Justice.” Led by cofounders, Reverend Billy and Savitri D, the Church of Stop Shopping have performed at festivals around the world. While maintaining an anti-consumerism stance at its core, the community also works for racial justice, queer liberation, sanctuary for immigrants, reclaiming public space, and environmental justice. Sociologist George González uses the group to showcase the links between religion, capitalist consumerism, and climate catastrophe and to analyze the ways consumers are ritualized into accepting the consequences.
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, edited by andre m. carrington (Library of America 2025, 384 pages, $24.95 paperback)
With Afrofuturist pioneers like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, a new generation of Black writers is fashioning a renaissance in speculative fiction. Edited and introduced by SF expert andré m. carrington, The Black Fantastic brings together Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Tiptree/Otherwise, and World Fantasy Award winners with emerging voices to showcase this watershed moment in American literature. Here are twenty beguiling, unsettling, and visionary stories spanning the cosmos and a dazzling array of alternate timelines. Reimagining the past and laying claim to the future, these writers bring forth kaleidoscopic new visions of Black identity and creative freedom in stories that are, by turns, comic, provocative, and terrifying.
Water Baby: A Novel by Chioma Okereke (Quercus Books 2024/2025, 17.99 paperback)
In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, nineteen-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her. With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of her community. Then a video of her at work goes viral and Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined – including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along?
Praiseworthy: A Novel by Alexis Wright (New Directions 2024, 672 pages, $22.95)
In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, studies butterflies and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality – a cry of outrage against oppression, greed, and assimilation.
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