For several weeks this summer, across many parts of the country, it was downright dangerous to be outside, whether because of smoke from distant wildfires or because of oppressive heat — or both. And that’s before one calculated the odds of becoming the victim of a particular tornado, rain bomb, or hurricane.
These are not the vibes of the “summer” we associate with “summer reading,” so what sort of book is appropriate for the summers we now face? For August’s bookshelf, Yale Climate Connections offers a tentative answer to this question.
In our new climate change summers, a harrowing book like Jeff Goodell’s “The Heat Will Kill You First” is a New York Times bestseller. The quirky, offbeat history book recounts how politics twisted Americans’ perceptions of climate science. And books on natural history suggest ways other species and their fragile ecosystems might somehow survive human-caused climate change.
In this new kind of summer, local color is provided by titles that explain how an octopus appeared in a Miami parking garage, or how Charleston, South Carolina, could adapt to rising sea levels without deepening the burdens borne by its citizens of color. Travelogues, on the other hand, revisit famed but sometimes questionable infrastructure projects of the past, like dams, or describe how climate change will impact different locales and the ways they might adapt.
Hobbies, like gardening and birding, are still pursued in the climate-changed future, but they are complicated by a sense of fragility, by feelings of loss, or by new concerns for social justice.
The same could be said of the fiction we read in these new summers. When the ocean is warmer than one’s bath and the heat-index on land is potentially life-threatening, will we still be looking for good “beach reads”?
So much has already happened in the summer of 2023 that we may need to revise our understanding of the season — and the kind of books we associate with it.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell (Little, Brown & Co., 2023, 400 pages, $29.00)
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110 °F. A heat wave, environmental reporter Jeff Goodell explains, is a predatory event — one that culls the most vulnerable people. But as heat waves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Goodell’s new book tackles the big questions and shows how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial by David Lipsky (W.W.W. Norton 2023, 496 pages, $32.50)
In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: “Al Gore’s New Home: Honk If You Love Climate Change.” In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme to the other. Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo traces the long, strange march of climate science and delivers a real-life tragicomedy — one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and American character.
The Rescue Effect: The Key to Saving Life on Earth by Michael Mehta Webster (Timber Press 2022, 296 pages, $28.00)
As climate change intensifies, the outlook for life on Earth often seems bleak. Yet hope for the future can be found in the “rescue effect,” which is nature’s innate ability to help organisms persist during hard times. In The Rescue Effect, Michael Mehta Webster reveals the science behind nature’s inherent resilience, through compelling stories of species adapting to the changing world — including tigers in the jungles of India, cichlid fish in the great lakes of Africa, and corals in the Caribbean. Webster argues there are good reasons to expect a bright future, because we can see evidence that nature can rescue many species, and when nature alone is not up to the task, we can help. The Rescue Effect provides the cautious optimism we need to help save life on Earth.
Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience by Rob Verchick (Columbia University Press 2023, 288 pages, $32.00)
One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus — and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded—is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps. Rob Verchick examines how we can manage the risks we can no longer avoid. Although reducing CO2 emissions is essential, we need to address the damage we have already caused, especially for disadvantaged communities. Engaging and accessible, The Octopus in the Parking Garage empowers readers to face the climate crisis and shows what we can do to adapt and thrive.
Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford (Pegasus Books 2023, 336 pages, $28.95)
At least 13 million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound these problems. In her new book, legal scholar Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America’s painful racial history and now stands at the intersection of climate and race. With its explosive gentrification, Charleston illustrates our tendency to value development above all else. But Charleston also stands for the need to change our ways—to build higher, drier, densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely.
Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World by Steven Hawley (Patagonia Books 2023, 320 pages, $28.00)
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the messy truth about the legacy of last century’s dam-building binge has come to light. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices. Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World is a speed date with the history of water control. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world is well beyond the benefits furnished. But success stories elsewhere point to a possible future where rivers run free and the Earth restores itself.
Climate Travels: How Ecotourism Changes Mindsets and Motivates Action by Michael M. Gunter, Jr. (Columbia University Press 2023, 360 pages, $30.00 paperback)
Many accounts of climate change depict disasters striking faraway places. How can seeing the consequences of human impacts up close help us grasp how global warming affects us and our neighbors? Michael M. Gunter, Jr. takes readers around the United States to bear witness to the many faces of the climate crisis: sea level rise in Virginia, floods in Tennessee, Maine lobsters migrating away from American waters, and imperiled ecosystems in national parks, from Alaskan permafrost to the Florida Keys. But Gunter also finds inspiring initiatives to mitigate and adapt to these threats. By showing how travel can help bring the reality of climate change home, Gunter offers readers a hopeful message about how to take action on the local level themselves.
Avid travelers should also check out A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World by David Gessner (Torrey House Press 2023, 320 pages, $21.95 paperback).
Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life by Scott Chaskey (Milkweed Editions 2023, 264 pages, 18.00 paperback)
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. He has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy communities. In this lively collection of essays, Chaskey explores the evolution of his perspective — as a farmer and as a poet. He recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. “Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic” — Scott Chaskey has given us a seed of hope and regeneration.
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper (Random House 2023, 304 pages, $28.00)
Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd) who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives. While in the park one morning in May 2020, an encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s video of the incident went viral. In his new book, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, Better Living Through Birding shares what birds can teach us about life, if we would look and listen.
No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet, edited by D.A. Baden (Habitat Press 2022, 352 pages, $8.95 paperback)
A collection of inspiring, funny, dark, mysterious, tragic, romantic, dramatic, upbeat and fantastical short stories. These 24 stories are written by a variety of authors, with the aim to inspire readers with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we might get there. The stories are diverse in style, ranging from whodunnits to sci-fi, romance to family drama, comedy to tragedy, and cover a range of solution types from high-tech to nature-based solutions, to more systemic aspects relating to our culture and political economy. ‘There’s an abundance of imagination in these stories,” says climate activist Bill McKibben. “They’ll make you think again, and in new ways, about the predicament of the planet and its people.”
The Deluge: A Novel by Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster 2023, 896 pages, $32.50)
In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock even as an ecological crisis advances. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters — a drug addict, an advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, a religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of history. A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.
Thirsty Animals: A Novel by Rachelle Atalla (Hachette Press, 2023, 368 pages, $29.95)
The world is running out of water. With the supply in the Scottish cities drying up, Aida is forced back home to live with her mum at their rural farm. For now, they are safe, with just enough to get by. Yet at the border, tensions are close to breaking point as more and more southerners chase the delusion that Scotland is an eternal spring. The service station where Aida works grows emptier every day. When suspicious strangers arrive at the farm asking for help, Aida and her family face a terrible decision: How much water can they afford to share? Then the taps are turned off. Can they survive long enough for the rain to come? Devastating and thought-provoking, Thirsty Animals takes us on a compelling journey of survival and self-discovery.