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Readers' Advisory: Climate Change - Popular Reading

This LibGuide helps librarians and library patrons quickly connect with popular and relevant books and eBooks by genre, theme, medium, or language.

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The Overstory by Richard Powers

"An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers - each summoned in different ways by trees - are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also an evocation of - and paean to - the natural world." #Conservation #Deforestation #EnvironmentalProtection #Fiction #Forest #Plants #Trees

CLI-FI : Canadian tales of climate change / edited by Bruce Meyer

"With the world facing the greatest global crisis of all time - climate change - personal and political indifference has wrought a series of unfolding complications that are altering our planet, and threatening our very existence. Reacting to the warnings sounded by scientists and thinkers, writers are responding imaginatively to the seriousness of changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself. These stories of Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) feature perspectives by culturally diverse Canadian writers of short fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and futurist works, and transcend traditional doomsday stories by inspiring us to overcome the bleak forecasted results of our current indifference." #Anthology #Canada #ClimateChange #Fiction #ShortStories #eBook

After world : a novel / Debbie Urbanski

A sentient AI determines that all humans must be eliminated as the root of climate change and leaves a woman named Sen as a "witness" to record her observations on the end of humanity as the world begins to rewild. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ClimateChange #Consciousness #Fiction #Witness

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

[Paperback edition] "As London is submerged below flood waters, an unnamed woman must take to the road with her newborn son in search of safety." #Baby #ClimateChange #Disaster #Fiction #Flooding #London #Motherhood #NewMother #Survival

Hardcover edition

eBook edition (3 Users)

Afterglow : climate fiction for future ancestors / edited by Grist

"Hopeful and forward-looking futuristic short stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need." #21stCentury #ClimateChange #Fiction #LiteraryCollection #ScienceFiction #eBook

No one is talking about this : a novel / Patricia Lockwood

"From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary." #ClimateChange #Fame #Fiction #Internet #SocialMedia #SocialMediaFigure

Banzeiro òkòtó : the Amazon as the centre of the world

"In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from Sao Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to 'reforest' herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies. Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Okoto is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them." #Amazon #Amazonians #Brazil #Brazilians #Nonfiction #SocialMovement #SouthAmericanIndians #XinguRiverValley

Universities on fire : higher education in the climate crisis / Bryan Alexander

"Scientists agree that we are on the precipice of a global climate crisis. How will it transform colleges and universities? In 2019, intense fires in the San Francisco Bay Area closed universities and drove afflicted people to shelter at other campuses. At the same time, extraordinary fires ravaged eastern Australia. Several universities responded by promising material and research support to damaged businesses while also hosting refugees and emergency response teams in student residence halls. This was an echo of the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on Tulane University in 2005.In Universities on Fire, futurist Bryan Alexander explores higher education during an age of unfolding climate crisis. Powered by real-world examples and the latest research, Alexander assesses practical responses and strategies by surveying contemporary programs and academic climate research from around the world. He establishes a model of how academic institutions may respond and offers practical pathways forward for higher education. How will the two main purposes of education-teaching and research-change as the world heats up?" #ClimateChange #Communication #EnvironmentalEducation #HigherEducation #Nonfiction #eBook

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration

"The untold story of climate migration-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future." #ClimateChange #EnvironmentalRefugees #ForcedMigration #Nonfiction

eBook edition (3 Users)

A house between Earth and the moon / Rebecca Scherm

"The gripping story of one scientist in outer space, another who watches over him, the family left behind, and the lengths people will go to protect the people and planet they love. Scientist Alex Welch-Peters has believed for twenty years that his super-algae can reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardized his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When Sensus, the colossal tech company, offers him a chance to complete his research, he seizes the opportunity. The catch? His lab will be in outer space on Parallaxis, the first-ever luxury residential space station built for billionaires. Alex and six other scientists leave their loved ones to become Pioneers, the beta tenants of Parallaxis. But Parallaxis is not the space palace they were sold. Day and night, the embittered crew builds the facility under pressure from Sensus, motivated by the promise that their families will join them. Meanwhile, back on Earth, with much of the country ablaze in wildfires, Alex's family tries to remain safe in Michigan. His teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, struggles through high school with the help of the ubiquitous Sensus phones implanted in everyone's ears, archiving each humiliation, and wishing she could go to Parallaxis with her father-but her mother will never allow it. The Pioneers are the beta testers of another program, too. As they toil away two hundred miles in the sky, Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behavior. Tess, a young social psychologist Sensus has hired to watch the Pioneers through their phones, begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When she takes it a step further-traveling to Parallaxis to observe them up close-the controlled experiment begins to unravel." #Fiction #HumanBehavior #Science #Scientists #SpaceStations #TeenageGirls

The climate action handbook : a visual guide to 100 climate solutions for everyone / Heidi A. Roop

"Every Action Matters will lay out the issues facing the planet and offer up 100 important actions that readers can take to help slow the adverse affects of climate change. Each action will get a spread and be accompanied by an infographic, statistic, or display quote to provide visual impact to the topic at hand." #ClimateChange #EnviromentalProtection #Nonfiction #Solutions #eBook

Fire weather : a true story from a hotter world / John Vaillant

"In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires-and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes." #ClimateChange #ForestFires #NorthAmerica #Nonfiction #Wildfires

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