100 Books Like The Tantrum That Saved the World

This picture book memoir based on her New York Times best-selling adult memoir, How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, introduces young readers to some of the incredible animals that have influenced the author throughout her lifetime and challenges us all to look at our relationships with animals differently.

What lessons have animals taught us—whether it’s our domesticated pets at home or animals you’ve seen in nature? How can animals make us better versions of ourselves? This beautifully told story by one of the greatest nature writers of our time shows us simply just how much animals have to teach us if we only pay close attention.

Facts matter to kids, of course, and library shelves groan with attempts to distill climate causes and effects down to child-sized volumes. For middle graders, visual encyclopedia-style nonfiction can work well, covering broad ranges of information from atmospheric chemistry to statistics on carbon emissions sources in photo-rich chunks. 

But I’ve seen younger readers wince at graphic pictures of bleached coral or violent wildfires. Pen and acrylic drawings soften this book’s approach, supporting student learning by avoiding traumatic imagery. The polar bear theme draws readers in yet gradually widens to encompass people and places affected near home.

My special kudos for spreads that explain scientific concepts, like the greenhouse effect, with accurate prose and illustrations abounding with life. 

As a lifelong biography reader and sometime biography writer, I planned to recommend one of the many fine children’s works about Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The teen’s brave protests have sparked an international movement demanding climate action for the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s children.

But this book is even better. Greta’s story launches this collective biography (“Bravely alone, she stood on the Parliament steps of stone. . . But she wasn’t alone for long”), inspiring young people around the world. Fifteen profiled boys and girls are planting trees, collecting compost, raising funds, and packing buses for demonstrations to reduce climate emissions.

By featuring youth leaders from Uganda, Colorado, Indonesia, and elsewhere, the book embodies the global reach of the movement and the reassuring reality that none of us, not even Greta, must face the crisis alone. 

This is the kind of book that changes lives! The spare text and black-and-white sketches convey an inescapable message about climate action: the hope we need comes from us.

As personified by another young heroine, effective action will take resolve (“Rise up!”), imagination ("Think up”), sleepless nights (“Rest up”), and support when we can find it (“Meet up.”) Some solutions may be unexpected, like seed swaps and Little Free Libraries, but they’re not impossible. Plenty of them look like fun.

I don’t know another book that depicts more succinctly how to build the future we want and children deserve: “Show up!”

(Disclaimer, some of my own work is included in this book.) The author’s preface says, “This book is intended to stimulate new ways of thinking by illustrating an…approach to design that encourages people to tread more lightly, so that people may inherit a healthy planet.” Even as we are half a century into environmentalism, there is still a perception that “green” design is ugly: all burlap and granola. This book is chock full of examples of furniture, clothing, accessories, kitchen utensils and the like that prove otherwise. And in the decade-plus since it came out, there’s even more like this, more of what I call Transparent Green: designs that don’t shout greenness.

A welcome corrective to the trend of X number of things you can do in your personal life to save the Earth that won't threaten the rule of greedy polluters over the economy and government, Price's lighthearted book welcomes the reader with a smile but strikes hard against propaganda from corporate polluters while she stands up for climate justice. To help readers make a real difference, as opposed to doing things that feel helpful but really aren't like buying a Prius, Price does actually offer a few personal life changes, like buying less stuff or buying higher quality stuff at lower quantity. But most of her ideas are about thinking differently about the environment--such as Redefine Economy or even Redefine Extremism (greedheads, not environmentalists, are the real extremists). Or getting active in public policy--from the strikingly simple "Vote!" to "Join up locally--government & economy R us."

Joanna Macy is an environmental activist and a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology. Her writing is at once direct and gracious, inviting us to explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. Central to her message of hope is what she calls the "Great Turning," a revolution in which humankind will turn from industrial capitalism, which seeks infinite growth through extraction, to a sustainable civilization of compassion and interdependence. This new edition of Active Hope, co-authored with Chris Johnstone, acknowledges that the Great Turning may in fact happen in the midst of a massive societal and ecological collapse, a "Great Unravelling." Yet, even in the midst of collapse, we can find deep hope by investing heart, mind, and strength in the Great Turning. "What's the best we can hope for? And how can we be active in making that more likely or even possible?"

A meaningful and absolutely pleasurable read that supports a treasured purpose in our complex world and justly speaks to one of the genuine accountabilities of being human: caring for and interring our dead. How do we plan for our final needs after passing and retain climate and community? Mallory faced these problems after her parents died in nearly identical biking mishaps a few years apart. She has inspired me greatly with how she writes about one of my favorite subjects. And how extra enjoyable to have my work attributed a few times throughout her book.

An oldie but a goodie, and a classic. Cronon’s lead essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” roused ‘90s environmentalism like a brilliant party crasher—but don’t miss Richard White’s “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living,” Giovanna Di Chiro’s “Nature as Community,” and, well, my own “Looking for Nature at the Mall.”

Want solutions? Start with our failed economic system. Daly, a World Bank senior economist, examines the economic restructuring necessary to live on a finite planet. He corrects the errors of classic economics by showing that a human economy is a subsystem embedded in a finite, fragile ecosystem, maintained by extracting limited resources and exporting waste. A steady-state economy accounts for the limits of both resources and waste.