Books like Urban Jungle — picked by fans

Eleutheria is a fantastic climate novel that paints a dire, realistic portrait of the near future and then combats that dystopia with bright-eyed hope.

I loved the narrator, Willa Marks, who is endearing and desperate to save the world against overwhelming odds, ultimately elbowing her way into a commune-like movement in the Caribbean that has very big plans. I really loved how Willa encapsulates what many of us feel: this urgency to do something to stop the climate crisis, even if we don’t know how.

What I truly loved about this book, however, is that it leaves us with a spark of real hope, rather than falling into dystopia. The author, Allegra Hyde, has declared the growing number of us hopeful climate writers as “Team Utopia,” and I’m a proud member.  

Bunny is an American teenager in Azerbaijan. Her father is a diplomat. She grows up in a world where oil is everything, listening to the language of the adults around her as some want their share of the profits reaped by this energy source while (a few) others point out the inequities in this industry and its potential long-term effects on the world.

What is fascinating as well is how she herself becomes part of this same world when she is an adult, almost as if she cannot help but be subsumed by the vast structure of the oil industry.

I bought this book after hearing its author, Simon Sharpe, speak about it at a festival. His talk was very inspiring and convincing, and the book definitely matched my expectations.

As a sustainability academic, it really appealed to me the way he sets out how current practices in science, economics, and diplomacy don’t work, and then proceeds to provide alternative solutions to address climate change, which is very compelling.

I liked that the call for action was not in the obvious areas that we normally pursue for climate action, and that despite all setbacks and lack of progress, there is grounds for hope, and regardless of who we are or what we do, there are things we all can do. 

I met Clive Hamilton at an event in London in 2011 shortly after the book’s launch. At the time the climate science community was still reeling from the disaster of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit.

As rationalists, we were asking the question: “Why is the scientific evidence not being listened to?” Hamilton provided answers – about humanity’s free market consumerist fetish, the insidious role of mainstream economics, and our denialist tendencies, alienation from nature, and hubris.

He explained that “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained our sense of the world as a stable and civilising place.”

Dismissing techno-solutions such as Carbon Capture and Storage and ‘Clean Coal’ as diversionary tactics by powerful interests, the book offers an ethical and moral basis for reconstructing the future. Rereading it 13 years after its publication, I am… show more.

Scranton is polarizing because he wallows in doom and flirts with an unpleasant form of nihilism. But even so, he provides an honest, sometimes searing introduction to the big troubles we are facing today—and he does so at the right level of analysis, our entire civilization. It is also very short and punchy. If, however, readers prefer less doom and more hope, then read instead Naomi Klein’s smart, serviceable collection of short essays, On Fire.

I chose Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change because I live in Connecticut and my own family and friend group have been gravely impacted by tick-borne infections. In fact, the subplot of my novel focuses on the frustrating story of a family seeking answers to this “mystery” illness.

We are at a moment where climate change is accelerating new and worsening pathogenic diseases and public health isn’t catching up fast enough. Mary Beth Pfeiffer provides a well-researched glimpse into the politics and pain of tick-borne infections in a climate-changing world.

I recommend this book as a community conversation starter because, more and more, citizens are coming together to share medical resources and put pressure on the public health community to act. 

I worry that people don’t hear enough about solutions to the climate crisis, but, thankfully, Paul Hawken and his collaborators lay many of them out in this book.

They focus not on the flashy technologies that often grab headlines—and not just on the reduction of fossil fuels—but on the power of a healthy, living Earth to heal itself. Of course, we need to be partners in this healing, and Hawken illuminates the people, organizations, and approaches that are doing just that.

We've all heard about climate change by now—but does constantly talking about it make a difference? Or does it matter more how you talk about it? Stoknes gives comprehensive explanations about the messaging that's most effective to get through to people about climate change from a psychological and marketing point of view.

A must-read for anyone who wants to talk about global warming, whether you're creating large-scale marketing plans or just trying to talk to family and friends.

I loved reading this book as it is so refreshingly different compared to other books in this space.

It focuses on what we can do rather than what we can’t and emphasises that we have more in common than what divides us when it comes to climate change. 

And the most important thing we can do about climate change is talk about it based on shared values, and it’s all about discovering what those are, whether it’s family, hobbies, outdoor activities, or faith. Talking about climate change is both a challenge and an encouragement for an introverted (yet social) sustainability academic like me.

I love how down-to-earth Katherine Hayhoe is. The book is peppered with lots of humour and personal anecdotes, yet clearly underpinned by scientific facts, and I finished the book feeling hopeful and inspired.

I’ve loved Glen Cook’s work since reading The Black Company back in the eighties. Tyranny of the Night begins The Instrumentalities of the Night. Yes, the series isn’t finished. No, that doesn’t matter; each book might be part of a larger history but each is a satisfying story on its own, so read them anyway. A world of realistically complex late-medieval politics and mostly unpleasant gods with their own agendas that have little to do with the desires of their human worshippers. It’s a secondary world, but the fastest way to describe the main character, Else/Piper, is to say he’s a Janissary sent back undercover to the people from whom he was stolen as a boy, living as a double, or maybe a triple agent—but it gets more complex than that, as you’d expect from a) Glen Cook and b) a hero who begins his story by using artillery against… show more.