Looking for something to read this summer? Here are some suggestions of acclaimed books that speak to a diversity of sustainability- and environmentally-related issues and ideas. Pick up one of these books this summer and gain a radically new outlook on the world we live in and how we can help to make it a better place.

1. Lab Girls

By Hope Jahren
Lab Girl is the debut memoir of Hope Jahren, who has devoted her life to the study of trees, flower, seeds, and soil. The story, as told by Jahren, takes the reader back to her childhood in rural Minnesota where her father allowed her access to his classroom’s lab, in which she found a love for science and learned to perform lab work. However, the book’s core plot hinders on Jahren’s relationship with her lab partner and best friend, with whom she travels across the United States from the Midwest to tropical Hawaii, where she currently lives and works. Lab Girl is highly acclaimed, a New York Times 2016 Notable Book, and a national bestseller.

 

2. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and has been trained to ask scientific questions of nature. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer has adopted the idea that plants and animals are our oldest teachers and that to fully awaken our ecological consciousness, we must learn from and celebrate our relationship with the living world.  In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer draws on her life as an indigenous scientists, a mother, and a woman to share two lenses of knowledge: the mythic and the scientific, and how we can learn from the gifts and lessons of other living beings.

 

 

3. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

By Dan Egan
In The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, prize-winning reporter Dan Egan explores the nation’s greatest natural resource and most ecologically threatened: the Great Lakes. Egan shares stories of invasive species decimating native species, new risks to drinking water, and “dead zones” covering hundreds of square miles of water–while also discussing how the Great Lakes can be restored and preserved for future generations.

 

 

 

 

4. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate–Discoveries from a Secret World

By Peter Wohlleben
Peter Wohlleben draws on groundbreaking new discoveries related to the life of trees and their abilities to communicate, support growth, and share nutrients. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben describes that when trees, much like human families, live together with their offspring, they help to create a healthy and protected ecosystem. Whereas, solitary trees often die earlier than those in a group. Wohlleben shares how eco-friendly behavior and practices have economically sustainable benefits and prolong the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.

 

 

5. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflection on the End of a Civilization

By Roy Scranton
A war veteran, journalist, author, and Princeton PhD candidate, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. After returning from the war in Iraq, Scranton witnessed the crisis of climate change, and its ravaging impact on the world. With extreme weather events, conflicts, famines, riots, political and economic instability; Scranton determines that the greatest threat to humanity is humanity itself. Through this account, Scranton takes the reader on a journey through our changing world, exploring street protests, findings in earth science, historic UN summits, and more, to come to terms with the death of the world we live in–the Anthropocene–in order to embrace a radical new vision of human life.

 

What’s on your summer reading list? Let us know in the comments below!