Type
Staff Picks
Earth Day is April 22! We have compiled a selection of fiction and non-fiction from the Library’s collection to celebrate Earth Day. These books focus on the natural world, the environment, climate change, and more.
Fiction
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
This novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
- Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. How far you would you go for love? One woman’s quest to follow what may be the endangered Arctic tern’s last migration from Greenland to Antarctica.
- Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
A Tennessee town grapples with the consequences of a miracle that turns out to have environmental causes.
- A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet
Set in an enclave of wealthy adults deluding themselves that they can escape intensifying storms, the novel centers on the children who see the crisis more clearly and are forced to grow up in a hurry. In the process, Millet shows how readily we can descend into fear, tribalism, and violence.
- Greenwood by Michael Christie
A multi-generational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. This nested-ring epic is set against the devastation of the natural world.
Non-Fiction
- Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
A world-leading expert shares her amazing story of discovering the communication that exists between trees and shares her own story of family and grief.
- The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
This young activist has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster.
- Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx
A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change.
- The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohleben
An illuminating account of the forest, and the science that shows us how trees communicate, feel, and live in social networks. After reading this book, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, this book shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.