Books

Earth Day

In honour of Earth Day, we have collated a short list of books we think you should read!

Little People, Big Dreams: Earth Heroes by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara

In these remarkable true stories, learn how three very different people use their voices to speak up for animals and the environment. When Jane was little, her father gave her a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee. This inspired her lifelong love of animals, and after living with chimpanzees in their natural habitat, she now educates the public on animal rights. When young Greta learned of the climate crisis, she couldn’t understand why people in power were not doing anything to save our Earth. But her “School Strike for Climate” has now inspired millions, and taught everyone her valuable message: “No one is too small to make a difference.” As a child, David spent hours in the science library, collating his own specimens and creating a mini animal museum. Now, he is loved all over the world for telling the untold stories of these animals. Each of these moving books features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the Earth Hero’s life.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible–food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation–today’s.

Plastic Sucks by Dougie Poynter

Plastic is everywhere and it sucks. It fills up our oceans, endangers our wildlife and never goes away. So it’s time to take action, find ways to cut down our plastic use and help protect our environment. Together we can make a difference! As a lifelong supporter of environmental causes and a key player in the campaign to ban microbeads in the UK, Dougie is always on the hunt for ways to reduce and replace plastic. This campaigning book, his first solo authored project, draws on his own experiences in the fight against plastic waste – the problems he’s encountered and the solutions he’s found. It covers the history of plastic, introduces us to some key campaigners and eco entrepreneurs and is full of top tips and infographics.

No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth 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.