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Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Written from the perspective of a trained biologist and botanist who specializes in mosses and an author of Indigenous heritage (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), this book tells the story of mosses from all sides, through personal narrative and reflection, through science, and through Indigenous ways of knowing. It’s a stunning work of non-fiction, memoir, and natural…
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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Carson wrote for a wide audience, drawing from sciences and making the message clear and universally applicable: if we keep spreading DDT and other toxins, the birds will stop singing and come springtime all we will hear is silence. The book is not fiction but fact, so a short excerpt works well as a compliment…
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Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly
In this gothic masterwork, Mary Shelley tells the story of an arrogant scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who brings to life a being assembled from dead body parts.
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The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
When the inhabitants of earth run out of trees, they colonize the planet Athshe, dispossessing the small, green, furry humanoids who live there and harvesting the wood from their forests.
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A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth, a Japanese-American writer based in Waletown, British Columbia, finds a hello kitty lunchbox on the beach that carries within it the diary of Nao, a California-born teenager who moved to Japan with her family after her father lost his Silicon Valley job in the 90s. As Ruth becomes immersed in the drama of Nao’s…
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Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
In this sequel to Parable of the Sower, Butler continues the story of Lauren Oya Olamina and her religious movement called Earthseed. Butler interweaves multiple narrators through collected journals, mostly Olamina and her daughter Larkin, but also occasionally her husband Bankole and her brother Marcus.
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The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood
These three novels tell stories from multiple characters’ viewpoints before, during, and after the “waterless flood” in which bioengineer Glenn causes a mass extinction event for humans.
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Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
This novel imagines that the Monarch butterflies’ annual spring migration to Mexico is disrupted by climate change in an event that forever changes the life of the main character, Dellarobia Turnbow.
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Dawn by Octavia Butler
Lilith Iyapo wakes up in a spaceship orbiting Earth to find out that humans have destroyed the world and made it unlivable and an alien species, the Oankali, have saved the few humans who survived the war.
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Sounds by Henry David Thoreau
The “Sounds” chapter in Thoreau’s Walden captures his local soundscape at Walden Pond in the mid-nineteenth century, which has since altered dramatically with the changing landscape.
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Climate Change is Violence by Rebecca Solnit
This short essay could be a good beginning text—clear, concise, full of factoids—that emphasizes the slippery environmental rhetoric of both corporations and institutions as well as the ways in which the climate crisis is not a coming event but current and widespread violence.
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10:04 by Ben Lerner
In this autofictional novel set in New York City, the narrator tells the story of how the book came to be. We learn that the novel was financed based on the promise of a short story that the narrator “Ben” published in The New Yorker, and we see the conception of the project change as…
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The Environmental Manifesto
These three short texts all raise questions about apocalypse, hope, and culture change, and might serve as a starting point for inviting students to explore their own fears around climate change as well as what kinds of cultural change they hope to see.
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Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
This novel takes the form of diary entries, written from 26 year-old Cedar Songmaker to her gestating child over the course of her pregnancy. The United States may be politically collapsing and is becoming ever more violent and carceral in this process, while strange evolutionary mutations lead to the rumor that evolution has started to…
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Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
This is the first of two novels (Parable of the Talents) centered around a young Black teenager named Lauren Oya Olamina. Due to climate change, a scarcity of resources (especially food and water) has led to a collapse of institutions and a rapid rise in violent crime.
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Sila by Chantal Bilodeau
Sila (breath in Inuktitut), a play set in the Canadian arctic/Nunavut, depicts the complex relationships between Inuit activists, Canadian scientists, government coast guard officials, and a polar bear mother and daughter struggling for survival.
