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. Set in Appalachia, the novelist’s current residence, the novel explores tensions between scientists, environmental activists, and poor rural communities over climate change.
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. Lilith is charged with waking her fellow humans to establish a new Oankali-Human society on Earth.
This post was developed and authored by Christina Katopodis, M.A., M.Phil. Core Text Thoreau, Henry David. “Sounds” in Walden, ed.…
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.
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 the narrator works his way from “fraudulence to sincerity in the sinking city.”
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.
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 run backwards–together, these events lead to governmental attempts to imprison and control all pregnant people.
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.
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.
