With spring right around the corner, the Office of Sustainability Education & Outreach Team has compiled a list of environmental books to welcome a new season filled with growth, warmth, and cultivation. Literature plays a vital role in building community, engaging diverse perspectives, and inspiring action to build a more sustainable world. Here is a list of six recommended books that uniquely delve into sustainability.
Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy
Book Jacket Description
The Colors of Nature works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future. Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.
Reader Reflection
Colors of Nature is a powerful anthology of essays, short stories, and poetry containing a diverse array of experiences and perspectives on nature and the human role within it. Through narratives of identity, belonging, and environmental responsibility, the collection emphasizes intersectional environmentalism by highlighting diverse cultural perspectives and their unique connections to the natural world. The stories highlight that environmental and social justice are deeply interconnected, urging us to listen to diverse voices, confront histories of oppression, and recognize how human-driven behaviors impact experiences with nature.
Selected Honorary Quotes
“Nature teaches us how to see ourselves within its greater domain. We see our own reflections in every ritual, and we cannot wound Mother Nature without wounding ourselves.”
-Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Dark Waters”
“What should history mean to someone like me? Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound? Or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?”
– Jamacia Kincaid, from “In History”
By Jordyn Czyzewski
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry by Camille Dungy
Book Jacket Description
Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.
Reader Reflection
Black Nature is a beautiful, critical anthology of poetry bringing light to the perspective and experience of African Americans in nature. Woven into an intricate, interdisciplinary collection of environmental literature, this collection features poetry by African American writers like Audre Lorde, Ross Gay, and Phillis Wheatley. Black Nature centers the damaged, fragmented, and healing pieces of our relationship to the Earth through the poetic narrative of voices from marginalized communities.
Selected Honorary Quotes
“A young boy sat in a room and ventured to worlds unknown. As an adult, he affirmed that connection and spread it across his pages so it can be shared. The poems found herein reflect the ebbs, flows, and cycles of nature. They reflect a black experience no longer extracted or eroded, but renewed.” -Ravi Howard, from “We Are Not Strangers Here”
“Through poetry, human beings can relive trauma, injury, catastrophe, whether it is physical, mental, or emotion, real or imagined, and reacquaint ourselves with our most inner resources, our ability to regenerate and manifest as whole again.” -Mona Lisa Saloy, from “Disasters, Nature, and Poetry”
By Catie Stumpf
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
Book Jacket Description
In his groundbreaking work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, journalist and child advocate Richard Louv directly links the absence of nature in the lives of today’s wired generation to some of the most disturbing childhood trends: the rise in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. This is the first book to bring together a body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is of children and adults. More than just raising an alarm, Louv offers practical solutions to heal the broken bond.
Reader Reflection & Honorary Quotes
Last Child in the Woods takes an intersectional approach to an increasingly common problem in our Western city-driven society with children and adults alike: lack of spending time in nature. Louv encourages readers to enjoy nature wholeheartedly and use it as a way of healing, to take care of our inner child. He backs his claims by citing anecdotal stories from teachers, parents, scientists, and environmentalists that offer their perspectives, all while contributing solutions of how we can incorporate nature into our daily lives. Louv leaves us with a call to action for what he envisions as a future, a future in which a child grows through nature, ultimately aiding a growing person’s emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.
Selected Honorary Quote
“Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.” – Richard Louv
By Alicia Lopez
Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez. PhD
Book Jacket Description
An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why Western conservationism isn’t working- and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors. Despite the fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse.
Reader Reflection
An essential critique of Western conservationism, Fresh Banana Leaves provides fascinating anecdotes about Indigenous connections to nature and infuriating examples of discrimination Hernandez faces on her journey to becoming an environmental scientist. She outlines how Indigenous ways of knowing are continuously devalued within academic spaces. Hernandez suggests that to many Indigenous groups, conservation is viewed as a necessary fix for the damage colonization created. With an in-depth explanation of how Indigenous people experience ecological grief, resource extraction from their lands, the erasure of Indigenous scientific contributions, and harmful stereotypes projected onto them, Fresh Banana Leaves serves as a powerful call to action to restructure conservationism before it’s too late.
Selected Honorary Quotes
“All environmental loss Indigenous peoples experience results in cultural loss that fractures our identities. Like all loss, it results in grief, and the loss that results from ecocolonialism and climate change is what I refer to as ecological grief.”- Jessica Hernandez Phd
“The birth of Western conservation is rooted in racism and anti-Indigeneity; thus this is a call for conservationists and environmental scientists to start questioning whose and which histories are celebrated in their environmental organizations, nonprofits, and within national parks.”
– Jessica Hernandez Phd
By Hannah Stahmann
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet by Leah Thomas
Book Jacket Description
The Intersectional Environmentalist is an introduction to the intersection of environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and an acknowledgment of the fundamental truth that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people. Written by Leah Thomas, a prominent voice in the field and the educator who coined the term “intersectional environmentalism”, this book is simultaneously a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all, and a pledge to work toward the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet.
Reader Reflection
Inspired by her family’s grassroots values, Thomas created a framework for how to incorporate social justice into existing environmental movements, outlining key principles in a way that is holistic but accessible. Thomas calls out the urgent need to reframe the environmental movement toward justice through the lens of intersectional environmentalism. She recalls having to seek out examples of contributions of people of color to sustainability outside of her environmental science education. Through this research, Thomas developed the lens of intersectional environmentalism informed by the theory of intersectionality developed by civil rights and law expert Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and by the work of Hazel M. Johnson and Dr. Robert Bullard. In all, The Intersectional Environmentalist serves as a call to action to combat the climate crisis and empower BIPOC communities while calling out the injustices they continue to face. It also outlines the work that her nonprofit, The Intersectional Environmentalist does to carry out this mission.
Selected Honorary Quotes
“We can create our own environmentalism that is intersectional in nature and that truly advocates for the protection of all people and the planet- an environmentalism that allows people of color to have their stories told, their cultural values reflected in environmental education, and their voices heard in environmental movements, organizations, and policies.”- Leah Thomas
“If we combine social justice efforts with environmental awareness efforts, we will harness enough power, representation, and momentum to have a shot at protecting our planet and creating equity at the same time.”- Leah Thomas
By Hannah Stahmann
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
Book Jacket Description
“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.”
Reader Reflection
The Overstory illuminates the importance of human relationships with the environment to enhance activism, creativity, and understanding the natural world more personally. The novel follows nine human stories that come with prosperity and hardships, which are inherently affected by tree and human interspecies connections. As the story moves from different sections of the canopy, the development of these relationships leads to kinship and empathy for more than the anthropocentric. Powers uses this metaphor to show how we’re not so different from the natural environment we walk past every day and creates a captivating tale of empathy, growth, and community.
Selected Honorary Quotes
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”
By Lily Jenkins
In light of these recommendations, we encourage you to seek out sustainable resources when purchasing and borrowing your books. To make your reading practices more sustainable, consider renting books at your local library, purchasing your books secondhand, and supporting local bookstores. If you are looking for local businesses and libraries to support this season, check out the bookstores listed below: