Featured Books: Climate Change

In Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, biologist Thor Hanson examines the remarkable ways plants and animals are responding to climate change, including moving, adapting, and evolving in real time.

The book blends personal anecdotes, field observations, and scientific research to illustrate how species cope with rapidly changing environments, offering both hope and caution about the future of biodiversity.

Hanson emphasizes that climate change is not only a threat but also a driver of adaptation and evolution. The book illustrates how species exhibit ingenuity and resilience, whether through physical changes, migration, or altered social behaviors. It also underscores the unpredictability of ecological responses, reminding readers that human-induced environmental changes interact with complex natural systems in unexpected ways

This Changes Everything contends that tackling climate change means confronting the economic system driving it. Naomi Klein builds a case for replacing fossil-fuel dependence with community-led, regenerative economies, framing the climate crisis as both an existential threat and a transformative chance.

This is Naomi Klein’s fourth book; it was published in 2014. Klein argues that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberal market fundamentalism, which encourages profligate consumption and has resulted in mega-mergers and trade agreements hostile to the health of the environment.

Klein spent five years writing the book, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at number five on 5 October 2014.

How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change provides tools and strategies for parents to explain the climate emergency to their children, maintain hope in the face of crisis, and galvanize positive action by encouraging today’s children to follow their passions in pursuit of a livable world. It includes:

• Ideas for helping children follow their passions in pursuit of a livable, just, and sustainable world.

• The unvarnished realities of the climate emergency, where we are at, and how we got here

• Strategies for talking to kids of different ages about the climate crisis, including advice from engaged parents on the ground

• How to maintain our own hope and that of our children

• A list of practical actions families can take to tackle the climate change crisis

In a ruined and toxic future, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo’s rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.

His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in law, whose special knack is fixing machines. Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. The silo is about to confront what its history has only hinted about and its inhabitants have never dared to whisper. Uprising.

Wool has been adapted for a television series, now on Apple TV.

Wild Dark Shore is a 2025 novel by Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy.

In the novel, a woman named Rowan is shipwrecked and washes ashore on Shearwater Island, a remote isle near Antarctica that houses a research station with a seed vault. Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants.

Wild Dark Shore is a novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

The novel was inspired by Macquarie Island, which McConaghy visited.

The Marrow Thieves is a dystopian novel by Métis Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline, published on September 1, 2017

Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden – but what they don’t know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Many young people and adults are rudely awakening to the fact that unchecked climate change and other widespread environmental issues paint a gloomy picture of their future. This knowledge can lead to a sense of fear, helplessness or worse, apathy.

This book aims to help stem those concerns by shining an inspiring and entertaining light on the lives of daring, dedicated individuals whose great passion, talents, and heart are helping to tip the environmental balance away from destruction and collapse towards hope, healing and personal empowerment.

Based on personal interviews and extensive research, this book tells engaging stories about a wide variety of people from across Canada who share a great passion for the environment. But beyond a deep personal connection with nature, these “environmental trailblazers” are doing truly unique and amazing things to protect the environment, while leading others down greener paths full of hope and positive action.

Inspired by internationally acclaimed environmental activist Robin Greenfield, Zero Waste Kids is a solutions-oriented book that teaches through projects and activities how to reduce, reuse, and recycle at home, at school, and in the community.

Zero-Waste living is one of the biggest environmental movements of today. Millions of people are inspired to create less trash as part of their desire to live a more environmentally friendly life. The Zero-Waste movement is an excellent opportunity to help children to understand the world they live in and inspire them to start living in a more sustainable way. Of all the environmental problems we face, “trash” is one that is easiest to understand because it is very visual, whereas many other problems are more abstract. Zero-waste isn’t the solution to the world’s problems, but a very good place to start.

This Is My Planet is written and illustrated by Jan Thornhill, the award-winning author of I Found a Dead Bird. Her intelligent, sensitive text guides readers through a sometimes difficult but highly relevant terrain. While not shying away from the facts, she offers hope, showing where action can make a difference and evidence of the amazing resilience and adaptability of Earth.

Beginning with a foundation that answers basic questions about how our planet works, and moving through an in-depth look at three specific environments -polar, ocean, and land- and at our human societies, Thornhill takes a comprehensive look at the subject of global warming.

Unlike anything else on the market for young readers, this brilliant treatment of global warming fills a void, and couldn’t be timed any better to hit the shelves as this important issue takes center stage at a global level.