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Reading lists

Uplifting Earth Day books to inspire hope about the planet’s future

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Recommendations

The best books about climate change – and how to fight it

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Features

Inspiring bookish quotes perfect for a protest banner

Books for people who want to change the world

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Winners of the 2019 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards

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News

Three wins for Penguin Random House at the 2019 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards

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Books to solve your Secret Santa dilemma

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Big Sky by Kate Atkinson Surge by Jay Bernard Dressed by Shahida Bari No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

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What we’re reading in June

Green Ideas Slipcase

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each of these short books deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement - now in one complete set 
 
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each of these short books deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Greta Thunberg (Author) 
 Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 1 million schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies across Europe. In December she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a speech that was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019 she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact. She has won the prestigious Prix Liberté and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg is vegan, and doesn't fly, in order to live a low-carbon life. 
 
Naomi Klein (Author) 
 Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, and No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics. In 2017 she joined The Intercept as Senior Correspondent. Recent articles have also appeared in the Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, the New Yorker and Le Monde. In November 2016 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in Australia. 
 
Timothy Morton (Author) 
 Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future's Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), 11 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton's work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. 
 
George Monbiot (Author) 
 George Monbiot studied zoology at Oxford, and has spent his career as a journalist and environmentalist, working with others to defend the natural world he loves. His celebrated Guardian columns are syndicated all over the world. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State, The Age of Consent, Bring on the Apocalypse and Heat, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. His latest book, Feral, was shortlisted for the Great Outdoors Book of the Year award. Among the many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. 
 
Bill McKibben (Author) 
 Bill McKibben is a writer and environmental activist. His The End of Nature (1989) is considered the first book for a general audience about climate change. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize. He has campaigned on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. In recognition of his activism, a new species of woodland gnat - Megophthalmidia mckibbeni - was in 2014 named in his honour. 
 
Amitav Ghosh (Author) 
 Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning novelist and essayist. His most recent book is The Great Derangement 
 
Tim Flannery (Author) 
 Professor Tim Flannery is a palaeontologist and conservationist who frequently presents programmes on ABC Radio, NPR and the BBC. He is a leading writer on climate change and his previous books include Here on Earth (2010) and The Weather Makers (2005). 
 
Terry Tempest Williams (Author) 
 Terry Tempest Williams (b.1955) is a writer and conservationist. Her creative non-fiction focuses on environmental justice, the protection of wilderness and humanity's relationship with the natural world. 
 
Michael Pollan (Author) 
 Michael Pollan is an award-winning author, activist and journalist. His international bestselling books about the way we live today - including How to Change Your Mind, In Defence of Food and Food Rules ­- combine meticulous reporting with anthropology, philosophy, culture, health and natural history. Time magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife. 
 
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Author) 
 Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. 
 
Dai Qing (Author) 
 Dai Qing (b.1941) is an environmentalist and investigative journalist who has been campaigning against the Three Gorges Dam since the 1980s. She is forbidden to publish or speak publicly in China but remains in the country to continue documenting the truth about the regime. 
 
Wangari Maathai (Author) 
 Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was a Nobel Peace Prize winning activist and founder of the Green Belt Movement, which to date has planted 51 million trees in Kenya. 
 
Jared Diamond (Author) 
 Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of Time magazine's best non-fiction books of all time, Collapse, a No. 1 international bestseller, and The World Until Yesterday, among other books. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others. 
 
Wendell Berry (Author) 
 'A farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,' Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Humanities Medal. For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed in his native Henry Country, Kentucky, with his wife, Tanya, and their children and grandchildren. 
 
Edward O. Wilson (Author) 
 Edward O. Wilson is widely recognized as one of the world's pre-eminent biologists and naturalists. The author of more than thirty books, including Consilience, The Diversity of Life, The Social Conquest of Earth, The Meaning of Human Existence and Letters to a Young Scientist, Wilson is a Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. 
 
James Lovelock (Author) 
 Elected to the Royal Society in 1974, James Lovelock is the originator of Gaia Theory. His many books include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). In 2003 he was made a Royal Companion of Honour, in 2005 Prospect placed him among the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal. 
 
Masanobu Fukuoka (Author) 
 Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a farmer and philosopher from Japan who inspired sustainable, organic practices with his approach to natural farming and the re-vegetation of desert land. 
 
Arne Næss (Author) 
 Arne Naess was born in Slemdal, Norway, in 1912. After earning his Ph.D. at the age of 27, he became the University of Oslo's youngest professor, and Norway's only Professor of Philosophy. 
 
Naess was a keen mountaineer, environmentalist and social activist. In 1938, he finished building an isolated wooden hut high in the Hallingskarvet mountains, where he would spend a quarter of his life. It was here that he developed his concept of 'deep ecology,' and his lifelong commitment to the environmental movement. His activity within the movement ranged from grassroots protest, to candidacy for political office with the Green Party, to a post as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway in 1988. 
 
His achievements as a philosopher, ecologist and activist were widely recognised during his lifetime. In 2005 he was knighted and made a Commander with Star of the Royal Norwegian order of St. Olav First Class. He died in Oslo in 2009. 
 
Rachel Carson (Author) 
 Rachel Carson (1907-64) wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, appeared in 1941. Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of the misuse of pesticides, was published in 1962. Carson's articles on natural history appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Reader's Digest and Holiday. An ardent ecologist and preservationist, Carson warned against the dumping of atomic waste at sea and predicted global warming. The Edge of the Sea, which completed her biography of the sea, is also published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Rachel Carson died of cancer at the age of 56.

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference collects Greta Thunberg's history-making speeches, from addresses at climate rallies around the world to audiences at the UN, the World Economic Forum, and the British Parliament.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. 
 
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference collects Greta Thunberg's history-making speeches, from addresses at climate rallies around the world audiences at the UN, the World Economic Forum, and the British Parliament. 
 
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Greta Thunberg (b.2003) is a climate activist and Nobel prize nominee whose 2018 school strikes ignited a   millions-strong global movement to protect the living planet.

Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

Our House is on Fire

This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. 
 
This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. 
 
Our House is on Fire is the story of how one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

The profoundly moving story of how love, courage and determination brought Greta Thunberg's family back from the brink 
 
'Urgent, lucid, courageous ... a must-read message of hope ... It is a glimpse of a saner world' David Mitchell, Guardian 
 
This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter Greta stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. 
 
They desperately searched for answers, and began to see how their children's suffering reached far beyond medical diagnoses. This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. And so they decided to act. 
 
Our House is on Fire shows how, amid forces that tried to silence them, one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

Our House Is on Fire feels like a new form of nonfiction, intimate and approachable as a photo album: a family memoir. . . . This is also a remarkable story of togetherness: a modern family shifting and pivoting to keep each person afloat.

An urgent, lucid, courageous account. . . . Everyone with an interest in the future of the planet should read this book. It is a clear-headed diagnosis. It is a glimpse of a saner world. It is fertile with hope.

An extraordinary account of how one family rose, with unshakable moral clarity, to the tremendous responsibility of being alive at the moment when our immediate collective decisions will determine the fate of life on Earth. They share their story of courage not because they want our accolades, but because they demand our company. Greta Thunberg has already inspired a global moment--this book is part of how we will win.

A surprisingly funny and optimistic book. Thunberg and her family might be screaming 'FIRE' on a crowded planet. But they believe we have the power to put that fire out if we act, right here, right now.

A book about finding purpose as a route to recovery.

This blazingly candid family memoir reveals the grueling and bewildering struggles that propelled Greta onto the world stage. . . . An unnerving and profoundly enlightening chronicle of the symbiosis between human and planetary health as manifest within one remarkable family whose painful awakeniThis blazingly candid family memoir reveals the grueling and bewildering struggles that propelled Greta onto the world stage. . . . An unnerving and profoundly enlightening chronicle of the symbiosis between human and planetary health as manifest within one remarkable family whose painful awakening to our 'acute sustainability crisis' should embolden us all.ng to our 'acute sustainability crisis' should embolden us all.

An impassioned call to action and a vulnerable family portrait of neurodiversity.

Greta Thunberg is a climate crisis activist from Sweden. In August 2018, she decided not to go to school one day, starting a strike outside the Swedish Parliament. Her actions sparked a global movement to fight the climate crisis, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet. Greta has Asperger's and considers it a gift which has enabled her to see the climate crisis in "black and white." She has won the prestigious Prix Liberté, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was selected as Time's Person of the Year in 2019. She is the author of the bestseller No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. 
 
Together with her mother, the celebrated opera singer Malena Ernman, her sister, Beata Ernman, and her father, Svante Thunberg, she has dedicated her life to protecting the living planet.

Illustrated Edition

'We are the change and change is coming' 
 
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. A year later, she was joined in her strike by over seven million people around the world. 
 
This is the record of a game-changing year in the fight against the climate crisis. Collecting the speeches that sparked a global movement, and iconic images of those who made it happen, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference 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. 
 
With new speeches from Vienna, Paris, New York and Montreal

A new expanded and illustrated edition of the history-making speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has become the voice of a generation 
 
'We are the change and change is coming' 
 
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. A year later, she was joined in her strike by over seven million people around the world. 
 
This is the record of a game-changing year in the fight against the climate crisis. Collecting the speeches that sparked a global movement, and iconic images of those who made it happen, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference 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. 
 
With new speeches from Vienna, Paris, New York and Montreal

Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 1 million schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies across Europe. In December she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a speech that was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019 she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact. She has won the prestigious Prix Liberté and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg is vegan, and doesn't fly, in order to live a low-carbon life.

Greta Thunberg

*A Times, Financial Times, Observer and Nature Book of the Year* 
 
‘Spectacular ... this work is planetary in scale’ Independent‘It offers real, rich hope’ Observer, Books of the Year 
We still have time to change the world. From the world's leading climate activist, this is the essential book for making it happen. 
Created by Greta Thunberg in partnership with over 100 climate experts working around the globe, with her commentaries throughout and updates for this new paperback edition to reflect the latest research, The Climate Book equips us with knowledge, and gives us hope. 
Together, it shows, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

Greta Thunberg

The Climate Book

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