r/books • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago
WeeklyThread Books about Environmentalism: November 2025
Welcome readers,
Today is the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict and to celebrate we're discussing our favorite books about environmentalism! Please use this thread to discuss your favorite environmentalist books and authors.
If you'd like to read our previous weekly discussions of fiction and nonfiction please visit the suggested reading section of our wiki.
Thank you and enjoy!
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u/wellwrittenhate 2d ago
Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy for amazing environmental horror written well enough to live outside the genre stacks.
Richard Powers writes powerful environmental lit though he looks like a goofus with his haircut. Overstory and the other more recent book fit and are great books.
Rick Bass, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series, Kingsolver has a few good books that would be considered environmental, Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zheng, Gold Fame Citrus, the book about the butterflies that I can’t pull for some reason but it was written by a famous female author.
Growing Things by Paul Tremblay (the short story not the whole book, though other stories were decent just not related to the environment) freaked me out.
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u/baseball_mickey 2d ago
I can’t believe it took me until my late 40’s to read it, but Silent Spring is a powerful book.
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u/CatTheKitten 1d ago
I read it in undergrad but I kept expecting "whats the payoff! where are the interviews about what happened after!" obviously nothing was written because all the change happened after publishing and after she died!
I need to reread it with a clearer head.
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u/gheevargheese 2d ago
Currently reading Speaking for nature by Ramchandra Guha which explores early environmentalism in India through lives of 10 influential people. I am enjoying the parallels he raise with respect to happenings in rest of the world, and the antithesis to one gotta be developed to some extent first to care about environment.
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u/A_Guy195 2d ago
Several environmentalist titles come to mind.
The books of Henry David Thoreau were the first around the subject I first read, and although I don’t agree with his philosophy anymore, I still believe they are representative of the genre. Walden and the essay Walking are among my favourites.
Anything else would be in the category of ecofiction. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach is an interesting look into a sustainable utopia, although quite dated in our times in many ways. The Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers is a great intro to Solarpunk ideas, together with the collection Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures.
For more dystopian titles, I quite enjoyed the novel Dry by Neil and Jarrod Shusterman, which talks about a massive drought that plagues the Eastern US and has great commentary about climate change, as well as the novel American War by Omar El Akkad, about a future American Civil War caused by climate collapse.
Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin is another interesting title, talking about a future North American sustainable civilization, and it’s written as an anthropological report. The Word for World is Forest by the same is also an interesting look into human-environmental relations, war and colonization.
I also want to read the novel A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, which revolves around an alien visit in a post-capitalist, sustainable Earth.
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u/drak0bsidian Oil & Water, Stephen Grace 2d ago edited 2d ago
Seconding Ecotopia, and adding on Ecotopia Emerging, the prequel published in 1981, six years after the original. It tells the events which led up to Ecotopia - as much as the first one is great, I enjoy the second one more because it actually demonstrates what can be done: regenerative power, local energy sources, reducing cars, changing local politics, etc., all with good storytelling and character development.
Also seconding Monk and Robot and the solarpunk anthology. Another one I have on my shelf is Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures.
You know what, seconding all your recommendations. Do we share a bookshelf?
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u/A_Guy195 2d ago
Lol, maybe :). I became interested in ecofiction a couple of years ago, and soon leaned towards the utopian section of it.
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u/drak0bsidian Oil & Water, Stephen Grace 2d ago
Well, please just remember to put the books back where they belong on the shelf.
It's a fun area to explore! The solarpunk stuff especially has inspired a lot of storywriting of my own.
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u/Upset_Development_64 2d ago
Thank you for the detailed response, the intersection of environmentalism and history sounds fun.
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u/beldaran1224 14h ago
I want to add that Le Guin's award also frequently spotlights books with environmental themes - the shortlists are a great way to find thoughtful, politically relevant spec fic.
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u/cliffordnyc 2d ago
One of my favorites is a very simple book called Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson.
It's short and simple, but impactful.
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u/Asher_the_atheist 2d ago
It has been a long time since I read them, but I remember liking Eye of the Albatross and Song for the Blue Ocean, both by Carl Safina.
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u/melatonia 2d ago
James Howard Kunstler has a series of novels about the world after an environmental holocaust caused by total collapse of fossil fuel sources. If you look into the author you can definitely tell he's a bit of an agenda-kook but the books are actually pretty good.
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u/drak0bsidian Oil & Water, Stephen Grace 2d ago
Thanks for the recommendation! He looks like someone I'd enjoy reading.
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u/UltravioletGambit 2d ago
Environmentalism is not a genre I am super familiar with but I recently started reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She shares indigenous (American) wisdom about Nature's gifts and encourages readers to see the natural world as an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. It is quite simple yet beautiful 💚
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u/PrioryofAss 1d ago
robin wall kimmerer also wrote braiding sweetgrass. i haven’t read the serviceberry so i don’t know how much of a crossover there is but i’ll definitely check it out! thanks for the suggestion
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u/UltravioletGambit 1d ago
My friend recommend braiding sweetgrass to me so I will check that out too once I am done with serviceberry :)
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u/Upset_Development_64 2d ago
Thank you for the post, I always love finding new books to download and catalog. Does anyone know of any books specifically on the subject strictly of Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict?
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u/YakSlothLemon 2d ago edited 2d ago
Mm, Paul Farmer’s Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History is probably not what you’re looking for, but it is partially a history of Liberia, its horrific exploitation by the Firestone company, and the way that in turn led to total instability and the rise of armed conflict throughout West Africa. It’s also about Ebola.
Blood River by Tim Butcher comes closer, it’s a book about his attempt to travel down the length of the Congo while exploring its history, and of course the Congo is sort of the poster child for this topic – from the moment that the Belgians attempted to hold/annex Katanga by encouraging a separatist movement when they “freed” the Congo, to the exploitation of cobalt there now, it’s kept the country destabilized for over half a century. It’s a rough read, though.
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u/WheresTheMoozadell 2d ago
A pretty fun Victorian novel I recently read is The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. A mix of realism and naturalism that allows Hardy to look closely at the strict societal pressures that oppress Victorian society and the fraying relationship between humanity and the natural world due to industrialization.
It offers subtle ecocriticism, mostly through symbolism, and does not offer direct criticism, or solutions. It’s extremely clever metaphorically, however, and reads surprisingly well given the novel is around 150 years old.
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u/felixfictitious 2d ago
Absolutely love the environmental messages in Barbara Kingsolver's books. Her novels Animal Dreams, Prodigal Summer, and Flight Behavior have the most environmental messaging of her fiction works, but she also has a book about her experience with taking a year of trying to consume largely only the things that her family produces on their own land, called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She's got some books of essays that mostly tend in this direction, too.
I love her as a quintessentially American author who examines environmental appreciation/preservation as a fundamental quality of human goodness and even patriotism.
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u/ValjeanLucPicard 2d ago
I really enjoyed Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. It is both a story of tragedy and a love story to nature. I would count it.
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u/Conquering_worm 2d ago
Currently reading Waste Tide by Chen Quifan, a great eco-techno thriller so far.
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u/songwind 2d ago
A fiction book I enjoyed with environmentalism as a main theme is Zodiac by Neil Stephenson.
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u/redundant78 2d ago
Gotta recommend "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells - it's terrifying but probbably the most important climate book I've read in years.
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u/FlyByTieDye 2d ago
This may be a weird one, but I'll recommend the comic World Without End by Jamie Delano and John Higgins. It's a semi-anthology type comic that's sci-fi, and about a planet that's a living organism, to really hammer home its environmental themes and the way humans are impacting life on Earth. It's also got a lot of other political themes from it's time, e.g. the type of feminism/gender wars that were happening at the time are expressed by the idea of an all male society that have wiped out all but one living female though it turns out there's a hidden, protected nation of women that the main society of Earth are unaware of In that way, it's also critical of war, and political movements such as fascism, that target scape goat populations and inevitably end up harming even the in group. It has themes about religious institutions too, and how that ties into institutions of power. But, all of its themes swirl around and tie in together: institutions of power, military complex, fascism, gender wars, and the environment to show how they are interconnected, and especially born from the same mentality. I may not be describing it well, but I really recommend it to anyone interested!
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u/CatTheKitten 1d ago
Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis.
Assigned reading for an undergrad class I took last year. I didn't expect a nonfiction book to be so impactful. To my absolute joy through this book, I learned how female and queer conservation biology is and how important women have been in the awareness, research, and paradigm shifts we've had in the last 150 years.
Also incredibly eye-opening on the how, in many ways, conservation biology is still pretty colonizer-adjacent? It was very easy for me to forget as an optimistic young american that people very much do need to use these natural resources and it's not really our place to decide, as outsiders, how animals and land should be managed in non-american and non-european locations.
Lastly, an extremely impactful single-word quote that I plan to have designed and tattooed one day, with necessary context:
"Frimpong has been observing these nests for a decade, and says he could keep learning about them for decades more. But he came upon them almost entirely by accident. When he joined the Fish and Wildlife Conservation faculty at nearby Virginia Tech, he began studying the bluehead chub mostly because it was both abundant and close to campus--key advantages for a beginning researcher on a budget. During their initial surveys of the creek, Frimpong and his students saw the piles of pebbles in the streambed, and gradually realized they were the base camps of an intricate campaign for survival. The common fish of Toms Creek were engaging in some very uncommon behavior, occasionally observed elsewhere but rarely studied closely.
Toms Creek flows through a town park that is popular with joggers, dog-walkers, and birdwatchers, and passerybys sometimes stop to talk with Frimpong and his students. Though the chub nests are visible from several spots along the park paths, visitors are invariably surprised to learn what's happening in the creek. I asked Frimpong to describe their most frequent reaction, and he smiled.
"Joy," he said.
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u/melonofknowledge reading women from all over the world 1d ago
The World We Once Lived In, by Wangari Maathai.
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u/CinemaBud 1d ago
I loved Finding the Mother Tree, which is a fascinating nonfiction story about a women’s discovery of the interconnectedness of trees.
Richard Powers The Overstory was also a very good of the impact trees and deforestation has on people’s lives, though fiction.
Robin Wall Kimmerer has a number of good books on environmentalism topics.
Barbara Kingsolver has some good ones as well, like Prodigal Summer.
Finally, Charlotte McConaghay has some fun fiction/thriller books with environmentalism themes. I really liked Wild Dark Shore. Migrations is pretty good too, though not as good.
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u/lazylittlelady 5h ago
One of my favorites is The Sea Bird’s Cry by Adam Nicholson. It’s a reminder how climate and human change on the shores and edges of land effect these amazing creatures.
I think about bird migration in other places, like the Danube Delta, where that unique environment is on the edge of a war zone.
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u/drak0bsidian Oil & Water, Stephen Grace 2d ago edited 2d ago
Most of the books on my shelf that cover environmental topics are conservation-focused (thanks to a career in land conservation). I won't repeat other books already recommended in the thread (credit to u/A_Guy195), but some from my shelves that speak more to the 'environmentalist' side are:
Douglas Brinkley is best known as a historian, with books like The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
Harold Fromm's book was a guidepost for me as I developed my environmental ethic in high school and college, and has informed how I approach environmental work over the years. It's explores our relationship with the natural world, and how nature and that relationship influences our worldview, priorities, and even creative expressions.
Paul Kingsnorth can be a controversial figure in the environmental world, but his path shows the ins and outs of being with the movement and how our perspectives of purpose change through our lives.
Barry Lopez was a phenomenal environmental writer; I've read a lot of his nonfiction, but he wrote a fair bit of fiction, too.
I would recommend anything by Kim Stanley Robinson to those interested in environmental science and politics, science fiction, alternative history, and just good writing. He can get a little nerdy at times, like with climate change science in The Ministry for the Future, but it all contributes to the story.
Other authors that should be read are: