I am not the kind of reader who reads one book at a time. At any given moment, I’m probably working my way through six or seven different books in parallel. This means my book-finishing pace is slow, and if a book can’t keep my attention for the several weeks (sometimes months!) it takes me to finish it, well, I probably won’t. A book I’ve read all the way to the last page is a book I’ve loved, and a book I’m almost certainly going to want to share.
TELL CONGRESS: SUPPORT MENTAL WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITIES HIT BY CLIMATE DISASTER
In case you’re in need of new ideas for your summer reading list, here are four books I’ve recently finished that all touch on different aspects of climate change and mental health—I hope you’ll love them as much as I did.
1. The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, by Clayton Page Aldern
There are numerous wonderful books about how climate disruption impacts our emotions, but The Weight of Nature is one of the first to comprehensively explore how our warming world affects the functioning of our brains and behavior. It’s meticulously researched and among the best science writing I’ve ever read.
The author, Clayton Page Aldern, is a neuroscientist-turned-journalist who manages to make alarming information (“As water temperatures rise and the seas absorb more and more atmospheric carbon dioxide, paralysis-causing ocean toxins will flourish”) accessible, intimate, engaging, and poetic: “Grief is only ever a sign that you’ve loved something enough to care that it’s changing. The weight of nature is an anchor, and it binds us to this world.” The Weight of Nature isn’t light reading, but it’s a book I’m very glad I read—and will undoubtedly refer back to many times.
2. How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet, by LaUra Schmidt (with Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsie Rivera)
Whenever people ask me for resources for navigating difficult climate emotions, I always tell them about the Good Grief Network, a 10-step, peer-led program for cultivating resilience in a time of climate chaos. Written by the Good Grief Network’s founder, LaUra Schmidt, How to Live in a Chaotic Climate is a book I want everyone struggling with climate grief to have on their shelves: it’s a roadmap through the tried-and-true 10 steps of the Good Grief Network model, from Step 1: Accepting the Severity of the Predicament (that’s a tough one!) to Step 10: Reinvest in Meaningful Efforts.
It’s a manual for reconnecting with ourselves and each other. “In a dominant culture that normalizes the repression of our emotions and reinforces the systemic division by race, class, gender, and more,” Schmidt says, “connection is a form of rebellion.”
3. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether or Not to Have Children in an Uncertain Future, by Jade Sasser
One of the most painful manifestations of the mental health impacts of climate change is the growing prevalence of concerns about what it means to have children in a climate-disrupted world. In Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, researcher Jade Sasser tackles the topic of eco-reproductive concerns head-on: “Increasingly people in their reproductive years aren’t acting on their desires and dreams; they are foreclosing and narrowing their reproductive possibilities because the social and environmental conditions we’re living in today are cause for despair, and they fear the future will not be any better.”
Sasser doesn’t tell readers that they should or shouldn’t have children. She turns instead to what research is telling us about how people in their childbearing years are experiencing these times, explores the impact of racial injustice on eco-reproductive concerns, and stands in solidarity with those demanding systemic changes so that people will feel free to build the families they want in the future. After reading Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, I immediately recommended it to several friends asking the kid question themselves; it’s a book I’m betting you’ll want to pass on too.
4. North Woods, by Daniel Mason
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not usually a fiction person; I can count on one hand the number of fiction books I’ve read over the last few years. But North Woods absolutely captivated me. Set deep in the forests of New England, North Woods follows the stories of the inhabitants of a single cabin in the woods over hundreds of years—it’s a meditation on the inevitability of change and the passage of time, and though it doesn’t bill itself as a “climate book,” reading North Woods felt like an unexpected balm for my climate grief. This book is funny, magical, spell-binding, and profound—and may just make a fiction reader out of me.
TELL CONGRESS: SUPPORT MENTAL WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITIES HIT BY CLIMATE DISASTER