Hope on the Shelf
Books to cultivate climate hope and optimism.
Every month, we’re sharing a book recommendation that cultivates hope and brings provocative optimism to our rapidly changing world. Curated by Karen Ciccone, NC State Lead Librarian for Public Science and CaSA Director of Futures Engagement.
What if We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? is a joyful and pragmatic antidote to climate doom. Johnson includes interviews with diverse experts, essays, poetry, and art offering concrete solutions and mapping out what a flourishing, sustainable future can actually look like.
Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures
Climate Imagination is an anthology of stories and essays depicting how the world could be if we embraced fresh perspectives on community stewardship of resources, nonhuman agency, and many other things that might seem impossible to change in the present. Sections include “Stories that Spark Change,” “Reimagining Sustainable Cities,” “From Climate Trauma to Climate Action,” and “Navigating Transitions, Building Communities.”
The Ministry for the Future
Ministry for the Future is a gripping account of near-future climate disaster, and how we get things right in response. This 2020 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a plausible path for humanity to reach deep decarbonization by the year 2050, showing that climate action and a hopeful future are possible.
