Not Too Late to join the climate book club

Dear friends and fellow readers,

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to shape the New Climate Stories book club starting next week to address the overwhelm that the topic sometimes elicits without soft-shoeing around the problem. To jump to the practical outcome of these considerations, the reading schedule for the five-month series, scroll down. If you’re interested in a few of my considerations — and how you could organize your own investigations into the climate literature — read on.

1. Choose hope from the middle of the mess.

In the essay '“How the Ants Moved the Elephants in Paris,” collected in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Renato Redentor Constantino, a Filipino delegate to the 2015 Paris Agreement, points out that hope is the real radical choice. He invokes the late John Berger (a figure so revered in my household that we named our dog after him), who counseled that to hope is “to live with history where the past is a dear companion instead of a mere instrument used to bludgeon adversaries.” In this vein, the past is a wise elder, someone I respect and revere, someone who can point the way to a livable future.

This kind of hope is especially radical when it arises from within the hearts of those most informed about climate change. From its inception, I envisioned a book group that would focus on new narratives that imagine new futures, but I also want those narratives to proceed from an expert understanding of the depth of the issues facing the planet. One strong feature of the Not Too Late collection is that many of its authors have waded into the worst of the climate morass and chosen optimism and hope from that vantage point. Similarly, The novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson portrays a lot of near-term devastation, but then it imagines a global community working to remedy our social ills.

2. Read slowly enough to metabolize the information.

I’m always trying to be sure that the readers in my book clubs get enough out of their membership. I worry that selecting a short book will make them feel, well, shorted. This, however, is the wrong attitude to bring into a climate book club (and probably any book club). Part of why we feel overwhelmed by the climate crisis is because we believe there is more to learn, more to understand, more to face, than we can possibly take on. Instead of trying to fit in every worthwhile climate book in this round, I’m taking a longer-term approach. When I considered how much can reasonably be absorbed and discussed every month, I slowed the pace considerably. The end result is to split both Robinson’s novel and the Not too Late collection into two months.

3. Read with both heart and mind.

Some climate reading foregrounds the scientific issues via data-heavy explanations. Other books cover the affective aspects and the ways in which we, individually and collectively, are responding to the crisis. In an “engaged reading” series like this one, both modes are essential, and I try for a balance. On the affective side, the excerpt I chose from Climate Lyricism by Min Hyoung Song explores the importance of cultivating both attention and community, and The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen collects personal responses to the crisis from a variety of well-known writers and thinkers. On the data end of the reading spectrum, Paul Hawken’s Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation is a textbook on solutions. Similarly, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist’s issue-by-issue explanation of what the data tell us and where to go from here.

The end result of these musings is the following schedule for the next five months, plus a lot of ideas for what to read in the second round, starting in the fall.

Monthly topics and book selections:

We’ll meet online, on fourth Mondays at 5pm PT, starting this Monday, April 22. The cost is $150 for the five sessions.

I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate Earth Day. I hope you’ll join me!

Jennifer Carson