Climate Prep Week Resources

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, where opposing sides try to achieve victory through fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This book examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change.

In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump--despite having information about climate change and the connection to fossil fuels--continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system.

If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone. All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States across generations, geographies, and race, and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced public conversation on the climate crisis.

Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. Wilson teases out what particular forces in American culture--in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values--combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. The story offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp.

Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people. Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself.

How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change provides tools and strategies for parents to explain the climate emergency to their children and galvanize positive action. Coverage includes: The unvarnished realities of the climate emergency, where we are, and how we got here, and strategies for talking to kids of different ages about the climate crisis, including advice from engaged parents on the ground. A lifeline for parents who are feeling overwhelmed with fear and grief, this book provides both hope and practical ways to engage children in pursuit of a better world that is still possible.

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. But the city is starting to fray along the edges--crime and corruption have set in and a new disease called "the breaks" is ravaging the population. When a visitor arrives--a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side--the city is entranced. The "orcamancer," as she's known, very subtly brings together four people--each living on the periphery--to stage unprecedented acts of resistance.

For years Lizzie has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They're both stable (for now), but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, calls. Sylvia has become famous for her podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants Lizzie to answer her mail: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she wonders what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls.

Ash and Pia move from hipster Brooklyn to rustic Vermont in search of a more authentic life. But just months after settling in, the forecast of a superstorm disrupts their dream. Fear of an impending disaster splits their tight-knit community and exposes the cracks in their marriage. Where Isole was once a place of old farm families, rednecks and transplants, it now divides into paranoid preppers, religious fanatics and government tools, each at odds about what course to take.

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. This extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.

Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying. In short, everything is going to hell. It's here that two young filmmakers find something to believe in- an old sailor who calls himself Daniel Defoe and claims to be five hundred and sixty years old. Some things remain constant throughout the centuries, and being on the edge of ruin may be one. But there are other constants too- love, humor, and old Dan himself, always adapting and inspiring others with dreams of a better life.

Drifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame. The stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.