Climate Justice: A Man-Made Problem With a Feminist Solution, by Mary Robinson. 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 – people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal. 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.

Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen. This work begins with an historical, grounding overview that situates ecofeminist theory and activism within the larger field of ecocriticism and provides a timeline for important publications and events. Drawing on animal studies, environmental studies, feminist/gender studies, and practical ethics, the ecofeminist contributors to this volume stress the need to move beyond binaries and attend to context over universal judgments; spotlight the importance of care as well as justice, emotion as well as reason; and work to undo the logic of domination and its material implications.

Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice, Gender Equality, Climate Change and Rights. Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice provides a compelling demonstration of the deeply gendered and unequal effects of the climate emergency, alongside the urgent need for a feminist perspective to expose and address these structural political, social and economic inequalities. Taking a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, this book explores new ways of thinking about how climate change interacts with gender inequalities and feminist concerns with rights and law, and how the human world is bound up with the non-human, natural world.

https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/feminist-frontiers-in-climate-justice-9781803923789.html (open access)

How women can save the Planet, by Anne Karpf shines a light on the radical ideas, compelling research and tireless campaigns, led by and for women around the world, that have inspired her to hope. Her conversations with female activists show how we can fight back, with strength in diversity. And, faced with the most urgent catastrophe of our times, she offers a powerful vision: a Green New Deal for Women.

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, by Vandana Shiva – feminist and environmental justice classic. In this pioneering work, Vandana Shiva looks at the history of development and progress, stripping away the neutral language of science to reveal third-world development policy as the global twin of the industrial revolution.

As Shiva makes clear, the way this development paradigm is being implemented—through violence against nature and women—threatens survival itself. She focuses on how rural Indian women experience and perceive the causes and effects of ecological destruction, and how they conceive of and initiate processes to stop the destruction and begin regeneration. As the world continues to follow destructive paths of development, Shiva’s Staying Alive is a fiercely relevant book that positions women not solely as survivors of the crisis, but as the source of crucial insights and visions to guide our struggle.

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff. No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.

Climate Change is Racist, by Jeremy Williams. In this eye-opening book, writer and environmental activist Jeremy Williams takes us on a short, urgent journey across the globe – from Kenya to India, the USA to Australia – to understand how White privilege and climate change overlap. We’ll look at the environmental facts, hear the experiences of the people most affected on our planet and learn from the activists leading the change. It’s time for each of us to find our place in the global struggle for justice.

The Intersectional Environmentalist, by Leah Thomas. The Intersectional Environmentalist examines the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and promotes awareness of the fundamental truth that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Written by Leah Thomas, a prominent voice in the field and the activist who coined the term “Intersectional Environmentalism,” this book is simultaneously a call to action, a guide to instigating change for all, and a pledge to work towards the empowerment of all people and the betterment of the planet.

To Cook a Continent, by Nnimmo Bassey. Arguing that the climate crisis confronting the world today is rooted mainly in the wealthy economies’ abuse of fossil fuels, indigenous forests, and global commercial agriculture, this important book investigates how Africa has been exploited and how Africans should respond for the good of all. As it examines the oil industry in Africa and probes the causes of global warming, this record warns of its insidious impacts and explores false solutions. Demonstrating that the issues around natural resource exploitation, corporate profiteering, and climate change must be considered together if the planet is to be saved, the book suggests how Africa can overcome the crises of environment and global warming.

Unbowed: A Memoir, by Wangari Maathai the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Green Belt Movement founder and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya.

As long as grass grows, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Through the unique lens of Indigenized environmental justice,  Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Life in the City of Dirty Water, by Clayton Thomas-Müller. Tying together personal stories of survival that bring the realities of the First Nations of this land into sharp focus, and lessons learned from a career as a frontline activist committed to addressing environmental injustice at a global scale, Thomas-Muller offers a narrative and vision of healing and responsibility.

The Red Deal, by The Red Nation. A powerful guide to Indigenous liberation and the fight to save the planet. The Red Deal is both a manifesto for Indigenous liberation and a plan for the future of our planet. Part movement document and part activist handbook, its ultimate goal is not to heal the existing structures, but to present a way forward following the abolition of them. 

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World, by Mikaela Loach takes a hopeful perspective on real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all. We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.

The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh discusses that contemporary literature nowadays is not truly connected with our nature world, so it leads to the lack of awareness and engagement with the climate crisis conversations. He then traces the link between capitalism and carbon emissions in the chapters that follow. Though Ghosh admits that it’s too late for us to avoid impacts of the current global climate, he’s optimistic that the younger generation will be able to rediscover the connection with other beings and be able to transcend the isolation in which humanity was entrapped.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, by Naomi Klein. Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

Wasteland, by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. When we throw things ‘away’, what does that actually mean? Where does it go, and who deals with it when it gets there? In Wasteland, award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on an eye-opening journey through the global waste industry. From the mountainous landfills of New Delhi to Britain’s overflowing sewers, from hollowed-out mining towns in the USA to Ghana’s flooded second-hand markets, we meet the people on the frontline of our waste crisis – both those being exploited, and those determined to make a difference. On the way, we discover the corporate greenwashing that started the recycling movement; the dark truth behind our second-hand donations; and come face to face with the 10,000-year legacy of our nuclear waste.

From Big Oil to Big Green, by Marco Grasso. Grasso argues that by indiscriminately flooding the global economy with fossil fuels – while convincing the public that halting climate change is a matter of consumer choice, that fossil fuels are synonymous with energy, and that a decarbonized world would take civilization back to the Stone Age – Big Oil is morally responsible for the climate crisis. He explains that it has managed to avoid being held financially accountable for past harm and that its duty of reparation has never been theoretically developed or justified. With this book, he fills those gaps. After making the moral case for climate reparations and their implementation, Grasso develops Big Oil’s duty of decarbonization, which entails its transformation into Big Green by phasing out carbon emissions from its processes and, especially, its products.

Climate Change Action and the Responsibility to Protect, by Ben L. Parr. This book brings together two important fields in the study of international politics and policy: climate change adaptation and mitigation (climate action) and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Both have attracted strong scholarly attention in each of their respective research silos, but there is yet to be a strong research push that explores the relationship between the two. Filling this gap, Ben L. Parr argues that the climate action and the R2P agendas share a common goal: to protect vulnerable human populations from large-scale harm. To substantiate this argument, Parr reveals where the historical, conceptual, and operational parallels exist between the two agendas, and where and when researchers and practitioners from both camps might work together in practice to achieve their common goal in the challenging years ahead. 

Food Sovereignty, edited by Hanna Wittman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais and Nettie Wiebe. Around the world, people are resisting the environmental, social and political destruction perpetuated by the industrial agricultural system. This resistance has led to a new and radical agricultural practice – food sovereignty – which puts control in the hands of those who are both hungry and produce the world’s food – peasants and family farmers – rather than corporate executives. Advocating a practical, radical change to the way much of our food system operates the contributors, including Raj Patel, Walden Bello, Philip McMichael, Miguel Altieri and Eric Holt-Gimenez, show through analysis and case studies that food sovereignty results in increased production, safe food that reaches those who are in the most need and agricultural practices that respect the earth. This is the means to achieving the UN-endorsed goal of food security.

Freedom Farmer: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, by Monica M. White. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power, by Liza Grandia. “Kernels of Resistance is an exemplary politically engaged anthropology of the powerful. With energy and clarity, Grandia weaves together Maya calendrics and agricultural knowledge, ethnography, political history, chemistry, scrappy legal and bureaucratic sleuthing, and odes to maize and weeds to create a handbook for anticorporate activists and activist scholars.”

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on Our Climate-Ravaged Planet, by Mark Shapiro. This investigation unravels the stories of seed survival strategies and why it matters that more than half of all commercially traded seeds are under the control of three multinational agri-chemical companies—producing chemical dependent uniform seeds just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. And he dives deep into the growing movement in the United States and around the world to defy these trends, and assert autonomy over locally evolved seeds that are, by contrast, showing high levels of resilience to the onrushing impacts of climate change. He probes into the implications for our health and for the Earth’s ecological health, of patented seeds, and the companies that have turned them, and the chemicals they require to survive, into one of the world’s most valuable commodities. 

Stolen Harvest, by Vandana Shiva. Shiva describes how industrial agriculture steals food from nature and poor people. She urges us to reclaim our right to protect the earth and her diverse species. Food democracy, she says, is the new agenda for ecological sustainability and social justice.

For the Wild is  a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. They are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. Their work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.

One Planet Podcast. Leading environmentalists, organizations, activists, and conservationists discuss meaningful ways to create a better and more sustainable future.

Outrage + Optimism, hosted by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson. The hosts explore the stories behind the headlines on climate change, talking to the change-makers turning challenges into opportunities. They delight in progress, question greenwash and get to grips with the difficult issues – sharing it all with our listeners along the way.

The YIKES Podcast hosted by Mikaela Loach and Josephine Becker. From the climate crisis to racism to activism and resisting oppressive systems, it can call get a bit overwhelming. Yikes is a podcast which leans into the Yikes of the world rather than letting it overwhelm us. We breakdown the issues in an accessible intersectional and nuanced way to guide us towards action together.