How do we understand, acknowledge, and appreciate these times—and how do we envision the future through so many unknowns? We find insight, inspiration, and solace in books. Here’s a selection of some of the most compelling work we’re reading.

Latest Books

Reality Blind

Reality Blind

by Nate Hagens Reductionism is quite useful, but both dangerous
and insufficient. A science-based worldview which looks at all the
puzzle pieces at once can make sense of things. The important
knowledge now resides between the disciplines.

Navigating the Polycrisis

Navigating the Polycrisis

By Michael J. Albert…A much-needed work of global futures studies, Navigating the Polycrisis brings the rigor of the natural and social sciences together with speculative imagination in order to illuminate and shape our global future.

More great reading

Permacrisis

Permacrisis

A Plan to Fix a Fractured World Three of the most internationally respected and experienced thinkers of our time, these friends found their pandemic Zooms increasingly focused on a cascade of crises: sputtering growth, surging inflation, poor policy responses, an...

Spaces for Growth: Learning our Way out of a Crisis

Spaces for Growth: Learning our Way out of a Crisis

By Graham Leicester and Maureen O'Hara In normal times we tend to go about our lives oblivious to the structures, institutions, processes and shared values that shape our behaviours. In powerful times like ours, deep structures of love, power and justice are brought...

Deep Survival: Who lives, who dies, and why

Deep Survival: Who lives, who dies, and why

By Laurence Gonzales Laurence Gonzales’s bestselling Deep Survival has helped save lives from the deepest wildernesses, just as it has improved readers’ everyday lives. Its mix of adventure narrative, survival science, and practical advice has inspired everyone from...

The Displacements

The Displacements

As 'The Displacements' slows down and sinks into the frustrations of life in a massive relief camp, the story recalls the Houston Astrodome after Katrina — except that here we witness what one character sardonically labels a 'catastrophe of whiteness.'… What unfolds...

Limits and Beyond

Limits and Beyond

Edited by Ugo Bardi & Carlos Alvarez Pereira In 1972, a book changed the world. The Club of Rome commissioned a report that shifted how we see what humans are doing to the planet. Looking back five decades later, what happened next, what did we do and not do, what...

We Are the Middle of Forever

We Are the Middle of Forever

This book adds an indigenous perspective on the polycrisis–it’s perspective-shifting and adds what has been missing in polycrisis conversations. And makes the important point that the actual idea of a polycrisis is a colonial construct. Susan An innovative work of...

Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons

Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons

Mary Watkins brings together activist, archetypal, and community-based work with beauty and grace. How do we show up—for all humans and all species—in the name of peace and liberation? If this question haunts you or sparks your imagination, dig into this offering....

Designs for the Pluriverse

Designs for the Pluriverse

Arturo Escobar, thank you for being alive on this planet at this time. And, thank you for this beautiful book and elevating how we think of design—and the role it has in human culture.Susan By Arturo Ecobar In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new...

Commanding Hope

Commanding Hope

This was my starting place for polycrisis reading, and I was pleasantly surprised by how optimistic and engaging it was. I got the audio version and walked many miles listening to this uplifting book. If you want to wrap your head around these troubling times with...

Ministry For The Future

Ministry For The Future

By Kim Stanley Robinson Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation's....

Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times

Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times

By Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times provides “a valuable guide to help everyone make sense of the new and potentially catastrophic situation in which we now find ourselves.” What if our civilization were to...

The Road

The Road

OK, this is Cormac McCarthy: it's dark and visually searing. If you’re up for a bleak vision of the future in the hands of an exceptional writer, give this a go. And be forewarned that you're unlikely to erase the images of the father pushing the shopping cart from...

The Dog Stars

The Dog Stars

By Peter Heller Hig’s wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley.But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the...

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth

This book is filled with accessible prose & technical science and woven together by storytelling that gives human context to its central question: “What if climate change is worse than we think?” As someone who consumes climate information in bite-sized pieces, it...

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

By Bill McKibben Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben's experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate...

Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It

Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It

David Fleming's Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It leads readers through a stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, comprising four hundred and four...

Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

In times of upheaval, why do some people, communities, companies and systems thrive, while others fall apart? That’s the question at the heart of an exciting new field, and an urgent new agenda for the 21st century. In Resilience, Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond includes four sets of studies. Seven chapters discuss some of the clearest, most familiar, most striking examples of past collapses: the ends of Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn Islands,...

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

In On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow. The future of humanity is bound to the future of science and...