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
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.
Noam Chomsky and Andrea Moro on the limits of our comprehension
“The sudden awareness of something that calls for an explanation, once the fog of habit has lifted, seems to be the real stuff revolutions’ sparkles are made of.”
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
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
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
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...
Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing wealth in the time of collapse
This book is the bone-rattling equivalent of a visit to the wild shaman’s house: you’d suppose you made the brief trip to get some medicinal items, but there are often more things in their brew than are dreamt of in your plans. Bayo Akomolafe By Alnoor Ladha &...
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
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
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
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
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...
Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
Presented as a series of short vignettes, on topics as wide ranging as the height of Japanese men to the manufacturing challenges of wind turbines, Smil’s latest work is a move away from his more traditional academic style. His emphasis remains on the importance of...
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
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
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
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
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 Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization
By Thomas Homer-Dixon The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon takes the reader on a mind-stretching tour of societies' management, or mismanagement, of disasters over time. From the demise of ancient Rome to contemporary climate change, this book analyzes what...
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?
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...
Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy
By David Fleming Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming’s extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of four hundred and four interlinked dictionary entries,...
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
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...
The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval
The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval, Edited by Daniel Lerch, combines a fresh look at the crises humanity faces, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the...
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,...
Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences
Apologies to the Grandchildren by William Ophuls is a collection of essays that throw light on questions of ecological collapse, the connection between the ecological crisis and the breakdown of liberal democracy, and what society will look like when we exhaust solar...
Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World
Resilience Thinking offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system...
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophesies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data:...
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...
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems
Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in...
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
It is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to...