These 10 books to read in honor of Earth Day 2022 include award-winning climate fiction and nonfiction about the current and future state of our natural world, the dire consequences of climate change, how nature mends us, and what we can do to save our planet for future generations. Celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2022, with these books to read in honor of Earth Day 2022.

1. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

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“Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver’s riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior is arguably Kingsolver’s must thrilling and accessible novel to date, and like so many other of her acclaimed works, represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.”

2. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

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“First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. ‘Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters’ (Peter Matthiessen, for Time‘s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson”s watershed book with a new introduction by the author and activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new afterword by the acclaimed Rachel Carson biographer Linda Lear, who tells the story of Carson”s courageous defense of her truths in the face of ruthless assault from the chemical industry in the year following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death in 1964.”

3. Tales from The Warming by Lorin R. Robinson

“Tales of The Warming is unique in the annals of climate fiction, a new literary genre spawned in the last decade by the climate crisis. The anthology of 10 short stories takes readers all over the world and over time to experience—in human terms—the growing impact of what the author has dubbed ‘The Warming,’ the man-made catastrophe that is increasing the world’s temperature, raising ocean levels and causing increasingly violent weather.”

4. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

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“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.”

5. Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy

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“Nature’s Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy—you will walk away with specific suggestions you can incorporate into your own yard.”

6. The Wild Remedy by Emma Mitchell

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“Emma Mitchell’s richly illustrated and evocative nature diary tracks the lives of local flora and fauna around her home and further afield and shows how being in the wild benefits our mental and physical wellbeing. Emma Mitchell has suffered with depression for 25 years. In 2003, she left the city and began to take walks in the countryside around her new home, photographing, collecting and drawing as she went. Each walk was as medicinal as any talk therapy or pharmaceutical. Emma’s moving and candid account of her year is a powerful testament to how reconnecting with nature may offer some answers to today’s mental health epidemic.”

7. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

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“A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future.”

8. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

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“A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.”

9. The Overstory by Richard Powers

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“The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours―vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.”

10. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

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“NEW YORK CITY, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe–ecological collapse, global war, natural disasters–he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost? At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be.”

Related: Can Climate Fiction Save The World? and 10 Books Past And Present That Help Define Climate Fiction

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