The weight of the crises our planet faces can feel overwhelming and disempowering. And the books that made Mongabay’s annual list take a hard look at the challenges — deforestation and species loss, climate-driven fires and coral bleaching, and inequality and colonialism — and unflinchingly present the gravity of each situation. But they also examine humanity’s place in the fabric, frayed as it may be, of the planet that sustains us all. Those connections are sometimes tangible — the sustenance they provide, for example. But they are also spiritual, leveling with wonder those among us with the courage to engage. And it’s from that wonder that so many draw inspiration to “remain steady in this fight,” Cristina Mittermeier writes in Hope: “Standing with others shoulder to shoulder until there is nothing left to stand for.” 1. The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History By Manjula Martin Image courtesy of Penguin Random House/Pantheon Books. The wildfire crisis in the western United States has sparked several books in recent years examining the tangle of a changing climate, forest management and fire suppression that have led to the mega-blazes that seem to occur every summer in the Northern Hemisphere. But few are as personal as The Last Fire Season. In 2020, the coastal redwoods in California’s Sonoma county, where author Manjula Martin was living, began to burn, as did the forests further south near Santa Cruz, where Martin was born. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and her own health crisis, she and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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