- The 2024 books that made this year’s list at Mongabay center primarily on humanity’s place in nature, both as a way to understand environmental problems and how to deal with them.
- The authors explore topics ranging from Arctic warming and Indigenous land rights, to deforestation and coral bleaching.
- The list below features a sample of important literature on conservation and the environment published in 2024.
- Inclusion in this list does not imply Mongabay’s endorsement of a book’s content; the views in the books are those of the authors and not necessarily of Mongabay.
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
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 her partner had to evacuate.
In the book, she explores her love for the landscapes she has come to know intimately, and through evocative prose, she grapples with the nuances of living in an altered body in an altered world.
2. H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, whose Under a White Sky made our list in 2021, breaks down climate change in 26 essays from a multitude of angles, all with the sumptuous illustrations of a graphic novel by Wesley Allsbrook. Kolbert takes us back in history, witnessing the first science to try to tease apart the impact humans were (and are) having on global temperatures. We’re brought along in a simulator as she learns to fly an electric plane in the gonzo journalism tradition. And as the title suggests, she searches for reasons to believe that Earth — or at least humanity’s survival on it — isn’t doomed. People are bringing their smarts, creativity and passion to projects aimed at shifting our course away from carbon-based energy. “Go looking for hopeful climate stories,” Kolbert writes, “and they turn up everywhere.”
3. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography
By David E. Gilbert
In Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land, environmental anthropologist David Gilbert examines the changes possible when humanity’s approach to the land, food production and justice shift. Gilbert’s lens is a case study in which agricultural workers in an Indonesian village took over an industrial plantation nearby. Twenty years later, the people of Casiavera on the island of Sumatra are still in control, farming the land collectively and helping its ecological recovery.
Their activism has inspired others in the Land Back movement, a global effort to reclaim land for Indigenous peoples. Gilbert sees the events in Casiavera as an example that can guide similar efforts elsewhere. “Reclaimers’ experiences from Sumatra and beyond can provide a point of reference as more and more people seek to get the land back, go back to the land, and live lives in solidarity with workers and all living beings,” he said in an interview about the book.
4. Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice
By Rebecca Kormos
On the topic of justice, wildlife biologist Rebecca Kormos has written Intertwined. Part of the story is a plea to acknowledge the disproportionate burden women face as a result of climate change and biodiversity loss. They’re more likely to suffer the repercussions of devastating storms, drought, and the disappearance of species undermining the food systems on which their families rely.
But Kormos’s focus also extends to the role that women can play — and indeed are playing — in addressing these crises. The book contains the stories of women working toward protecting nature for the benefit of all of us, demonstrating what happens when women take the lead. And as she points out, the evidence is behind them, given that empowering women often leads to better conservation outcomes.
5. In Hot Water: Inside the Battle to Save the Great Barrier Reef
By Paul E. Hardisty
The bleaching of coral reefs is one of the most striking impacts of climate change. Rising ocean temperatures tear apart the symbiotic relationship between corals and their resident algae, devastating the reefs that anchor critical marine ecosystems. Even the world’s largest assemblage of coral, the Great Barrier Reef, isn’t immune. Paul Hardisty, former CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, takes readers into the fight to save the reef with In Hot Water. Hardisty explores not just the reef’s ecological history and ongoing importance, but also the innovative people who have made saving the reef their singular focus.
6. The Heart of the Wild: Essays on Nature, Conservation, and the Human Future
Edited by Ben A. Minteer and Jonathan B. Losos
The Heart of the Wild draws together essays from scientists, philosophers and writers tasked with pondering humanity’s connection with the world around us. Through that lens, they look at the degradation of the environment and ask how society’s growing distance from the “wild” has impacted us. They explore the importance of engaging with the natural world and seeing ourselves as part of it, not apart from it. In doing so, they also envision a novel way forward in which the ecological crises of our time no longer seem so insurmountable.
7. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Following up on her 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer continues her probing of Indigenous wisdom to take a different view of how life might coexist on the planet. Kimmerer herself is Indigenous, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and a botanist. Through her writing, the plants she studies become teachers, imparting lessons emphasizing the importance of what we give more than what we accumulate. As the title suggests, the serviceberry, a humble tree that sprouts white flowers and sweet berries, serves as a model for the interconnectedness through which life can flourish, even as the systems people have developed tend to trick us into “the illusion of self-sufficiency,” as Kimmerer writes.
8. Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis
By Jon Waterman
Author Jon Waterman has spent decades exploring the Arctic, beginning as a park ranger in the U.S. state of Alaska in the early 1980s. In the Brooks Range and along the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park, he developed a lifelong love and passion for Earth’s northerly latitudes. More recent trips, including one with his son in 2021, brought the impacts of a changing climate into sharp focus.
Into the Thaw documents these worrying shifts across the past 40 years — the balmy (and sometimes sweltering) temperatures; the transition of the tundra (“like frozen spinach left on the kitchen counter”) from carbon sink to source; the dwindling caribou herds.
But the book doesn’t read like an elegy to the Arctic. The Arctic has drawn Waterman back again and again, including another trip in 2022 after the one with his son. Through his prose and photographs documenting hundreds of miles of travel by raft and on foot, encounters with wildlife, and interactions with researchers and the Iñupiat, he brings to life the “wonder” that the north holds for anyone brave enough to venture into it.
9. Hope
By Cristina Mittermeier
Conservationist Cristina Mittermeier’s new book, Hope, includes an array of striking photographs from cultures, climates and ecosystems across the globe. As a photographer, she seems as at home among Indigenous peoples as she does diving with marine life. But it’s through Mittermeier’s writing that accompanies the images that we get a glimpse behind the camera of how documenting life around her has impacted her and, specifically, as the title suggests, her views on the idea of hope when we live in such an imperiled world.
“Has hope become an endangered species? Perhaps. Maybe the challenges are too big and too scary,” she writes, next to a photo of a polar bear on an ice floe. Undaunted, she continues: “I will be there, hopeful, until the end.”
10. Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America
By Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate
As incomes and living standards have risen across Europe and the United States in recent centuries, the once-degraded forests there recovered. Economists Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate write that the same economic trends are stimulating the recovery of forests in parts of Latin America. In Brazil, home to the largest piece of the world’s biggest rainforest, deforestation declined to its lowest level in nearly a decade by mid-2024. Sohngen and Southgate’s thesis is that demographic changes, like lower birth rates and more productive agriculture, have helped to turn the tide away from deforestation. Greater recognition of local land rights has also made a difference.
However, the problem is far from solved. Not long ago, in 2022, the Amazon across several countries experienced one of its highest deforestation rates ever recorded. The authors of Reversing Deforestation argue that a continued focus on local land rights and measures that place value on the biodiversity these forests hold will help to encourage less deforestation in the future.
Banner image: From Cristina Mittermeier’s Hope: Kayapó children play in the Rio Pequeno, near their village. Image by Cristina Mittermeier.
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky.
How conservation photographer Cristina Mittermeier uses visual storytelling to inspire action
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