After witnessing apocalyptic fires, violent hurricanes, and cataclysmic flooding, readers don’t need lectures, says climate scientist Kate Marvel. “There’s a whole spectrum of natural emotions that pop up when people think about climate change,” she adds. She and other authors of forthcoming nonfiction acknowledge the realities while offering coping suggestions and examples of collective action.
In Human Nature (Ecco, June 2025), Marvel views climate change through the prism of nine emotions. She deliberates, for example, on the double meaning of pride: the hubris of proposals that would engineer sunlight away from the earth and the gratification of genuine scientific breakthroughs. Another chapter focuses on hope; when asked about it, Marvel invoked Fred Rogers’s suggestion to “look for the helpers,” a notion she finds as comforting today as she did as a child. “There are so many helpers; it’s important to tell people that.”
Alan Weisman, whose best known book is 2007’s The World Without Us, says that as he brainstormed new projects, “My editor kept asking, Do you think there’s any hope?” Weisman responds to that question in Hope Dies Last (Dutton, Apr. 2025) by profiling environmental change makers from around the world, such as Dutch activist Marjan Minnesma, whose Urgenda Foundation successfully sued the Netherlands to enforce climate treaties it had signed. “These are people for whom the word impossible doesn’t exist,” Weisman says.
In other books, authors examine their own motivations and actions. Terrible Beauty (Harvard Business Review, Nov.) grapples with what Auden Schendler, SVP of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, describes as his complicity in advocating corporate sustainability practices that ultimately left the fossil fuel industry unscathed. “Everything I’d been preaching—that businesses could cut their carbon footprint at a profit and lead by example—sounded as if it had been written by the fossil-fuel industry,” he says.
In his new book, he recalls retrofitting his workspace with efficient light bulbs and boiler systems only to realize that the carbon footprint hadn’t budged because his electrical utility burned coal. This inspired him to organize a nearly decade-long effort with community members to change the utility’s leadership. “We ran campaigns,” he explains. “We found people to run for the board. That’s only possible when we’re thinking about society and not just profit.”
MacArthur fellow Catherine Coleman Flowers leans on her faith in the essay collection Holy Ground (Spiegel & Grau, Jan. 2025) to illustrate how issues like rural poverty, reproductive freedom, and ecologically destructive practices are connected. “I grew up in the Baptist tradition, where we use allegory to tell stories,” she says. Drawing from a lifetime of activism and experience finding common cause with unlikely allies—she recounts working with Alabama senator Jeff Sessions to get funding for sewage treatment in rural Black communities—Flowers aims to inspire younger generations to find their place in the fight for sustainable transformation.
“My role has changed multiple times, and the holes I’ve fit into weren’t always round,” she says. “I want to show people that everyone has a role to fill.”
