Top 5 Climate Advocacy Books I've read from the start of 2020

In celebration of Earth Day tomorrow, April 22, I wanted to share some of my latest top recommended reads that involve climate change and advocacy, sustainability or recycling. I typically supplement any books I read on the subjects with any articles they recommend or to cross-reference facts they may be stating to ensure it's the most accurate or up-to-date information.

I have all five book suggestions below, not ranked in order with synopsis and a one sentence of my personal opinion that will in no way, give away anything in the book. I am also always looking for new recommendations on these types of reads so please, send anything my way at consciouslyeco@gmail.com.

- Recycling by Finn Arne Jorgensen

Synopsis: An overview of recycling as an activity and a process, following different materials through the waste stream.

Is there a point to recycling? Is recycling even good for the environment? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Finn Arne Jørgensen answers (drumroll, please): it depends. From a technical point of view, recycling is a series of processes—collecting, sorting, processing, manufacturing. Recycling also has a cultural component; at its core, recycling is about transformation and value, turning material waste into something useful—plastic bags into patio furniture, plastic bottles into T-shirts. Jørgensen offers an accessible and engaging overview of recycling as an activity and as a process at the intersection of the material and the ideological.

Brittany's opinion: Fast read with a general overview of how recycling ended in the consumer's lap rather than the producer.

- How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet by Sophie Egan

Synopsis: Using three criteria—Is it good for me? Is it good for others? Is it good for the planet?—Sophie Egan helps us navigate the bewildering world of food so that we can all become conscious eaters. To eat consciously is not about diets, fads, or hard-and-fast rules. It’s about having straightforward, accurate information to make smart, thoughtful choices amid the chaos of conflicting news and marketing hype. An expert on food’s impact on human and environmental health, Egan organizes the book into four categories—stuff that comes from the ground, stuff that comes from animals, stuff that comes from factories, and stuff that’s made in restaurant kitchens. This practical guide offers bottom-line answers to your most top-of-mind questions about what to eat.

Brittany's opinion: Great beginner guide to conscious eating that will help jumpstart your mind to clean choices on your next grocery trip.

- Eating Animals and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer

Synopsis for Eating Animals: Bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his life oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. For years he was content to live with uncertainty about his own dietary choices but once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.

Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.

Brittany's opinion: This book really kickstarted me to be more conscious how much meat I consume and to help choose vegetarian options where and when I can.

Synopsis for We Are the Weather: In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.

Brittany's opinion: Largely a retrospective on what more the author could be doing to better the world around him.

- The Uninhabitable Earth - Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

Synopsis: An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post),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.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

Brittany's opinion: Get past the first chapter. There's more to it than the first chapter implies.