With the holiday travel season ramping up, a good book is a must-have for airport delays or to give as the perfect gift.

Journalists from Bloomberg Green picked seven climate and environmental books they loved despite their weighty content. A few were positively uplifting. Here are our recommendations.

Fiction

“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

It’s 2119, decades after the Derangement (cascading climate catastrophes), the Inundation (a global tsunami triggered by a Russian nuclear bomb) and artificial intelligence-launched wars have halved the world’s population. The U.S. is no more and the U.K. is an impoverished archipelago of tiny islands where scholar Tom Metcalfe embarks on an obsessive quest to find the only copy of a renowned 21st century poem that was never published.

The famous author of the ode to now-vanished English landscapes recited it once at a dinner party in 2014 as a gift to his wife, but its words remain lost to time. Metcalfe believes access to the previously hidden digital lives of the poet and his circle will lead him to the manuscript. He knows where to start his search: Thanks to Nigeria — the 22nd century’s superpower — the historical internet has been decrypted and archived, including every personal email, text, photo and video.

The truth, though, lies elsewhere. It’s a richly told tale of our deranged present — and where it may lead without course correction. — Todd Woody

“Greenwood” by Michael Christie

This likewise dystopian novel begins in 2038 with Jacinda Greenwood, a dendrologist turned tour guide for the ultra-wealthy, working in one of the world’s last remaining forests. But the novel zig-zags back to 1934 and the beginnings of a timber empire that divided her family for generations.

For more than a century, the Greenwoods’ lives and fates were entwined with the trees they fought to exploit or protect. The novel explores themes of ancestral sin and atonement against the backdrop of the forests, which stand as silent witnesses to human crimes enacted on a global scale. — Danielle Bochove

“Barkskins” by Annie Proulx

Another multigenerational saga, spanning more than three centuries and 700 pages, this 2016 novel by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author tracks the deforestation of the New World over 300 years, beginning in the 17th century.

Following the descendants of two immigrants to what will become modern-day Quebec, the story takes the reader on a global voyage, crisscrossing North America, visiting the Amsterdam coffee houses that served as hubs for the Dutch mercantile empire and following new trade routes from China to New Zealand. Along the way, it chronicles the exploitation of the forests, the impact on Indigenous communities and the lasting legacy of colonialism.

With a vast cast of characters, the novel is at times unwieldy. But the staggering descriptions of Old World forests and the incredible human effort required to destroy them linger long after the saga concludes. —Danielle Bochove

Nonfiction

“The Joyful Environmentalist: How to Practise Without Preaching” by Isabel Losada

It is hard for a committed environmentalist to feel cheerful these days. But Isabel Losada’s book encourages readers to undertake a seemingly impossible mission: finding delight in navigating the absurd situations that committed environmentalists inevitably face, rather than succumbing to frustration.

Those delights can be as simple as looking up eco-friendly homemade shampoo formulas on Instagram or crushing a bucket of berries for seed collection to help restore native plants.

The book itself is an enjoyable read. With vivid details and a dose of British humor, Losada relays her failed attempt to have lunch at a Whole Foods store without using its disposable plastic cutlery. (The solution? Bring your own metal fork.) To be sure, some advice in her book isn’t realistic for everyone. But there are plenty of practical tips, such as deleting old and unwanted emails to help reduce the energy usage of data centers that store them. This book is an important reminder that you can protect the environment joyfully.
— Coco Liu

“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang

China’s President Xi Jinping is a trained engineer, and so are many members of the country’s top leadership. Dan Wang writes about how that training shows up in the country’s relentless push to build, build and build. That includes a clean tech industry that leads the world in almost every conceivable category, though Wang explores other domains as well.

Born in China, Wang grew up in Canada and studied in the U.S. before going back to live in his native country from 2017 to 2023. That background helps his analysis land with more gravity in 2025, as the U.S. and China face off in a battle of fossil fuels versus clean tech. — Akshat Rathi

“Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures” by Merlin Sheldrake

A JP Morgan banker might seem an unlikely character in a book about fungi. But R. Gordon Wasson, who popularized the main compound found in “magic mushrooms” with a 1957 article in Life magazine, is only one of the delightful surprises in Merlin Sheldrake’s offbeat book. The author’s dedication to telling the tale of fungi includes literally getting his hands dirty, unearthing complex underground fungal networks, and engaging in self-experimentation by participating in a scientific study of the effects of LSD on the brain. The result is a book that reveals the complexity and interdependency of life on Earth, and the role we play in it.

“We humans became as clever as we are, so the argument goes, because we were entangled within a demanding flurry of interaction,” Sheldrake writes. Fungi, a lifeform that depends on its interrelatedness with everything else, might have more in common with us than we realize. — Olivia Rudgard

“Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” by Dan Fagin

When chemical manufacturer Ciba arrived in Toms River, N.J., in 1952, the company’s new plant seemed like the economic engine the sleepy coastal community dependent on fishing and tourism had always needed. But the plant soon began quietly dumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced waste into the town’s eponymous river and surrounding woods. That started a legacy of toxic pollution that left families asking whether the waste was the cause of unusually high rates of childhood cancer in the area.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of environmental journalism reads like a thriller, albeit with devastating real-world fallout. It also shows how companies can reinvent themselves: I was startled to learn that Ciba, later known as Ciba-Geigy, merged with another company in 1996 to become the pharmaceutical company Novartis. At a time when there’s been a push to relocate manufacturing from abroad back to the U.S., this is a worthy examination of the hidden costs that can accompany industrial growth. — Emma Court

Bochove, Woody, Liu, Court, Rudgard and Rathi write for Bloomberg.