10 Best Climate & Environment Books of 2025
2025 was the third-hottest year in human history. Learning about climate change, the environment, and how we can live more sustainably is more important than ever.
Luckily, last year was a wonderful year for books on these very topics.
Here are Earthview’s picks for the top ten climate and environment books of 2025, along with a few honorable mentions:
First Place🥇
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
Bill McKibben | W.W. Norton | 224 Pages
Climate change is the single greatest threat to civilization. And solar energy is the best tool to fight it, argues longtime climate activist Bill McKibben. McKibben deftly summarizes the economic case for solar, highlighting its dramatic cost declines in recent years. He dubs solar the “Costco of energy” and identifies it as the cheapest source of energy in human history.
The book also debunks misinformation regarding solar’s limitations and inveighs against NIMBYism that has stalled solar development in some places. Only by building a new energy system can we kick our addiction to dirty fossil fuels, argues this sunny, optimistic tome.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
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Second Place🥈
Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China
Jonathan C. Slaght | Straus and Giroux | 512 Pages
In the chaos and lawlessness that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the beloved Siberian tiger nearly went extinct in the wild as poaching exploded. Slaght tells the story of The Siberian Tiger Project, the pioneering conservation alliance that brought the species back from the brink.
American and Russian researchers have for decades worked together to protect the charismatic big cat. But conservation gains are now under threat as the War in Ukraine has made full cooperation impossible.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Third Place🥉
Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
Kate Marvel | Ecco | 304 Pages
Climate scientist Kate Marvel explains the complex science of climate change through the innovative and evocative lens of human emotions. Each chapter uses a different emotion to investigate a different aspect of the climate crisis - using wonder, for example, to describe Earth’s lucky position in the Goldilocks zone, fear to depict the health impacts of rising temperatures, and hope to detail the remarkable speed of the energy transition.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Selections 4-10
Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic
No region is more threatened by climate change than the Arctic. In this book, Neil Shea examines the unraveling of Arctic ecosystems at various points in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Norway before pivoting to the “great game” underway as global powers seek to profit from the melting ice.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Insectopolis: A Natural History
Peter Kuper | W.W. Norton | 256 Pages
This charming graphic novel explores urban landscapes from the perspective of the insects who thrive there. Set in a post-human world, various species of insects research their own histories in the city of New York from the ruins of the New York Public Library.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World
Elizabeth Kolbert | Crown | 320 Pages
Elizabeth Kolbert has spent two decades writing on the environment for the New Yorker. This book is a curation of seventeen of the author’s finest essays over this period - chronicling humanity’s reckoning with the climate crisis in real-time.
We barely understand the natural systems of our planet, yet we are nonetheless radically changing them to our own detriment. Can we stop ourselves in time? Can we reverse the damage we’ve caused?
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
Alexander Clapp | Little, Brown & Co. | 400 Pages
Author Alexander Clapp spent two years travelling the world for this illuminating and somewhat horrifying travelogue explaining what happens to our trash after we throw it away. Although some ends up in landfills, much of it is shipped, resold, and dumped around the world, often harming vulnerable communities that can least afford the burden.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life
Amy Bowers Cordalis | Little, Brown & Co. | 288 Pages
Cordalis tells the remarkable story of her family’s 170-year fight to protect the Klamath River in Northern California from the predations of an alien, industrial civilization that worships extraction over preservation.
A former general counsel of the Yurok Tribe, Cordalis was instrumental in asserting native rights to the river and the removal of four devastatingly destructive dams. The book highlights an example of how Indigenous peoples can unite with the modern environmental movement to create a powerful force for conservation.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
Craig Childs | Torrey House Press | 212 Pages
Follow Craig Childs on his 10-day journey from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the pitch-black darkness of the Nevada desert. Explore at each stage the damage excess light at night causes to wildlife, our own circadian rhythms, and our cultural connection to the stars.
Thankfully, light pollution is an easy problem to fix relative to thornier environmental knots like climate change and air pollution. Simply turning off artificial lights at night or shielding their beams can save the world from humanity’s rogue photons.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Wild Ocean: A Journey to the Earth's Last Wild Coasts
Peter Pickford and Beverly Pickford | Thames & Hudson | 400 Pages
The authors of Wild Ocean spent four years traversing the wildest, most pristine coastlines across all five of Earth’s oceans, and the result is 400 pages of stunning landscape and wildlife photography.
This book is the ultimate visual record of the liminal space between Earth and Sea in its most natural state. A pictorial joy to savor and contemplate.
Buy: Amazon
🇺🇸: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble
🇬🇧: Bookshop.org, Waterstones
🇨🇦: Indigo
🇦🇺: Booktopia
Honourable Mentions
Carbon: The Book of Life - Paul Hawken | Viking | 256 Pages
Carbon is often used as shorthand for “carbon dioxide pollution,” which gives the word a negative connotation in modern English. Paul Hawken flips the script and explains how carbon is a vital material that underpins all life on Earth. Far from being demonized; we should celebrate how this humble element serves as the latticework of creation.
Heart of the Jaguar - James Campbell | W.W. Norton | 336 Pages
Campbell astutely explains the logic behind connectivity conservation through the story of Alan Rabinowitz - an American zoologist who dedicated his life to saving jaguars via a conservation corridor stretching from Mexico to Argentina. An optimistic narrative about how conservationists can achieve major victories.
Is a River Alive? - Robert Macfarlane | W.W. Norton | 384 Pages
Wade into the “rights of nature” movement with Robert Macfarlane as he travels the world from New Zealand to Canada to Colombia, where local Indigenous cultures seek to protect rivers by granting them legal personhood. Is the presumed inanimacy of rivers in the Western mind a scientific truth? Or just a product of our specific cultural and linguistic heritage?
The tale of how environmental organizations and fishermen overcame a lack of trust and designed a fishery management system that both protected fish and preserved the economic livelihood of fishing communities. This process has now been adopted worldwide and is one of the most important conservation successes of all time.
A certain amount of global warming is already inevitable, and Fisher convincingly argues the time has come for a conversation about adaptation. How can we close the “adaptation gap,” whereby the countries most affected by climate change are typically those least responsible for causing it? And what practical reforms need to be taken in infrastructure, agriculture, and our social systems to help us survive the heat?
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