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On [fire]: the burning case for a Green New Deal /
By Naomi Klein. 2019
For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people…
and planet--and the champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with stability and justice at its center. In lucid dispatches from the frontlines--from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented "ecological conversion"--she has penned surging, indispensable lectures and essays for a wide public, with prescient, clarifying information about the future that awaits us and our children if we stick our heads in the sand. They show Klein at her most thoughtful, tracing the evolution of the climate crisis as the key issue of our time, not only as an immediate political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one too. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans' ability to change rapidly in the face of grave threat, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of "climate barbarism," this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. Above all, she underscores how we can still rise to the existential challenge of the crisis if we are willing to transform our systems that are producing it, making clear how the battle for a greener world is indistinguishable from the fight for our lives. 2019.How to Die: A Book About Being Alive
By Ray Robertson. 2020
“He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to…
Die: A Book on Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells. 2019
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical…
prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday DemonNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus ReviewsIt is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. 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.LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of BooksImperilled Ocean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea
By Laura Trethewey. 2020
The vulnerable visage of the crown jewel of planet Earth.An exploration of the earth's last wild frontier, filled with high-stakes…
stories of people and places facing an uncertain future.On a life raft in the Mediterranean, a teenager from Ghana wonders whether he will reach Europe alive, and whether he will be allowed to stay. In the North Atlantic, a young chef disappears from a cruise ship, leaving a mystery for his friends and family to solve. A water-squatting community battles eviction from a harbour in British Columbia, raising the question of who owns the water.The Imperilled Ocean by Laura Trethewey is a deeply reported work of narrative journalism that follows people as they head out to sea. What they discover holds inspiring and dire implications for the life of the ocean — and for all of us back on land. Battles are fought, fortunes made, lives lost, and the ocean approaches an uncertain future. Behind this human drama, the ocean is growing ever more unstable, threatening to upend life on land.Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
By Rebekah Taussig. 2020
A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to…
paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.Kids are on a mission to save the Earth! Recycle and Remake is the hands-on, practical guide you need to…
get started.This gentle, but empowering book is full of creative making activities, information, and ideas that give young eco-warriors (like you!) the know-how to really help the environment.With Recycle and Remake, you will soon be saving trees by making your own seeded recycled paper from junk mail, cleaning up the oceans by turning old carrier bags into kites, friendship bracelets, and colorful weaved baskets and repurposing a cardboard box into a periscope.You'll also learn about sustainable energies by creating a simple solar oven, cutting down on cling-film by making a food wrap from scrap cotton and beeswax, and turning an old t-shirt into a reusable tote bag so you never need to buy a plastic carrier bag again. You can even grow new plants to clean the air in your own upcycled milk bottle planters and using homemade compost.Each of the activities directly relates to an environmental hot topic, such as plastic pollution, food waste, or deforestation. Budding environmentalists all over the world are feeling inspired to do their bit for our unique planet.Magdalena: River of Dreams
By Wade Davis. 2020
A captivating new book from Wade Davis--award-winning, bestselling author and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence for more than a decade-- that brings…
vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and futureTravelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. Now in a masterful new book, the bestselling author tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild. Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life. At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.Extraordinary Canadians: Stories from the Heart of Our Nation
By Peter Mansbridge, Mark Bulgutch. 2020
From Peter Mansbridge, the beloved former anchor of CBC’s The National, and Mark Bulgutch, former CBC producer, comes a collection…
of first-person stories about remarkable Canadians who embody the values of our great nation—kindness, compassion, courage, and freedom—and inspire us to do the same.In this timely and heartwarming volume of personal stories, Peter Mansbridge and former CBC producer Mark Bulgutch bring together inspiring Canadians from across the country, who in their own way, are making Canada a better place for all. Hear Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock describe her childhood in northern British Columbia where she straddled two communities—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—and her subsequent fight for equitable health care for all children as the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. Meet Matt Devlin, the US broadcaster who found a new home in Canada when he got a job with the Toronto Raptors, and read how he helped calm the crowd when a gunman began shooting in Nathan Phillips Square after the team’s NBA championship win. From the young woman living with Crohn’s disease—and proudly modeling her ostomy bag—to the rabbi whose family fled Nazi Germany—and who now gives the benediction on Parliament Hill each Remembrance Day—Extraordinary Canadians celebrates the people who have overcome adversity and broken down barriers to champion the rights and freedoms of everyone who calls Canada home. Featuring voices from all walks of life—advocates, politicians, doctors, veterans, immigrants, business leaders, and more—this collection gets to the heart of what it means to be Canadian. These stories will change the way you see your country and make you fall in love with Canada all over again.Paradise Won: The Struggle to Create Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve
By Elizabeth May. 2020
Originally published in 1990, Paradise Won has been updated and details the epic 12-year struggle to stop logging in the…
unique global ecosystem referred to as “Canada’s Galapagos.” Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve is located in the southernmost part of Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), 130 kilometres off the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. Gwaii Haanas protects an archipelago of 138 islands in the territory of the Haida people, who have lived in Haida Gwaii for well over 14,000 years. From the 1970s through the early 1980s, plans to expand logging in the area led to the first concerted efforts to protect Gwaii Haanas and – in 1985 – the Haida Nation created the “Haida Heritage Site.” In spite of efforts to protect the landscape, logging continued and resulted in a prolonged legal and political battle. In 1987, logging finally ended when the governments of Canada and British Columbia signed the South Moresby Memorandum of Understanding, which safeguarded the area and permitted shared stewardship, treating the unique marine and terrestrial environments as though they were a national park, though many land claims were still outstanding. This updated edition of Paradise Won includes a new foreword by the author and will bring back into focus this remarkable story of the power and importance of Indigenous rights and how activism can spur average citizens to action in order to fight climate change and protect fragile ecosystems everywhere.Ice Walker: A Polar Bear's Journey through the Fragile Arctic
By James Raffan. 2020
From bestselling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing…
Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce.Nanurjuk, “the bear-spirited one,” is hunting for seals on Hudson Bay, where ice never lasts more than one season. For her and her young, everything is in flux. From the top of the world, Hudson Bay looks like an enormous paw print on the torso of the continent, and through a vast network of lakes and rivers, this bay connects to oceans across the globe. Here, at the heart of everything, walks Nanurjuk, or Nanu, one polar bear among the six thousand that traverse the 1.23 million square kilometers of ice and snow covering the bay. For millennia, Nanu’s ancestors have roamed this great expanse, living, evolving, and surviving alongside human beings in one of the most challenging and unforgiving habitats on earth. But that world is changing. In the Arctic’s lands and waters, oil has been extracted—and spilled. As global temperatures have risen, the sea ice that Nanu and her young need to hunt seal and fish has melted, forcing them to wait on land where the delicate balance between them and their two-legged neighbors has now shifted. This is the icescape that author and geographer James Raffan invites us to inhabit in Ice Walker. In precise and provocative prose, he brings readers inside Nanu’s world as she treks uncertainly around the heart of Hudson Bay, searching for nourishment for the children that grow inside her. She stops at nothing to protect her cubs from the dangers she can see—other bears, wolves, whales, human beings—and those she cannot. By focusing his lens on this bear family, Raffan closes the gap between humans and bears, showing us how, like the water of the Hudson Bay, our existence—and our future—is tied to Nanu’s. He asks us to consider what might be done about this fragile world before it is gone for good. Masterful, vivid, and haunting, Ice Walker is an utterly unique piece of creative nonfiction and a deeply affecting call to action.Big: Stories about Life in Plus-Sized Bodies
By Christina Myers. 2020
Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG…
is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus-sized women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with thinness. Revealing insights that are both funny and traumatic, surprising and challenging, familiar and unexpected, 26 writers explore themes as diverse as self perception, body image, fashion, fat activism, food, sexuality, diet culture, motherhood and more. These stories offer a closer look at what it means to navigate a world designed to fit bodies of a certain size (sometimes literally) and, in turn, invite readers to ask questions about?and ultimately reconsider?our collective and individual obsession with women?s bodies. Contributors include Dr. Rohini Bannerjee, Amanda Scriver, Cassie Stocks, Jo Jefferson, Layla Cameron, Rabbit Richards, Sonja Boon, Simone Blais, Tracy Manrell and other writers from across Canada, the US, and the UK.Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Essential Anthologies Ser. #15)
By Linda M. Morra, Marianne Ackerman, The Quebec Writers' Federation. 2021
Where were you when the pandemic hit? While the shock of COVID-19 was fresh, the Quebec Writers' Federation sent out…
a call to its members asking for short descriptions of life under lockdown. The response was immediate and heartfelt. Written and posted online between April 6 and May 26 of 2020, these dispatches--including several from the front lines--are first-person stories of hunkering down, gasping for air, facing challenges, getting through. Mainly written from isolation, the pieces present reading and writing as constant themes: trying, failing, being blocked, and finding renewed purpose. Award-winning author Susan Doherty opens the volume with a dramatic account of her own close call: how the man who saved her life unknowingly put her in danger of infection. Poet Rachel McCrum and writer Crystal Chan, who shepherded the project, reflect in their closing remarks on how the experience created community, and delivered unexpected insight into the power and purpose of chronicling our days. This book is a collaborative effort to document a time like no other. The cover image, a re-imagined detail from a seventeenth-century engraving of a plague doctor wearing elaborate personal protective equipment, links our present to a past in which disease was a decisive player. It is a moment we are not likely to forget anytime soon.Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
By Kazim Ali. 2021
"It begins to rain as we fly, falling in solid sheets, water from sky to earth — a free system…
of exchange."Kazim Ali’s earliest memories are of Jenpeg, a temporary town in the forests of northern Manitoba where his immigrant father worked on the construction of a hydroelectric dam. As a child, Ali had no idea that the dam was located on the unceded lands of the Indigenous Pimicikamak, the "people of rivers and lakes."Northern Light recounts Ali’s memories of his childhood and his return to Pimicikamak as an adult. During his visit, he searches for the sites of his childhood memories and learns more about the realities of life in Pimicikamak: the environmental and social impact of the Jenpeg dam, the effects of colonialism and cultural erasure, and the community’s initiatives to preserve and strengthen their identity. Deeply rooted in place, Northern Light is both a stunning exploration of home, belonging, and identity and an immersive account of contemporary life in one Indigenous community.The Imperilled Ocean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea
By Laura Trethewey. 2020
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2020A Writers' Trust of Canada Best Book of the YearCBC Books: The Best…
Canadian Nonfiction SelectionSilver Medal, Miramichi Reader's "The Very Best!" Book AwardsAn exploration of the earth's last wild frontier, filled with high-stakes stories of people and places facing an uncertain future.On a life raft in the Mediterranean, a teenager from Ghana wonders whether he will reach Europe alive, and whether he will be allowed to stay. In the North Atlantic, a young chef disappears from a cruise ship, leaving a mystery for his friends and family to solve. A water-squatting community battles eviction from a harbour in British Columbia, raising the question of who owns the water.The Imperilled Ocean by Laura Trethewey is a deeply reported work of narrative journalism that follows people as they head out to sea. What they discover holds inspiring and dire implications for the life of the ocean — and for all of us back on land. Battles are fought, fortunes made, lives lost, and the ocean approaches an uncertain future. Behind this human drama, the ocean is growing ever more unstable, threatening to upend life on land.Restigouche: The Long Run of the Wild River
By Philip Lee. 2020
Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award for Non-FictionA CBC New Brunswick Book List SelectionAn Atlantic Books Today Must-Have New Brunswick Books…
of 2020 SelectionThe Restigouche River flows through the remote border region between the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, its magically transparent waters, soaring forest hillsides, and population of Atlantic salmon creating one of the most storied wild spaces on the continent. In Restigouche, writer Philip Lee follows ancient portage routes into the headwaters of the river, travelling by canoe to explore the extraordinary history of the river and the people of the valley. They include the Mi’gmaq, who have lived in the Restigouche valley for thousands of years; the descendants of French Acadian, Irish, and Scottish settlers; and some of the wealthiest people in the world who for more than a century have used the river as an exclusive wilderness retreat.The people of the Restigouche have long been both divided and united by a remarkable river that each day continues to assert itself, despite local and global industrial forces that now threaten its natural systems and the survival of the salmon. In the deep pools and rushing waters of the Restigouche, in this place apart in a rapidly changing natural world, Lee finds a story of hope about how to safeguard wild spaces and why doing so is the most urgent question of our time.Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry This Place
By Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, Brian Wright-McLeod. 2021
Rich and diverse narratives of Indigenous Toronto, past and present Beneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation…
of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day. With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived. "This book is a reflection of endurance and a helpful corrective to settler fantasies. It tells a more balanced account of our communities, then and now. It offers the space for us to reclaim our ancestors’ language and legacy, rewriting ourselves back into a landscape from which non Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase us. But we are there in the skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions." – from the introduction by Hayden KingTongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language
By Ayelet Tsabari, Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza. 2021
In this collection of deeply personal essays, twenty-six writers explore their connection with language, accents, and vocabularies, and contend with…
the ways these can be used as both bridge and weapon. Some explore the way power and privilege affect language learning, especially the shame and exclusion often felt by non-native English speakers in a white, settler, colonial nation. Some confront the pain of losing a mother tongue or an ancestral language along with the loss of community and highlight the empowerment that comes with reclamation. Others celebrate the joys of learning a new language and the power of connection. All underscore how language can offer both transformation and collective healing. Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is a vital anthology that opens a compelling dialogue about language diversity and probes the importance of language in our identity and the ways in which it shapes us. With contributions by: Kamal Al-Solaylee, Jenny Heijun Wills, Karen McBride, Melissa Bull, Leonarda Carranza, Adam Pottle, Kai Cheng Thom, Sigal Samuel, Rebecca Fisseha, Hege Anita Jakobsen Lepri, Logan Broeckaert, Taslim Jaffer, Ashley Hynd, Jagtar Kaur Atwal, Téa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, Sahar Golshan, Camila Justino, Amanda Leduc, Ayelet Tsabari, Carrianne Leung, Janet Hong, Danny Ramadan, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jónína Kirton, and Eufemia Fantetti.Alfabet / alphabet : a memoir of a first language
By Sadiqa De Meijer. 2020
alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer's transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity,…
landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new lightStill Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism
By Maude Barlow. 2022
From her days in second wave feminist activism to her battle against the precursor to NAFTA to her indefatigable fight…
for social justice and water rights for all, Maude shares her stories and her expertise to inspire us and show us how we can do it too.A History of the Theories of Rain
By Stephen Collis. 2021
“Can you walk away from a climate?” Maybe. But “in the future / everyone will have their fifteen minutes of…
blame.” A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe conceptually through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural” disasters. How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment? Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. What his book does instead is probe our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. All the while – in song, in lyrical outbursts, and in philosophical and speculative excursions – it asks what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take. In doing so, it explores the links between the climate’s “tipping points” and the borders which constrain those who are fleeing the disaster – including the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.