Global Environmental Challenges: New Nonfiction

Philip Warburg is the author of Harvest the Wind: America’s Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability. He was president of the Conservation Law Foundation, New England's leading environmental advocacy group, from 2003 to 2009. Previously, he directed the Israel Union for Environmental Defense in Tel Aviv and was an attorney at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC. In Harness the Sun: America's Quest for a Solar-Powered Future (Beacon Press), Warburg takes readers on a far-flung journey that explores America’s solar revolution. Beginning with his solar-powered home in New England, he introduces readers to the pioneers who are spearheading our move toward a clean energy economy. Warburg shows how solar energy has won surprising support across the political spectrum. Prominent conservatives embrace solar power as an emblem of market freedom, while environmental advocates see it as a way to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Harness the Sun offers a grounded, persuasive vision of America’s energy future. It is a future fueled by clean, renewable sources of power, with solar at center stage.

A war veteran, journalist, author, and Princeton PhD candidate, Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Publishers) combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life. Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality.

Wen Stephenson, an independent journalist and climate activist, is a contributing writer for the Nation. Formerly an editor at the Atlantic and the Boston Globe, he has also written about climate, culture, and politics for Slate, the New York Times, Grist, and the Boston Phoenix. Stephenson’s book, What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice (Beacon Press), is an urgent, on-the-ground look at some of the “new American radicals” who have laid everything on the line to build a stronger climate justice movement. Stephenson tells his own story of becoming an unlikely radical and the stories of the remarkable and courageous people he has worked alongside. He argues that the movement is less like environmentalism and more like the great human rights and social justice struggles of the past, from abolitionism to civil rights. This is a fiercely urgent and profoundly spiritual journey into the climate justice movement at a critical moment—in search of what "climate justice," at this late hour, may mean.