The Yale Climate Connections bookshelf for March, also known as Women’s History Month, began to take shape when I saw the announcement for “Mother Creature Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling” by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder. The early April release, I realized, would be the sixth title published on motherhood and climate change in the last two years. (Four of the other five have appeared, individually, in previous bookshelves.)
To be the best of my knowledge, these six titles have never been presented together. I do so now solely for the purpose of a calling attention to this remarkable convergence. By comparison, I cannot think of a single title on fatherhood and climate change, let alone six. (In 2021, however, Yale Climate Connections did produce an audio story on the “Climate Dads” support group in Philadelphia.)
But this set of facts comports perfectly with what I have observed in the sustainability courses I have co-taught and the sustainability minors I have advised at my university: Women make up 75-90% of my students.
By my imprecise recollection of the book announcements I have received over the past several years, women have also written the majority of cli-novels and story collections. All nine of the titles longlisted for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize, for example, were written by women.
One of those nine, “The Mars House” by Natasha Below, is listed below. It is accompanied by a just-released reimagining of the Dust Bowl by Karen Russell and by Octavia Butler’s pathbreaking 1993 novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which I have included because much of its story takes place in 2025 in a California ravaged by fires, both wild and weaponized. (In Butler’s 1998 sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” the fragile “Earthseed” community confronts a Christian-nationalist president who vows to “make America great again.”)
I’ll further hazard that women have written the majority of climate/environmental memoirs and children’s books, represented here by “My Oceans” by Christine Rivera, which also includes some reflections on mothering, and “Magic in a Drop of Water: How Ruth Patrick Taught the World about Water Pollution” by Julie Winterbottom.
The pollution problem discovered by Ruth Patrick is being solved, at least in part, by the women profiled in the final book in this month’s list, “From the Ground Up: Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture.” Author Stephanie Anderson makes it easy to imagine women soon setting the pace in this field as well – if they don’t already.
This list suggests, once again, that women – young women, in particular – are doing the heavy lifting on climate action. (See also The Politics of Gen Z by Melissa Deckman.) The six titles on motherhood and climate change also suggest that women are doing the deeper thinking about what it will mean to live in an increasingly dangerous climate, perhaps because many stages of life have always been more dangerous for women.
It’s past time we recognized the critical leadership of women on climate – and followed.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.
The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush (Milkweed Editions 2023/2024, 424 pages, $20.00 paperback)
In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier, believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise. In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime – seeing an iceberg for the first time – alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change? From the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, The Quickening is an astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood.
Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future by Jade Sasser (Princeton University Press 2024, 192 pages, $19.95 paperback)
Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly growing field, but most researchers overlook a closely related concern: reproductive anxiety. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question is the first comprehensive study of how environmental emotions influence whether, when, and why people today decide to become parents – or not. Sasser concludes that climate emotions and climate justice are inseparable, and that culturally appropriate mental and emotional health services are a necessary component to ensure climate justice for vulnerable communities.
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” by Emily Raboteau (Henry Holt 2024, 304 pages, $29.99)
Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises. With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and city parks where her children may safely play while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography stitches together stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.
Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency by Sarah Marie Wiebe (Fernwood 2024, 196 pages, $25.00 paperback)
The summer after giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, with temperatures over 20 degrees above normal, creating all-time heat records across the province. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. The extreme heat landed Wiebe in the hospital, dehydrated and separated from her nursing baby from dawn until dusk. So began a year of mothering through heat, fires and floods. Drawing on hospital codes to explore the connections, Wiebe opens up tender conversations about intimate matters of how our bodies respond to emergency interventions. A critical ecofeminist, Wiebe argues for caring relations between humans and the planet, including all its elements and denizens.
Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood by Anna Farro Henderson (University of Minnesota Press 2024, 208 pages, $18.95 paperback)
How can we use stories to accelerate action on climate change? In Core Samples, climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson narrates her own journey, exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant, she brings readers into the daily rhythms and intimacies of research and policymaking. Henderson’s eclectic, unconventional essays include field notes, packing lists, and lactation records. Readers are invited on trips as far afield as the Juneau Icefield and as close to home as a town hall meeting in America’s corn belt. A love letter to science and a bracing portrait of the many obstacles women face, Core Samples illuminates our messy, contradictory humanity.
Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder (Broadleaf Books 2025, 304 pages, $27.99)
What does it mean to be a mother in an era of climate catastrophe? Drawing upon ecology, mythology, and her own experiences as a new mother, Steinauer-Scudder confronts what it means to “mother”: to do the good work of being in service to the living world. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, Mother, Creature, Kin reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink. Writing in the tradition of Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Rush, and Margaret Renkl, Steinauer-Scudder invites us into the daily, obligatory, sacred work of care. Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children, and while we don’t know what the future holds, we know it will need mothers.
The Mars House: A Novel by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024/2025, 480 pages, $19.99 paperback)
In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger-a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process that is always disabling and sometimes deadly. With these threads, Pulley weaves a story of personal, political, and planetary transformation.
The Antidote: A Novel by Karen Russell (Knopf 2025, 432 pages, $30.00)
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing – not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows several characters in these histories: a “Prairie Witch,” a Polish wheat farmer, his orphan niece, a basketball star, a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer. Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – the amnesia and omissions passed down from generation to generation. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers to envision of what might have been – and what still could be.
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (Grand Central / Hachette Books 1993 / 2019, 368 pages, $19.99 paperback)
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. She suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith … and a startling vision of human destiny. This 2019 edition of Butler’s acclaimed 1993 novel includes a new foreword by N. K. Jemisin, author of the Hugo-Award-winning cli-fi trilogy, The Broken Earth.
Octavia Butler builds on and concludes this story in “Parable of the Talents” (Grand Central 1998 / 2019, 448 pages, $19.99 paperback).
My Oceans: Essays on Water, Whales, and Women by Christina Rivera (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books 2025, 272 pages, $24.00 paperback)
In a swell of sea-linked essays, Christina Rivera explores the kinship between marine animals, humans, and Earth’s blue womb. Rivera’s investigative questions begin with the toxic burden of her body and spiral out – to a grieving orca, a hunted manta ray, a pregnant sea turtle, a spawning salmon, an “endling” porpoise, and the “mother culture” of sperm whales. Braiding memoir with embodied climate science, Rivera argues that it’s not anthropomorphism to feel deep connection to nonhuman species. Gathering in collective grief is essential amid mass extinction. For ecofeminists, for fans of Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams, My Oceans offers a luminous descent into the deep waters of interconnection in which we swim.
Magic in a Drop of Water: How Ruth Patrick Taught the World about Water Pollution by Julie Winterbottom and illustrated by (Rocky Pond Books 2025, 48 pages, $19.99)
A brilliant scientist and intrepid explorer, the ecologist Ruth Patrick taught the world how to care for the environment. She studied water pollution long before it became a public concern and gave other scientists the tools to do something about it. Born in 1907, Ruth Patrick was one of the only women in her field when she made her breakthrough discovery about biodiversity and the ecosystem of rivers, forever changing how ecologists understand pollution. Lyrically, joyfully written, exquisitely illustrated, and full of fascinating details and a rich afterword and timeline, this STEM biography will inspire readers who love the environment to follow their passion and curiosity.
From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture by Stephanie Anderson (The New Press 2024, 256 pages, $27.99)
From the Ground Up, by award-winning author Stephanie Anderson, journeys into the root causes of our unsustainable food chain, revealing its detrimental reliance on extractive agriculture, which depletes soil and water, produces nutritionally deficient food, and devastates communities and farmers. Anderson then delivers an uplifting, narrative of women-led farms and ranches, supported by women-led investment firms, training programs, supply chain partners, and advocacy groups, all working together to create an inclusive sustainable world. From the Ground Up retraces inspiring journeys, in stories that transform the way we think about the food chain – so that we can weather the storms of climate change, conflicts, and global pandemics.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
