A preview of the new year — in 12 new books » Yale Climate Connections

The new year is off to a frightening start. Just opening a news feed can result in a new jump-scare. This won’t be a year of chasing rainbows but of fleeing floodwaters, putting out fires (literal and figurative), and protesting injustice. 

For such a year, a diverse toolkit is required. So this month’s bookshelf highlights new books about a variety of climate-related topics: climate solutions, climate anxiety, climate diets, transportation, climate migration (or “climigration”), the climate-related attacks on science and education, and the impacts of climate change and other human (in)actions on animals, plants, and bioregions — like the Arctic. 

This month’s selection of books also acknowledges the need for deep dives into social and economic history and for engaged reflection on the work of artists and writers. 

One bookshelf, 12 very different paths for readers to pursue.

Over the coming year, Yale Climate Connections will pursue some of these topics in greater depth, but with five or six titles instead of the 12 included in a typical bookshelf, which will still appear each month. 

Later this month, for example, Yale Climate Connections will offer its first special selection on storytelling, science, and climate change. In the works are special selections of titles on climate and cars, the Arctic, mis/disinformation, and, for Arbor Day, trees. 

And in these special selections, as in this bookshelf, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. 

Our Biggest Deal: Pathways to Planetary Prosperity by Aaron Williams Perry (Earth Water Press 2025, 449 pages, $29.97)

Our Biggest Deal showcases essential top-down and bottom-up economic, financial, organizational, and philanthropic strategies to transcend the Anthropocene polycrisis and scale-up pathways to planetary prosperity. From regenerative finance to multi-stakeholder capital stacks, from ethics-based banking to conscious crypto, from stewardship philanthropy to quintenary competitive advantage, and from world-wide mycelial-like networks to interdependent fabrics of bioregional resiliencies, this must-read book — with 13 way-showing chapters and 28 guest essays — provides a comprehensive road map for impact entrepreneurs, enterprising executives, catalytic change-makers, and forward-looking family offices, funds, and foundations that are framing, fostering, and financing our shared global future.

Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving by Thomas Doherty (Little Brown / Spark 2025, 416 pages, $30)

With climate disasters mounting and solutions feeling ever more elusive, eco-anxiety is rapidly becoming one of the biggest mental health threats of our time. Surviving Climate Anxiety is the essential guide to coping with the psychological impacts of persistent environmental crisis. In it, the world’s leading climate anxiety expert Dr. Thomas Doherty shares his pioneering, evidence-based methods to help you reclaim your nervous system, understand your environmental identity: your history, values, and connection to the natural world, prioritize eco-wellness, liberate yourself from living as a climate hostage, and broaden your horizons of hope. Packed with practical, research-backed tips and dozens of stories, Surviving Climate Anxiety provides the tools to cope, heal, and flourish, even in these times.

Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Foods—and Our Future by Bruce Friedrich (Ben Bella Books 2026, 420 pages, $29.95)

The human love of meat appears to be hard-wired. The world consumes more than 550 million metric tons of meat and seafood each year. That number has been climbing for decades and is expected to continue to rise through at least 2050. But what if we could give humanity the meat it craves by a different process? Plant-based and cultivated meat that are just as delicious as the meat you love, but more affordable and healthier. Think it’s not possible? With examples ranging from the “horseless carriage” (car) to the smart phone in your pocket, Meat reminds readers that scientific innovations often move from disbelief or opposition to inevitability and ubiquity, much faster than almost anyone expects. Meat offers a vision of the next agricultural revolution that is optimistic, achievable, and delicious.

Saving Ourselves from Big Car by David Obst (Columbia Business School Publishing 2025, 286 pages, $27.95)

This book exposes how “Big Car”—the complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench car dependence —has pursued profit at the expense of the common good. David Obst explores how Big Car gained almost immeasurable influence over our lives, weighing the benefits and the costs of reliance on private automobiles. He details how industry covered up the harms of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund climate-change denialism. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe—are experimenting with forms of transportation that challenge the dominance of cars. Provocative and comprehensive, Saving Ourselves from Big Car is a powerful wake-up call for us to change how we use cars before it’s too late.

North: The Future of Post-Climate America by Jesse M. Keenan (Oxford University Press 2025, 288 pages, $29.95)

Climate change is already influencing how and where people live. In North, Jesse M. Keenan argues that America is entering a new era marked by shifts in population that will transform everything from the physical landscape of cities to electoral politics. First, Keenan examines how human mobility is shaped by the environment and the economy. Next, he provides a conceptual and empirical overview of adaptation science. Then he documents how physical impacts in the built environment, escalating costs, and public sector inertia converge to drive people out of high-risk areas, while perceived low-risk areas attract people who seek more sustainable ways of life. North is not just a warning about the perils for those left behind. It is also a projection of optimism about America’s capacity for decarbonization, stewardship, and mobility.

Science in the Resistance: The Scientist Rebellion for Climate Justice by Fernando Racimo (University of California Press 2025, 291 pages, $24.95)

In April 2022, hundreds of scientists rose in civil disobedience, breaking the law in more than twenty-eight countries. Risking arrest, they glued their hands to roads, blocked government and corporate buildings, and chained themselves to the White House fence. In Science in Resistance, Fernando Racimo provides a first-person account of the Scientist Rebellion, a growing international movement of researchers stepping beyond conventional roles to alert the public about the need for action in the climate emergency. Racimo describes how he became involved in the movement, explores the many ways in which academic institutions today are complicit in climate breakdown, and drawing on lessons from the political and social sciences, shows how we can all take a stand for climate justice by collectively organizing for change.

Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World by Hillary Rosner (Patagonia 2025, 353 pages, $32.00)

Humans have always altered the landscapes around us; in some ways it’s part of what defines us as a species. But since the middle of the last century, we’ve changed the Earth on an overwhelming scale. Our infrastructure, our methods of farming and traveling and living have rendered our planet inhospitable for the other species. All over the globe, animals are stranded—by roads, fences, drainage systems, industrial farms, cities. They simply cannot move around to access their daily needs. Yet as climate change reshapes the planet in its own ways, many creatures will, increasingly, have to move in order to survive. This book is about a massive and underreported problem. But it’s also about solutions, and hope, about how humans can recognize their interconnectedness and view other species with empathy and compassion.

Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America by Trent Preszler (Algonquin Books 2025, 224 pages, $29.00) 

Every December, millions of people adorn their homes, offices, and town squares with lavishly decorated Christmas trees to celebrate the holiday season. Yet few pause to wonder: Where did this tradition come from? And in an age of climate upheaval and artificial replicas, will these beloved trees still be here for future generations? In Evergreen, Cornell University professor Trent Preszler weaves together a captivating story of humanity’s deeply rooted relationship with evergreens, revealing how the trees shaped economies, launched cultural movements, and propelled America’s rise to global prominence. At once timeless and urgently relevant, Evergreen delivers a stirring reflection on the quiet power of trees, challenging us to reconsider the balance between our restless ambition and the living world that sustains us.

Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic by Neil Shea (Ecco December 2025, 240 pages, $28)

In Frostlines, Neil Shea blends natural history, anthropology, and travel writing to explore how the beauty, chaos, and power of change in the far north are reflected in the lives of people and animals. He sojourns with a wolf pack on Canada’s Ellesmere Island and travels with Indigenous hunters in Alaska, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories. He tracks dwindling caribou herds across the top of North America, and visits the front line of the new Cold War between Russia and Europe. What Shea finds is not one Arctic but many—yet all still linked by shattering cold, seasons of darkness, and inimitable light. Written with masterful prose and a spark of adventure, Frostlines is an expansive yet intimate revelation of the Arctic during a time of transformation, a journey along the threshold of the stunning world emerging right before our eyes.

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp (Knopf 2025, 593 pages, $35.00)

In Goliath’s Curse, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy on our species, from the earliest cities to the collapse of modern states like Somalia. He traces the emergence of “Goliaths”: large societies built on a collection of hierarchies that are also terrifyingly fragile, collapsing time after time across the world. Drawing on historical databases and the latest discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, he infers that democratic societies tend to be more resilient, collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred (it’s possible we’re living through one now), and all Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise. Goliath’s Curse is a stark reminder that there are bright and dark sides to societal collapse—that it is not necessarily a reversion to a dark age—and that making a more resilient world may entail making a more just one.

Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power by Victoria Bateman (Hachette Books / Seal Press (Oct) 2025, 480 pages, $35.00) 

How many female entrepreneurs, economic revolutionaries, merchants, and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until very recently, there were none at all. But what about Phryne, the richest woman in ancient Athens, who offered to pay to rebuild the walls of Thebes after the city was razed by Alexander the Great? Or what about Priscilla Wakefield, the writer who set up the first English bank for women and children? And, just as important, what about the everyday women who, for only a pittance, labored for the profit of others? Economica takes you on a journey that begins in the Stone Age and ends in the 21^st century, and spans the world’s historic centers of prosperity, from ancient Egypt to the U.S. Economica is more than a history of women—it is a more accurate history of us all. 

Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment by Amitav Ghosh (University of Chicago Press (Nov) 2025, 480 pages, $29)

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh’s extraordinary writings on subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; and human lives, travel, and discoveries. From the significance of the commodification of the clove to the diversity of the mangrove forests in Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, Wild Fictions is a powerful refutation of imperial violence, a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history, and a reminder of the importance of sensitivity and empathy. Through their combinations of moral passion, intellectual curiosity, and literary elegance, the pieces in Wild Fictions chart a course that allows us to heal our relationships and restore the delicate balance with the volatile landscapes to which we all belong.