Movies and Books to start 2022 learning more about Climate Change

The beginning of every year is always full of hope for a better future. As humans, it's important we face global challenges with positivity. Each year that goes by, it becomes imperative we change our relationship with the environment, integrating our life with the planet, living our life as we are part of it, not as if it is here only for our use, to be exploited as an endless resources source.

We've been hearing about climate change for a while now, but today we can see and feel it’s consequences already. However, because there is a narrative that makes us think that there is no other way to live, we tend to don’t take it serious or we think is not going to happen to us. But it is already happening with all the uncommon weather around the world and the melting glaciers. And what can we do about it? We must not just watch and be anxious about it but do our part and be attentive about what the governments and the global institutions are doing about it. Looking for more information beyond the news is something we can and should do, so we can have a well-informed opinion and consequently make good decisions.

Watching some movies and documentaries, reading some books can give us new perspectives and help us to understand what is really behind the news, in a more profound way. It will also help us to have a critical look.

Today we bring you some suggestions of movies, documentaries and books, take a look:

Movies

Cowspiracy - The Sustainability (2014, directed by Keegan Kuhn and Kip Andersen)

Cowspiracy, the Sustainability Secret is an environmental documentary that reveals the destructivity of ranching industry for the planet and investigates why the world's leading environmental organizations are too scared to talk about it. This industry is the main cause of deforestation, water consumption and pollution, and it is responsible for even more greenhouse gases than the transport sector.

Seaspiracy (2021, directed by Ali Tabrizi)

Seaspiracy is about the impact the fishing industry has on marine species.

Ice on Fire (2019, directed by Leila Conners)

An eye-opening documentary that asks the question: Are we going to let climate change destroy civilization, or will we act on technologies that can reverse it? Featuring never-before-seen solutions on the many ways we can reduce carbon in the atmosphere thus paving the way for temperatures to go down, saving civilization.

Tomorrow (2015, directed by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent) 

Tomorrow (Demain) is a 2015 french documentary that has the distinction of not giving in to catastrophism. They show experiences around the world of people doing things in a different way, in many social sectors.

Don’t look up (2021, directed by Adam McKay)

It's a satire movie that, in a certain way, uses a comet that comes towards the earth as a metaphor for the climate emergency. The sense of urgency in the movie is the same we have right now about global warming, we need to act now!

Books

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves - with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.

The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means For Life on Earth, by Tim Flannery

In The Weather Makers, along with a riveting history of climate change, Tim Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, by Christiana Figueres e Tom Rivett-Carnac

In The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world's changing climate and the fate of humanity.

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, by Hope Jahren

Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly warming our planet to dangerous levels.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells

In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.

We hope you like it.

Do you have any other good suggestions? Let us know!