Read the Change

(You Want to See in the World)

Seeded in childhood, watered every day since, fear had sprouted through her veins all her life. Thinking war thoughts it had gathered, blossomed into another thing.
– Toni Morrison

Human Rights

Shirin Ebadi’s Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran (2016)

Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (2012)

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves – to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be.
– Rebecca Mead

Conservation

Deni Ellis Béchard’s Empty Hands, Open Arms: The Race to Save Bonobos in the Congo and Make Conservation Go Viral (2013)

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
– Audre Lorde

Ecosystems

Linda Hogan’s The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020)

Theresa Kishkan’s Mnemonic: A Book of Trees (2011)

…reading is a political act. The more you read, the more political you become. The more you read, the more dangerous you become.
– Timothy Findley

Water

Erin Brockovich’s Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What WE THE PEOPLE Can Do about It (2020)

Laura Trethewey’s The Imperilled Ocean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea (2020)

It’s that powerlessness that I want to help people break out of because I don’t accept it is inevitable in any circumstances. I think books can do that. They give you strength, they give you purpose, they give you hope.
– Jeanette Winterson

Pollution

Rick Smith’s and Bruce Lourie’s Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health (2009)