A microscope reveals what was always there. As more people become personally affected by crises, they are looking at issues once seen as distant and distinct now coming into sharp focus as deeply interconnected. With rising food insecurity, femicide, wildfires, housing precarity, and wealth disparity across the country, Canadians are becoming more aware of the systems underpinning the problems we face.
But then we’re left with a daunting question: what can we do, as individuals and communities, to bring about systems change?
BCCIC’s 2025 booklist begins with the climate crisis as a starting place and zooms into its intricate, entangled roots. The books featured—ranging from poetry, short stories, fiction, best sellers, and deep analysis—present pathways being forged and imagined by communities around the world to address the planetary polycrisis. Finally, they offer roadmaps for how we can join them in healing the world.
The fight for human rights, environmental justice, and decolonization are bound together. Now is the time for relentless, organized, global action. May these books offer insight, guidance, and hope.
A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis by Vanessa Makate
Manifesto, Memoir, Activism, African Studies
In A Bigger Picture, leading climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate shares her story as a young Ugandan woman who sees that her community bears disproportionate consequences to the climate crisis. At the same time, she sees that activists from African nations and the global south are not being heard in the same way as activists from white nations are heard.
Nakate highlights and reveals rampant inequalities within the climate justice movement. From a shy little girl in Kampala to a leader on the world stage, A Bigger Picture presents a new vision for the climate movement based on resilience, sustainability, and genuine equity.
Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors Edited By Gist
Short Stories, Climate Fiction
Afterglow is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world.
Inspired by cutting-edge literary movements, such as Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunk, Afterglow imagines intersectional worlds in which no one is left behind–where humanity prioritizes equitable climate solutions and continued service to one’s community. Whether through abundance or adaptation, reform, or a new understanding of survival, these stories offer flickers of hope, even joy, as they provide a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Ailton Krenak
Philosophy, Indigenous Thought, Non-Fiction
From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.
To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet by Leah Thomas
Feminist Theory, Social Justice, Non-Fiction
The Intersectional Environmentalist examines the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and promotes awareness of the fundamental truth that we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people — especially those most often unheard. Written by IE founder Leah Thomas featuring excerpts from over 20 activists and educators.
Current, Climate: The Poetry of Rita Wong
Poetry Collection
Current, Climate is an introduction to the environmental and social-justice poetry of Rita Wong. The selected works show how Wong has responded to local and global inequities with outrage, linguistic inventiveness and sometimes humour. Wong’s poetry explores the meeting places of life, language and land — from downtown Vancouver to the headwaters of the Columbia River.
Her poems are deeply attentive to places and their names, and especially to the imposition of foreign words on the unceded Indigenous lands of what is otherwise known as British Columbia. Exhorting readers to recognize their responsibilities to the planet and to their communities, Wong’s watershed poetics encompass anger, grief, wit and hope.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
Award Winning Best Seller, Political Economy, Non-Fiction
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.
The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change
Indigenous Activism & Climate Leadership, Non-Fiction
After two decades of working with indigenous communities, Gleb Raygorodetsky shows how these communities are actually islands of biological and cultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. They are an “archipelago of hope” as we enter the Anthropocene, for here lies humankind’s best chance to remember our roots and how to take care of the Earth. These communities are implementing creative solutions to meet these modern challenges. Solutions that are relevant to the rest of us.
We meet the Skolt Sami of Finland, the Nenets and Altai of Russia, the Sapara of Ecuador, the Karen of Myanmar, and the Tla-o-qui-aht of Canada. Intimate portraits of these men and women, youth and elders, emerge against the backdrop of their traditional practices on land and water.
The End of This World Climate Justice in So-Called Canada by Emily Eaton, Crystal Lameman, Angele Alook et. al
Indigenous Activism & Knowledge, National Best Seller, Political Analysis, Non-Fiction
In this compelling roadmap to a livable future, Indigenous sovereignty and climate justice go hand in hand. Drawing on their work in Indigenous activism, the labour movement, youth climate campaigns, community-engaged scholarship, and independent journalism, the six authors challenge toothless proposals and false solutions to show that a just transition from fossil fuels cannot succeed without the dismantling of settler capitalism in Canada.
Packed with clear-eyed analysis of both short- and long-term strategies for radical social change, The End of This World promises that the next world is within reach and worth fighting for.
Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Climate Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction
Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.
It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.
Storming the Wall by Todd Miller
Political Analysis, Emigration & Immigration, Security, Non-Fiction
In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for sustainability and environmental justice. Reporting from the flashpoints of climate clashes, and from likely sites of futures battles, Miller chronicles a growing system of militarized divisions between the rich and the poor, the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed.
There’s Something In The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities by Ingrid Waldron
Environmental Racism, Indigenous and Black Resistence, Non-Fiction
Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities.
Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. Waldron explores how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context, and is further compounded by other forms of oppression. The book documents the long history of struggle, resistance, and mobilizing in Indigenous and Black communities to address environmental racism.
Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell
Indigenous Wisdom
A narrative of Indigenous wisdom that provides a road map for the spirit and a compass of compassion for humanity.
Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our say, such as environmental protection and human rights. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.
This booklist does not constitute as an endorsement for any of the books contained. The books and their contents do not necessarily align with the perspectives, positions, or values of BCCIC. Readers are encouraged to critically evaluate the content before forming their own opinions.
